Coverage dropped below 70%

[ruggiero]

Just as the title says coverage dropped below 70% by the end of December and it still hasn't gone up. I have 2 responsive ads and matched content with ads. I see blank spaces frequently and strangely matched content doesn't show sometimes either. I'm not talking about the ads inside of it but the entire thing. Isn't matched content supposed to show all the time?

Please help because my revenue has dropped by 50%-75%!

[dk385]

@sdksjdksjd

I had following :

- scrapped content
- sheer clothing (some actress)
- #*$!ography (woman giving birth photo : WTF?)
- accidental clicks causing layout ( fixed by padding/margin on ad unit)

[AlexB77]

@sdksjdksjd, I have never had any policy violations and I have been with AdSense since 2003, but I too have the same problem as most here. Pages with noindex, noarchive, nofollow IMO have not much to do with the issues at hand, at least for now, again only IMO. I have emailed Google AdSense Help desk and received their response saying that they will pass this issue on the senior team to investigate. This was 2 days ago and I have not received any more information from them yet. My coverage has dropped across entire site from 99.8% to 78% in November 2017 and has not picked up since. At first, I thought that this was to do with ads.txt, but it appears to be irrelevant. My traffic is higher than ever and my media.net ad units are doing great, so this has definitely has nothing to do with my site, URL structure or some other BS that G asked me to check in their first response to me. I have not made any changes to the site except adding more and more content, which is all indexed and has no issues. So the only logical conclusion that I keep coming to is something that got changed in the GS system in November, either not working the way it was intended to or actually works the way it was intended to and it was G's intention. What is illogical is that Google in their attempt to reduce spamy ads accidentally broke something and not even trying to fix it. Also, this changes in November begun with changes related to the Ad Review Centre, so I am not too sure if one has anything to do with the other.

[sdksjdksjd]

@AlexB77
Absolutely same boat.

[NickMNS]

@AlexB77 the AdSense/AdWords policy change took place on the December 15th officially. Most publisher including myself noticed the impact as of the 18th. Are you saying that you were seeing the drop in coverage before the December 15th?

[AlexB77]

@NickMNS, I can confirm this, my stats show the drop from 11th November

Here is an image where you can see a sudden drop in coverage. I will keep it in my dropbox for a week then it be removed, including this link AdSense Coverage Drop [dropbox.com]

[NickMNS]

@AlexB77 very interesting this suggests as many have suspected that there are likely two or more issues going on at once.

What is your traffic pattern. On a typical day, do many users go to very few pages, or do many users go to few pages?
Do you use session paramaters or other unique identifier in your URLs?

[AlexB77]

@NickMNS I too suspect that there few more issues besides this one.

My traffic pattern is very steady, I have international visitors, which is why I do not get a lot of waves in traffic. 2-4 page with average time 2-3 min per page. I do not use any parameters in my URLs, so the structure of the site is simple and all of the major pages are indexed and have no problems, visible or otherwise.

[glitterball]

[youtube-creators.googleblog.com...]

YouTube announced yesterday that they are cutting off monetisation from all channels with less than 1000 subscribers.
Since this is the vast majority of channels, they have basically decided that they just aren't going to pay the content creators anymore.

Can't help but think that this is related and they have a huge shortage of advertisers at the moment.

[keyplyr]

I see no shortage of advertisers. In fact, I have a difficult time keeping up with the new advertisers in the Ad Review Center.

[AlexB77]

@glitterball this is something that could potentially be extended to websites too.

The only problem I see is that the site with 800 daily visitors and site with 65,000 daily visitors are both punished equally, at the moment at least. But I cannot say that this is not something that we all should potentially look forward to sometime soon.

[glitterball]

I see no shortage of advertisers. In fact, I have a difficult time keeping up with the new advertisers in the Ad Review Center.

So they are removing Ads from the majority of their inventory on YouTube and you are seriously suggesting that there is no shortage of Advertisers?
Please be serious.

[AlexB77]

@keyplyr, same here, but for some reason I still see the drop

[NickMNS]

@AlexB77, I appreciate your answers, but they are not addressing the specifics of my first question. When visitors come to your site do they all land on the same page or does each visitor land on a different page. So 1000 visitors go to the same 2 pages or 1000 visitors visit 700 hundred unique pages?

[AlexB77]

@NickMNS, sorry, misunderstood your question. No all visitors are coming to various pages on the website, the site has little over 750 pages and the page with minimum number of visitors has at least 100 unique visitors. I hope that this clarifies it.

[rokramne]

My ad review center shows 30k ads to be reviewed if I filter it down to "newest ads: yesterday". So shortage of ads it cannot be at least in my case.

[NickMNS]

@Alex yes this does clarify things very much. Thanks.

We now have a clear example of a site that is not subject to the "brand safety" update that is experiencing a drop in coverage.

Just to be expedient and make sure all the bases are covered. Do you have any crawl errors or warnings in your Adsense account? "Setting" -> "Status" -> "Crawl Report".

[keyplyr]

@glitterball - Unrelated: [webmasterworld.com...]

[AlexB77]

@Nick GSC shows no errors whatsoever related to crawling, Mediapartners-Google bot is not blocked and Adsense account shows no errors at all.

[glitterball]

@glitterball - Unrelated: [webmasterworld.com...]

How is removing vast amounts of inventory unrelated?
Adwords is a bidding system, therefore removing supply of adspace will help to keep prices up.

[dk385]

What confuses me more is fact that out of three responsive units on page, one ad is displayed but Matched content unit don't.
I have situations where all three ad units display ads but matched content doesnt render.
I have checked reports for matched content and found out that matched content coverage is even less - about 30% impressions before drop.

Something is happening...

What is your situation on this subject?

[keyplyr]

@glitterball - it's unrelated (off topic) to this discussion of missing ads. Comments regarding Youtube should appropriately be in the discussion I linked for you.

[glitterball]

@keyplyr

@glitterball - it's unrelated (off topic) to this discussion of missing ads. Comments regarding Youtube should appropriately be in the discussion I linked for you.

It's unrelated because you say it's unrelated. I'm saying that there are missing Ads because Google don't have the Ads to fill the slots as evidenced by their decision to remove Adsense ads from most of the videos on YouTube. Anyone can see that this is massive and will have knock-on effects for website publishers as well. There is simply no way that Google would do this if they had a enough coverage.

You seem to continuously spout Google's official party line in here, so I'm going to ask the question (I've wondered this for a long time):
Are you being paid directly or indirectly by Google to promote their interests?

[danone]

@SEOPTI Just imagine a site getting Bing/Yahoo visitors, but NO google traffic and you can NOT monetize this site any more with adsense.

that's right my most visitor come from bing/yahoo US to pages where there is advertise and content directly. maybe that's the reason google want its search engine to filter this. as I mentioned I will remove nofollow pages try again and see whats happen.

@Govnokontora that's exactly what they meant we are sorry we don't need you anymore because there is alot of reason we can't tell you.

[AlexB77]

Just an update, the number of advertisers have dropped from 35k from 2 days ago to 7k today. In addition, Google is sending £240.00 vouchers to all of my google accounts asking me to start advertising blablabla. So it looks like indeed there is a huge shortage of advertisers that is already having an impact on YouTub and our sites too. Also, today coverage dropped to new record level 77% for me across the board.

[sdksjdksjd]

@AlexB77
How do you see number of advertisers? "Newest ads" ?

[AlexB77]

@sdksjdksjd, both number of new advertisers and unreviewed ads and newest ads.

[NickMNS]

@AlexB77 your are attributing meaning to random occurrences.
Google regularly sends out AdWords vouchers,so I wouldn't read to much into it.

the number of advertisers have dropped from 35k from 2 days ago to 7k today.

Two days ago when you checked and found 35k ads, when was the last time you reviewed ads before that?

[sdksjdksjd]

Possible lack of advertisers is not something to be concluded by AdSense or YT stats.
Economy is slowly, but growing everywhere. Number of 3rd party networks in the system is growing, means there are advertisers for everyone.
On the big picture I don't see any reason why number of advertisers would be collapsing. In fact, it should be growing since social networks are constantly screwing inner spam based promo activity.

[AlexB77]

@NickMNS I review ads on the weekly basis, but I must admit, I think I have jumped to conclusions rather too quickly, I think that there are some changes to the AdSense/AdWords ecosystem, which is why I see jumps and drops in advertisers every now and again, which seems to be happening again now.

[NickMNS]

@AlexB77 you cannot compare 2 weeks to 2 days that is a 7x difference 7k x 7 = 49k ads. Unfortunately you can't do simple scaling because, some ad units that appear on day 1 will continue to appear over the whole period so it will only ever count as one ad. 7k x 5 = 35k so simply by gut feeling there seems to be little change.