14 year old site, since yesterday ad impressions are somehow "capped"

[Lagonda]

(I'm crossposting this from the Google's AdSense Community hoping for some additional input... sorry for the "abuse")

Context:
- one account, two sites
- everything's in good standing for 14 years

Site 1 = 13 years old, everything's fine, stable and consistent impressions/revenue

Site 2 = 14 years old, same traffic volume (visits/sessions, page views, etc.), same patterns (audience, traffic acquisition, etc.), no server changes from my side (didn't change anything), since yesterday impressions are extremely low, to me ads don't show but nonetheless, reports indicate increasing impressions along the day but very very few to what is normal.
Change in impressions, page views and clicks is around -60% comparing yesterday to previous weekday.
By today's reports, ads are showing but the trend remains - same analytics traffic but very low ad impressions, yet, all ad units get some impressions.
Up until yesterday everything was fine, no surge in clicks or revenue that might suggest click bombing or anything like that.

What I did to troubleshoot:
- checked code implementation, OK
- checked ads.txt, OK
- checked crawler errors, OK
- checked Policy Center, no relevant violations (1 violation in a page about smoking, only affects that page, already removed the page and requested review), OK
- checked several devices, from different networks and browsers, same behavior, OK
- followed the "Ads don't show" troubleshooter guide [support.google.com], OK

I have already read the page Ad serving limits [support.google.com], but I don't have any violation or email stating that this has happened. Also, I don't have Facebook traffic, I don't buy traffic or anything like that - it's all purely organic. If this could be the reason, why now, when everything's been consistent and homogeneous for years?

I have already contacted support but was wondering if there's anything left for me to do?
Any tips or advice?

Thanks in advance. ;)

Update:
- checked the coverage report, it gives a +99% coverage figure for the last 7 days including yesterday and today
- tried to refresh a sample page to see if any ads appeared and, without any consistency, they do appear sometimes, can't understand if it's a time or frequency capping

Any thoughts?

Here's a last 30 days report just to illustrate the problem (all figures omitted).
[storage.googleapis.com...]

[IanTurner]

I saw a change on 5th October but in my case impressions tripled. Revenue per impression went down to a third of what it was before.

For my change I think it is Ad Balancer being removed. You may be seeing a consequence of that removal across vast swathes of sites.

[JorgeV]

Hello,

Check your police center.

[londrum]

do all the pages regularly get visited by real users?
I had this in the past on a very big site (tens of thousands of pages) when google decided to stop showing ads on pages that hadn't been visited by a real person - and crawling by search bots didn't count. the advert would only start appearing on the second view.
but they reset the count every couple of weeks (or whatever the length was, i cant remember exactly how long it was now), so unless a real person continuously viewed the page every couple of weeks we never got any ads showing

[Lagonda]

Update
Got a response from support: too many ad requests.
When this happens AdSense temporarily stops serving ads.

I have 3 ad units + 1 link ad + auto ads set sitewide.
Support recommended removal of 2 to 3 manual ads.

I'll do as they say.
I'll update this thread soon.

[ronron]

^ that's an odd reason, unless it's meant to create a better user experience by not inundating the user with ads.

[JorgeV]

I am quoting your comment :

Any Way to Get Just 1 Ad?
Auto-ads Splatters EVERYTHING
[webmasterworld.com...]

Remember when you could only have 3 ads on any given page?

So it seems, there is still such limit :)

[NickMNS]

Support recommended removal of 2 to 3 manual ads.

Sounds like a typical Google answer. The manual ads are certainly not causing the problem. There is no doubt that the problem is the auto-ads. The fact that Google can't limit their own ad serving should be a big warning. If I where you I would ditch the auto-ads, and one or two "manual" ads to compensate. Whatever marginal revenue optimization that auto-ads may provide (if any) it was probably all lost from having lost nearly all ad impression for the better part of two days.

Small side note. A few years ago I updated one of my website, using an "infinite scroll" type approach. Ads were added to the page after each time new content was added to the page. But I had a bug in the program, so instead of simply adding an additional ad unit with the new content, the script added a new ad unit to each ad slot, layering them one on top of another. So the number of ads on my pages grew exponentially. After a few days I found the bug and fixed it, but for a few days impressions were exponentially higher than normal, this did not trigger any warnings or penalties from AdSense. All that to say, two additional ad-requests per page are not going to trigger a "too many ad request penalty".

[IanTurner]

You can also lower the number of ads per page that auto ads will deliver. You need to go into the auto ads settings for the individual site and set the slider to a lower setting.

[Lagonda]

(still crossposting)

I've removed 3 manual ads (2 ads + 1 link ad).
Sometime after (+/-1 hour), ads have come back.

Let's see how this change reflects on revenue.

Nonetheless, I think this use case should be "polished" by the AdSense Team.

I've lost +50% revenue for 2 days without any notice or compensation.
This happened because of auto ads, not because of me.
AdSense auto ads should be adjusted so that this doesn't happen or, if it does, it should provide some kind of warning previously.

I'm happy to use AdSense, it's been a good partnership, I'm somehow content with AdSense support but, I feel this was unjust and unnecessary.

[Lagonda]

So it seems, there is still such limit :)

I decided some time ago to set the auto ads slider to the max allowed, guessing AdSense wouldn't serve too many ads.
I was wrong.

If I where you I would ditch the auto-ads, and one or two "manual" ads to compensate. Whatever marginal revenue optimization that auto-ads may provide (if any) it was probably all lost from having lost nearly all ad impression for the better part of two days.

I'm testing this right now - all I wanted was ads back.

In the next weeks I'll try to eliminate or adjust the auto ads slider and see what happens.
This wasn't a blind decision - I checked the "Placement format" report before.
Last 30 days:
Auto ads = 38% of revenue.
Auto ads + remaining manual ads = 70% of revenue.
I risk losing 30% of revenue but I hope (who knows?) that the missing manual ads positions will be replaced by auto ads.
Let's see what happens.

You can also lower the number of ads per page that auto ads will deliver. You need to go into the auto ads settings for the individual site and set the slider to a lower setting.

Yes, I also did that.
Interestingly, when I hit "Apply", AdSense proposed an experiment with 50% of the traffic.
It's running, I'll post further developments.

[Lagonda]

This is funny.

So, in July 2020, after AdSense removed Ad Balance I said to myself: "fork it, if they want ads, I'll give them ads".
I set the ad slider for auto ads to the max.
Ran an experiment.
Result: 3 auto ads per page (original) VS 5 auto ads per page (new config) = +23% revenue for the 5 ads variation.
Let's get crazy, I welcome a 23% increase in revenue so, I decided to keep 5 auto ads.

These are long pages, +/-10 vertical desktop screens, take that in consideration when judging the number of ads per page.

3 months later, it happens what originated this topic.

Ok, as said before, given what's happened, let's run a new experiment.
Now, 5 ads per page (original version set in July) VS 3 ads per page (new config).
Result until now: 5 auto ads per page VS 3 auto ads per page = +47% revenue for the 3 ads variation.

Do you agree that this is rather amusing?