Coverage at 25% and Income Dropped by 90%

[jc2021]

I manage a news site and since the start of the year I have noticed fewer and fewer impressions and lower coverage. I oftentimes see blank spaces. I have no policy violations and Google hasn't been helpful at all.

Since January I have been seeing my income dropping as a result. Now I earn 10% of what I did 6 months ago.

Most of my metrics such as page views reduced by a bit, but just by 10-15%.

Coverage dropped by 50-60% and impressions dropped by 30-40%.

I have been troubleshooting this for 12 hours a day without much result and no one has been able to assist, not even the guys from AdPushup who never got back to me.

I use AdInserter Pro to insert the ad code.

I noticed responsive ad codes show 95% of the time while fixed ad slots show whenever they want. Especially rotating ads don't show.

[martinibuster]

Have you tried crawling your site to see if there's something getting in the way of crawling?

Are the topics related to products?

Would you feel comfortable reading your articles to a child?

[jc2021]

According to search console, all the news articles are crawlable.

Would you feel comfortable reading your articles to a child?

Well not all, but it is a news website after all. I know content matters but my direct competitors and other large news websites also report on gruesome things happening around the world and I see ads displaying without issue there.

[rokramne]

Did this start around 25th-27th of January and is your audience mostly European? If so, it's because of the end of Google's grace period with TCF2.0 and since then AdSense is only serving non-personalized ads. In this case you have to deploy a CMP such as Funding Choices by Google or Quantcast Choice.

[jc2021]

I admit I have not looked into this. I do get most of my income from within the EU and I only have a cookie notice displayed.

I don't use ad or tag manager, just adsense and I never got any notice regarding a CMP.

[edited by: jc2021 at 10:32 am (utc) on Feb 26, 2021]

[rokramne]

Well, that's it then. You can confirm this by checking the targeting types in AdSense reporting.

Here's what you need to be able to show personalized ads:

Google will serve personalized ads when all of the following criteria are met:

The end user grants Google consent to:
Store and/or access information on a device (Purpose 1)
Create a personalized ads profile (Purposes 3)
Select personalized ads (Purposes 4)
Legitimate interest (or consent, where a publisher configures their CMP to request it) is established for Google to:
Select basic ads (Purpose 2)
Measure ad performance (Purpose 7)
Apply market research to generate audience insights (Purpose 9)
Develop and improve products (Purpose 10)

[support.google.com...]

I had this same problem and put up Funding Choices and income is went back to normal.

[jc2021]

Well, that's it then. You can confirm this by checking the targeting types in AdSense reporting.

6 months ago personalized ads were at 95% or more and now it's at 80%, do you think the 15% makes the difference in income?

[rokramne]

In my case the audience is 99% from the EU and income from personalized targeting went down 80 % and personalized impressions went down 50 %. Especially this no-consent problem affected mobile income which halted 95 %.

But there is not really a choice here as Google is now using TCF2.0 and you should comply with it.

Edit: Funding Choices (and Quantcast also, both are free tools) is really easy to implement. Just make a consent message and add the code to the header before any ad tags.

Edit 2: Well actually Google is not forcing to use TCF2.0 but then you should build your own solution to get a permission from users to those purposes I posted earlier and pass the info to AdSense.

[jc2021]

Thanks, I integrated quantcast. How do I know everything is setup accordingly for adsense?

[rokramne]

You can check if the set cookie has correct values by decoding it here: [consentstringdecoder.com...]

Other than that it should work automatically.

[NickMNS]

Especially rotating ads don't show.

What are "rotating" ads exactly?

[jc2021]

You can check if the set cookie has correct values by decoding it here: [consentstringdecoder.com...]

Thanks but where do I find my consent string or 'set cookie'? I wasn't able to find this on google.

What are "rotating" ads exactly?

[adinserter.pro...]

I use it for bottom sticky banners, so when users scroll down they see a new ad every X seconds

Anyway, I don't see a big difference after installing the CMP, I still see blank ad spaces and income still very, very poor. Not sure if it needs time.

[NickMNS]

I use it for bottom sticky banners, so when users scroll down they see a new ad every X seconds

I'm going to guess that this is the source of your problem. To over simplify, this is against AdSense policies.

It may be possible to implement this such that it doesn't go against the AdSense policies, but I'm not really sure what your plugin is doing this or even how it works under the hood. I strongly recommend that your read through the thread that I started regarding a related issue, the threads provides much of the details you would require to make this work for you.
[webmasterworld.com...]

Note: In the above thread be sure to watch the youTube video linked by @Levo in the first response post.

To solve your problems in the near term I would disable this feature immediately.

Note: one easy "fix" would be to use this "rotating" ads widget with ads from another ad network that allows it. But I'm not sure that this is a great solution for advertiser or users or the ad-network.

[jc2021]

Thanks, I really didn't know that.

Do you think sticky ads are allowed? I see it on many websites.

[NickMNS]

Do you think sticky ads are allowed?

AdSense offers Anchor ads as part of auto ads. But I'm not sure if they are displayed on desktop. "Vignette" ads, (Adsense's interstitial ad format) which is similar to Anchor ads was recently made available to desktop. Otherwise you can show ads from another ad network that allows the stickies.

Note that both Anchor and Vignette ads are part of auto-ads, so very simple to implement. No need for a plugin. You simply enable it in your Adsense account and then include one line of code in the head section of your pages.

[rokramne]

Thanks but where do I find my consent string or 'set cookie'? I wasn't able to find this on google.

You check it from your own browser's cookie that it is saved correctly.

[jc2021]

It seems that fixing the cookie issue didn't help. Still poor ad coverage and poor income. I have excluded everything now, at least to my knowledge.

Active view viewable has also dropped significantly since yesterday, does this mean people are browsing my site who rejected the cookies?

[jc2021]

I am seeing this right now, I get error 1.2

[help.quantcast.com...]

This apparently means people rejected cookies and nothing can be done about it.

Any experiences?

Google says: Confirm whether the user intentionally disallowed Purpose 1 or if this is due to CMP implementation errors.
[support.google.com...]

As far as I know there is no CMP implementation error...

[rokramne]

I get that issue banner too and they are all error 1.2.

[jc2021]

Do you also get this JS error on your site after installing the CMP? I got quantcast.

VM1013 cmp2.js:1 Uncaught TypeError: n is not a function
 at e.apiCall (VM1013 cmp2.js:1)
 at new e (VM1013 cmp2.js:1)
 at Module.<anonymous> (VM1013 cmp2.js:1)
 at n (VM1013 cmp2.js:1)
 at Object.<anonymous> (VM1013 cmp2.js:1)
 at n (VM1013 cmp2.js:1)
 at VM1013 cmp2.js:1
 at VM1013 cmp2.js:1

[jc2021]

I am now seeing a CORS error. Any ideas?