AdSense shaved 80%

[Anatoliy]

The "Estimated earnings" for June lost 80% after being moved to "Balance" and it drives me mad. All that I can get from them is an reply "It's probably related for invalid traffic". Last month I blocked countries with cloudflare. Didn't help.

Do you experience the same issue? May be someone found the reason and would share the knowledge?

Is it possible that it's the xenforo software that violating adsense's turms of use? I had another forum (IPB) and there was a warning about ajax pagination in the admin -> config area, something like "You have to turn it of if you serve Google Adsense ads". Does xenForo has some similar switch that has to be turned off?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Bram]

HI @Anatoliy I know what you are feeling and those of us with experience with badsense/sadsense for sure had the same in the past. Me too, but I can only give you one tip. If your site's size allows you to ditch Adsense and go with another provider who manages your ad stack go for it as all adsense sites are leaving money on the table.

If you need a good company I can recommend you a few. Just drop me a pm if you wish.

 

[Anatoliy]

badsense/sadsense

 

[RobParker]

It's been getting way worse for me lately too, losing 40% or so.

 

[AndyB]

I assume AdSense revenue has declined because advertisers are not spending money as they did before covid-19.

 

[RobParker]

I assume AdSense revenue has declined because advertisers are not spending money as they did before covid-19.

It's not the amount declining, it's the amount of "invalid" traffic increasing.

 

[Anatoliy]

I assume AdSense revenue has declined because advertisers are not spending money as they did before covid-19.

that's different

 

[Anatoliy]

It looks like the "after the first post" code (from this guide https://xenforo.com/community/resou...ips-and-visual-overview-of-ad-positions.6797/) was a reason of "invalid traffic" and earnings deduction.

I had 2 ads on thread pages - after the first post and below message list. Impressions, clicks, estimated earnings for each one was very close.
Page CTR was about 10%. Yesterday I turned off the after the first post ad. Page CTR became about 1%.

@Mr. Jinx , do you use after the first post ads from your guide? Does google shave 80% of your earnings?

 

[Anatoliy]

It's been getting way worse for me lately too, losing 40% or so.

do you use "after the first post" ads? or do you use autoads?

 

[RobParker]

We’re using the ad manager addon and using the last read position,

 

[Anatoliy]

We’re using the ad manager addon and using the last read position,

I was using Ads manager 2, then decided that it might be a problem somehow and stopped using it.
It looks like Google doesn't like an idea to show ads below post container and consider it as invalid traffic.

 

[Mr. Jinx]

It looks like Google doesn't like an idea to show ads below post container and consider it as invalid traffic.

There is nothing wrong with placing ads after first post or any other position, as long as it is clear for your users that it is an ad.
For example, it should not look like a regular link that users could click on by mistake. It should also not be placed on auto-reloading pages, etc..
Never heard of this problem so it might be some misconfiguration on your end, or users misbehaving?

 

[RobParker]

There is nothing wrong with placing ads after first post or any other position, as long as it is clear for your users that it is an ad.
For example, it should not look like a regular link that users could click on by mistake. It should also not be placed on auto-reloading pages, etc..
Never heard of this problem so it might be some misconfiguration on your end, or users misbehaving?

It's definitely getting worse. Used to be 10-20% and now some months it can be 50%+ for us. You can look at your past payments and it says how much is deducted for invalid traffic.

 

[Anatoliy]

There is nothing wrong with placing ads after first post or any other position, as long as it is clear for your users that it is an ad.
For example, it should not look like a regular link that users could click on by mistake. It should also not be placed on auto-reloading pages, etc..
Never heard of this problem so it might be some misconfiguration on your end, or users misbehaving?

Yeah, I understand that in theory there is nothing wrong in placing an ad after a first post container. And I even made top and bottom margins 10px instead of 3 as in your guide, to be sure that ads are not too close and will not violate that rule "ad is too close to an object and fools users".

I have no idea, that's why I started this thread... May be some weird reason like a div with an add is in a div that is in a div... and google somehow fails to read css of those nested divs and somehow it looks to google that the add is places with violation...

Will keep my eye on Page CTR. With after the first post it was 10%. Now with only after thread list ad it's 2.3% so far. SO yeah, it makes sense that Google deducted 80% if normal CTR is 5 times smaller that what I had.

 

[RobParker]

We have ads at the top/bottom as well as in the middle of threads. The top position performs best by far. Sometimes the deducted amount is more than the total of the other positions. That means, even if google was deducting all of the revenue from the middle/bottom positions, it still wouldn't account for all of our deductions. There's more to this than just a dodgy ad position.

 

[Anatoliy]

the deducted amount is more than the total of the other positions.

isn't that a bulletproof confirmation that top position ads are the reason of "invalid traffic"? )

 

[RobParker]

isn't that a bulletproof confirmation that top position ads are the reason of "invalid traffic"? )

Nope, I don't think it is as sometimes the deductions are larger than those too. I think there's something more fundamental going on.

 

[Anatoliy]

Nope, I don't think it is

for me it's a simple math problem. )

 

[Mr. Jinx]

FYI, I have ads after first post, in the middle and before last post but don't see any difference past months.
Usually I have 1% of invalid traffic.

Did you read what invalid traffic exactly means anyway?

Definition of invalid traffic - Google AdSense Help

Invalid traffic includes any clicks or impressions that may artificially inflate an advertiser's costs or a publisher's earnings. Invalid traffic covers intentionally fraudulent traffic as well as acc

support.google.com

• Clicks or impressions generated by publishers clicking their own live ads
• Repeated ad clicks or impressions generated by one or more users
• Publishers encouraging clicks on their ads (examples may include: any language encouraging users to click on ads, ad implementations that may cause a high volume of accidental clicks, etc.)
• Automated clicking tools or traffic sources, robots, or other deceptive software.

So usually, this is because of publishers (you ) clicking their own ads, or your users clicking at ads in a way that is looks suspicious to google. It could also be some kind of bot.
I don't believe it has anything to do with impressions but rather false clicks.

The link I provided also contains a form you can submit if you suspect the invalid traffic is coming from something else.

 

[Masetrix]

If advertising docks too close to the posting, it can trigger "accidental clicks".
Therefore, after the first <div> I use <hr /> to have a separation between content and advertising, which effectively prevents accidental clicks.