Adsense on Smack

Is anyone else noticing adsense blocks looking whacked this past day or so? ie. For a Wide Skyscraper only one of the five ads is displaying, when normally all the ads are displayed. This has happened numerous times for me...

 

I've noticed it on and off for awhile...maybe a week or so.

 

google has a new feature outlined in the updated TOS. Fewer ad units are occasionally displayed *supposedly* to earn you more money. I was looking at it just last night.

 

"AdSense now optimizes your ad units on the fly, to present the ideal number of the most relevant ads available! Read the What's New page for details." --Adsense

 

well its severly flawed if thats the case, theres a lot more relevant ads it could be displaying in my case... it also makes the site look so ugly with all the whitespace.

 

I keep reading about this, but I have yet to see it on any of my sites.

 

AS assumes that more attention is going to be drawn to the higher paying ad.

But somehow displaying just one seems more like its just severely reducing the profit-generating area on the page.

 

I think part of what they are doing is dropping less profitable ads as well.. in order to maximize revenue.

 

Those of us checking out sites ads by just going to the URL are making a mistake as I found out yesterday by someone informing me in here that they serve ads up based on off-page factors too - ie. how your visitor found your site, what keywords they came using etc.

Go on Google, type in 'widgets' to bring up your site, and use various terms, and see how your ads are tailored toward your search term aswell as the page content.

It's very clever... so if you think relevant ads aren't showing for you, they probably are for your visitors, however they're coming to your site. Interesting stuff.

Pete

 

Apart from the TOS is there a read up on this elsewhere anyone know....

 

https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/answer.py?answer=22506

I would prefer they didn't do this. It looks strange.

J

 

thanks

Not only does it make sites look ugly... but I doubt as to whether this will increase profitability. Time will tell I guess. You'd have to be a game man to question google's logic

 

something tells me they have a few bugs to sort out. When the ad blocks dont look whacked they show all spyware ads for me on a non-tech site. Very wierd.

 

Pete, that is an interesting concept that I have not heard before. I'm sure G is constantly tweaking how it delivers ads because just a fraction of a percent better CTR equals millions of dollars to them.

 

One some of my sites, it simply makes the site look plain stupid. With big white gaps all over the place.

 

It's awfully good timing of big G though, with the beta release of Yahoo's publishing network.