Adsense blank ads

Pravi · January 28, 2019, 9:59am

Hello Guys,
I have seen that ads in some of the page is not visible some times. Some times I have to reload multiple times to make it visible.

Sometimes like this:

Need some help guys! Thanks

itsbhanusharma · January 28, 2019, 10:00am

This is probably adsense related, not related to plugin.

Adsense sometimes places blank ads to analyse your audience etc. This should resolve soon.

Pravi · January 28, 2019, 10:29am

Thanks for the reply.

inspect
What about this one? Is it normal ? Is there anything wrong from with my custom css?

itsbhanusharma · January 28, 2019, 10:30am

That’s just a warning and shouldn’t impact the ad loading. You can defer it’s loading or maybe use async ad code.

eesty · January 29, 2019, 9:42pm

I’m getting the same issue.

Sometimes all the ad units appear, but about two thirds of the time the slots are blank.
The slot has loaded, but no ad appears.

I can’t make heads or tails of it, but it’s certainly impacting revenue heavily.

I’m also getting that warning message “the resource… was preloaded using…”, but nothing else in console.

Discourse is sitting behind NGINX.

bartv · January 30, 2019, 9:49am

For how long have you had AdSense on your site? It took several weeks for me to get good coverage as they needed to index my content first.

eesty · January 30, 2019, 12:07pm

Okay that would make sense.

I’ve had Adsense running for years but I recently migrated from Phpbb3 to discourse.

Thanks

eesty · March 10, 2019, 11:23am

I thought I’d provide an update on my experience with the Adsense plugin.

Unfortunately it hasn’t been great. Typically the ad slots fail to load any ad unit, so all I see is a blank space (or the ‘empty’ colour that I set for the ad unit). I’d say about only 40% of the time are ads actually servered. When they are, the “nth” post ad unit is still flakey, sometimes delivering an ad.

I thought it may be something to do with the way that the ads were being called, however I have a skyscraper ad on the side on my page (I used the Discourse Layouts plugin to achieve this), yet it is still hitting around the 50% mark.

Interestingly, older topics almost never have ads, while new topics are more likely to have them appear.

Sadly I’ve seen revenue drop considerably, even though impression counts haven’t really changed.
Further, jittery mobile experience (with the nth post ad slot) and the blank spaces make the site look unfinished. It’s getting to the point where I’m considering cutting my losses and going back to phpbb. It’s a shame because I’m a big advocate of Discourse and don’t want to change.

Would this kind of experience with the Adsense plugin be familiar to anyone?

I’m happy to share my forum URL (here --> http://weststigersforum.com) to demonstrate what I’ve just described.

agemo · March 29, 2019, 8:45am

Yep it’s a total disaster the metrics have collapsed and revenue accordingly.

I’d up your 40% to 80% at times being down on metrics and revenue. This is also coming from a phpBB install.

Let that be a word of warning to anyone considering moving, needs to throughly understand the consequences and plan accordingly.

Impressions are wildly down, though we had probably over placed adverts to get that up, but it worked and the users never seem to complain despite it seemingly being overkill.

While googling this issue it’s apprenrlty similar also occurs for Wordpress (not sure if it wa plugin related). I briefly read something about Adsense not being able to find the right sized container and so it does not show an ad when this occurs. Is the same happening here?

I was making some mild CSS adjustments to .topic-body width and noticed when I did that seemed to push things wider and allow an advert suddenly pop into place. This advert was positioned at the bottom of a page, below the REPLY button array.

Is there something in the layout cascade and strucutrepreventing adverts appearing somethings. I have no idea. I could be assuming to much here and it could be coincidence. I’m simply noting what I observed.

Those more familiar with the way the pages are constructed and works together might have better insight.

It could also be a google thing where it doesn’t have the ad to display but it’s impossible to tell right now.

The plugin in my experience needs the following:

better settings interface UI
no. the ad units, helping cross reference.
GFX/Icons would really help to indicate position of ad (settings)
more positional controls or more positions to choose from.
Sometimes it’s ok to have 3 ads in one row on part of a forum.
Sometimes it’s ok to stack ads in 2 or more rows.
nth ad on latest page would be a help too (with no next page it’s really needed).
being also configurable separate to the topic nth.

Also to add, this is an early phpBB migration too and yes it’s understood traffic will drop (so no surprises here) but with redirects it hasn’t been as bad as expected on user traffic, getting very close to original pattern, maybe 10% lower daily user count (according to analytics) whereas adsense is very very very poor.

Maybe we made the mistake of making up a new ad unit for each entry/position in the adsense plugin (this was for easy of visible tracking for performance) but reverted to historical ad units after a few days. This helped a bit but it’s still 80% revenue drop problem.

Final note, adsense revenue trend was not great before, but this has made it worse so a portion of the issue could be changes on the google side. It’s hard for a Admin these days, so many things coming at ya!

agemo · April 2, 2019, 9:28am

Thus far things goeth:

Regular Traffic has come back reasonably well.
Indexing is still ongoing and looking way better, mobile friendly errors are falling by a ton!)

Yet, Ads do not load when they should. Reload page, ads appear!.

I don’t know yet if there is similarity or disparity between mobile & desktop serving.

All we know is it’s alarming to see how many ad servings are missing at this point and the real world problem it has created.

Solution?

Version: Discourse install is v2.2 (beta4), with plans to upgrade asap.

agemo · April 2, 2019, 9:37am

eesty:

I thought I’d provide an update on my experience with the Adsense plugin.

Unfortunately it hasn’t been great. Typically the ad slots fail to load any ad unit, so all I see is a blank space (or the ‘empty’ colour that I set for the ad unit). I’d say about only 40% of the time are ads actually servered. When they are, the “nth” post ad unit is still flakey, sometimes delivering an ad.

I thought it may be something to do with the way that the ads were being called, however I have a skyscraper ad on the side on my page (I used the Discourse Layouts plugin to achieve this), yet it is still hitting around the 50% mark.

Interestingly, older topics almost never have ads, while new topics are more likely to have them appear.

Sadly I’ve seen revenue drop considerably, even though impression counts haven’t really changed.
Further, jittery mobile experience (with the nth post ad slot) and the blank spaces make the site look unfinished. It’s getting to the point where I’m considering cutting my losses and going back to phpbb. It’s a shame because I’m a big advocate of Discourse and don’t want to change.

Would this kind of experience with the Adsense plugin be familiar to anyone?

I’m happy to share my forum URL (here → http://weststigersforum.com) to demonstrate what I’ve just described.

Your issues and experience and everything you detail here is identical to our own from beginning to end. (excluding the custom Layout)

Going back seems unthinkable, and is that even technically possible or cost effective. Maybe for some but is it worth the effort. Maybe going sideways into a similar platform is the best option but who wants to do that all over again, Discourse is a nice platform.

There is an important point here that maybe is being missed. I don’t fully know but it would seems that:

Site Admins would surely pay and easily justify the cost of a reasonable purchase fee for a fully functioning Adsense plugin if even it was a nominal fee. $10/20 with a lower renewal for any full point upgrades with maybe a 3/6 month trial for smaller sites with low traffic.

To support updates, fixes and new features too.

UPDATE Apr 3rd '19:

I wanted to add in this image of Pagew View, Impression & Click for the purposes of illustrating the trend of approx 12/13 days period.

page-view-impression-clicks800×147 25.9 KB

Yellow - Impressions
Red - Page Views
Green - Clicks

It’s very obvious ot see where Discourse went live.

There is the previous and very stable pattern before upgrade and the jump-off-cliff dive.

Page RPM, Active Viewable Area & Impression Rpm have performed better, a little erratic but also with some good peaks. Nothing like this trending drop of trailing the sea floor!

Generally site Traffic is performing fine and index errors are continuing to drop like flies with a real rise in valid indexing/coverage report and a vast improvement in mobile enhancement performance.

Naturally it takes time for users to grapple with the new UI and other initial issues but that point is passing now and traffic is really starting to conform to typical patterns, maybe still about 10% lower but the gap is closing, with some tentative signs of a rise in mobile traffic.

Impressions & Pages View if these are down then Clicks are going to collapse. That is the relationship. I you can’t see an ad, you don’t have a chance to click or record the impression.

Blank Ads, are still common and again going back through old threads. There can be no other reason and there is no signs of that improving based on the stats to date despite the recovery and beginning stabilisation of traffic.

Yea give it a bit more time but really I’ve played with Adsense for a long time and you can get results fast if you play and you see the changes within 3/4 days.

Maybe this is an indexing issue and is going to take much longer but I dunno yet. Seeing Blank Ads, Ads not loading but loading on a reload does not instil confidence.

eesty · April 4, 2019, 7:03pm

My experience is the same.

Since switching the discourse traffic is about 90% compared to comparable periods yet revenue is down about 80-90%.

If I could have my time again I’d stay with PHPBB, even through discourse is a much better platform.

Pravi · January 14, 2020, 6:43am

Still no idea what is the exact issue here. I have to reload the page twice, sometime thrice for the ad to appear. Even if google is not severing the ads, there has to be a blank container which is missing. Seems like a bug.

I appreciate any response from the discourse team. Is this normal?

marianord · January 17, 2020, 3:08pm

If you updated recently the new CSP policies might be causing issues. You need to whitelist Google domains to be able to see again the ads (or disable CSP).

Pravi · January 18, 2020, 5:53am

Yes, recently I have enabled CSP policies but I have this problem even before enabling CSP. How to whitelist google? Here are my current CSP settings.

marianord · January 18, 2020, 4:56pm

You would need to check each domain Google is using, and add it, that’s my understanding at least.

neil · January 20, 2020, 4:31pm

Do you see any errors in the javascript console of your browser? Any network requests to google failing with 400 errors or similar? Any errors or warnings showing in your AdSense account?

Pravi · January 20, 2020, 6:45pm

No error or warnings in my adsense account yet.

Errors in my logs:

(google_oauth2) Authentication failure! csrf_detected: OmniAuth::Strategies::OAuth2::CallbackError, csrf_detected | CSRF detected

14 Jan 8:17 pm

Uncaught exception: TypeError: Cannot convert 'e.Mixin' to object Url: https://engineersasylum.com/assets/vendor-3b0a3ac5e0bc628422d6e99d3563fad4c474398644f70683eff0893b7a241513.js Line: 1 Window Loca

14 Jan 8:20 pm

e.Mixin is undefined Url: https://engineersasylum.com/assets/vendor-3b0a3ac5e0bc628422d6e99d3563fad4c474398644f70683eff0893b7a241513.js Line: 1 Window Location: https://engineersasylum.com/t/differenc

14 Jan 10:28 pm

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15 Jan 3:36 am

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15 Jan 8:20 am

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15 Jan 8:22 am

2

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15 Jan 12:19 pm

2

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15 Jan 12:19 pm

3

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15 Jan 12:27 pm

2

Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'create' of undefined Url: https://engineersasylum.com/assets/vendor-3b0a3ac5e0bc628422d6e99d3563fad4c474398644f70683eff0893b7a241513.js Line: 1 Column: 69 Win

15 Jan 12:27 pm

4

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15 Jan 12:32 pm

2

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15 Jan 12:44 pm

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15 Jan 12:56 pm

Uncaught exception: TypeError: Cannot convert 'e.Mixin' to object Url: https://engineersasylum.com/assets/vendor-3b0a3ac5e0bc628422d6e99d3563fad4c474398644f70683eff0893b7a241513.js Line: 1 Window Loca

15 Jan 1:45 pm

Uncaught SyntaxError: Block-scoped declarations (let, const, function, class) not yet supported outside strict mode Url: Line: 6 Column: 10 Window Location: https://engineersasylum.com/signup

15 Jan 2:12 pm

Uncaught exception: TypeError: Cannot convert 'e.Mixin' to object Url: https://engineersasylum.com/assets/vendor-3b0a3ac5e0bc628422d6e99d3563fad4c474398644f70683eff0893b7a241513.js Line: 1 Window Loca

15 Jan 4:33 pm

CSP Violation: 'https://engineersasylum.com/t/how-to-run-a-python-program-in-the-command-prompt-in-windows-10/77'

15 Jan 7:15 pm

2

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15 Jan 7:17 pm

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15 Jan 7:37 pm

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15 Jan 8:03 pm

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15 Jan 8:08 pm

2

Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'create' of undefined Url: https://engineersasylum.com/assets/vendor-3b0a3ac5e0bc628422d6e99d3563fad4c474398644f70683eff0893b7a241513.js Line: 1 Column: 69 Win

16 Jan 1:06 am

2

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16 Jan 4:30 am

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16 Jan 4:30 am

2

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16 Jan 4:39 am

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16 Jan 4:52 am

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16 Jan 5:06 am

2

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16 Jan 7:25 pm

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17 Jan 10:25 am

6

CSP Violation: 'https://engineersasylum.com/logs/report_js_error'

17 Jan 10:25 am

29

CSP Violation: 'https://engineersasylum.com/t/how-to-run-a-python-program-in-the-command-prompt-in-windows-10/77'

17 Jan 10:26 am

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17 Jan 11:56 am

8

CSP Violation: 'https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js'

17 Jan 10:53 pm

Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'create' of undefined Url: https://engineersasylum.com/assets/vendor-3b0a3ac5e0bc628422d6e99d3563fad4c474398644f70683eff0893b7a241513.js Line: 1 Column: 69 Win

18 Jan 1:17 am

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18 Jan 7:18 am

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18 Jan 7:19 am

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Su 7:05 pm

32

CSP Violation: 'data'

Su 7:26 pm

18

CSP Violation: 'https://www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js'

Su 9:18 pm

79

CSP Violation: 'eval'

Mo 12:38 am

12

CSP Violation: 'about'

Mo 5:56 am

Uncaught [object Object] Url: https://engineersasylum.com/assets/ember_jquery-c2cca4a19fd4c70eabc95b010a6d7643955ec2a2251aeb1d70f625773eebea21.js Line: 1 Column: 262002 Window Location: https://engine

Mo 8:03 am

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Mo 3:44 pm

2

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Mo 5:11 pm

2

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Mo 5:36 pm

4

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Mo 5:56 pm

2

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Mo 8:02 pm

4

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Mo 9:12 pm

6

Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'create' of undefined Url: https://engineersasylum.com/assets/vendor-3b0a3ac5e0bc628422d6e99d3563fad4c474398644f70683eff0893b7a241513.js Line: 1 Column: 69 Win

Mo 9:38 pm

TypeError: a.charCodeAt(0).toString(16).padStart is not a function. (In 'a.charCodeAt(0).toString(16).padStart(4,"0")', 'a.charCodeAt(0).toString(16).padStart' is undefined) Url: https://engineersasyl

Right now, I have disabled CSP for my site.

Topic		Replies	Views
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Dropping ad revenue Support	54	4133	January 27, 2023
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Adsense blank ads

Solution?

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