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.