I personally don't see the trend but "low inventory" rings in my ears.

One of my site has above 1000000 page views per month.
I think google adviertisers base is shrinking (may be because of US economy).

I personally don't see the trend but "low inventory" rings in my ears.

I have seen a significant reduction in placement ads on my site. In the past placement ads represented up to 5% of ads shown. Yesterday I seen less than .001%.

Definately a change in inventory...

I was just going to post about this, we have several multi million page view a month sites and we are seeing a clear gradual decline in ad impressions from Google.

Not a nice thing to say but Im glad to see others are seeing the same thing.

One of my site has above 1000000 page views per month.
I think google adviertisers base is shrinking (may be because of US economy).

That's likely to depend on the topic, the region where the ads are being served, placement targeting, and (possibly) other factors such as "smart pricing" that might influence how Google allocates ads. (All other things being equal, wouldn't it make sense for Google to display ads on pages where they'll earn the greatest amount per click?)

For what it's worth, some publishers have reported an upward trend in EPC lately, and their EPC (which obviously is heavily influenced by bids) wouldn't be climbing if advertisers weren't competing for explosure and clicks.

For those who are seeing PSA's, do you have many ads in your Competitive Ad Filter?

FarmBoy

No filter being used farmboy, signor_john our EPC is actually up quite a bit on these sites. It is purely a inventory issue.

Well, it's certainly possible that inventory for certain keywords in certain locations could be limited--especially for topics that have a lot of competition or generate huge numbers of impressions. (I doubt if I'm alone in believing that the number of pages and impressions on the Web is growing at a faster rate than advertisers' budgets are.)

I could agree with that signor_john. We are in probably the most common pc related area of the web and I wouldnt be suprised if it accounted for 10-15% of all adsense impressions.

Hold on a second with those optimistic things about this poster being a one off. My reading is that his revenue is reduced, recently I assume, by 50%. He is also complaining of a recent increase in PSAs.

He / she believes there is a significant downward trend in the quality of ads being placed on the sites.

So why the reduction? It's not the niche, it's not the quality of the page content, it's not the placement of the ads - or is it?

Why the reluctance to believe that this guy really is seeing a significant drop in the quality of the ads, all else being equal.

Tell us more.

i've noticed a decrease in the number of ads as well. i use those 160x600 blocks that normally have 5 ads in. but recently i've been seeing a lot of blocks with only 4 ads in. and they don't stretch to fill the box either -- it's just 4 ads and a big blank space where the last one would normally be.

"low inventory" rings in my ears.

It doesn't appear to be an inventory problem. I'm seeing PSAs on subject where there is plenty of inventory. More likely it's just a bug in the Adsense infrastructure.

Its not just one of my sites. I have a network of sites and I can see the trend in most of the sites.

I haven't paid attention to PSAs, how do you know how many are being shown on a site?

You know it may be some kind of bug because we never see PSA's I just see blank white spots now over the past few weeks, no PSA'S and we have PSA's enabled for fallback on these particular channels.

Our site traffic is fine, another ad network we show on the site shows no deviation in page impressions.

So in our case it appears that we are showing white space instead of ads or PSA's randomly on the site even though PSA's are selected as fallback and I doubt our homepage for the most popular section of Tech would be out of all inventory for.

Somethings broke.

I wouldn't assume it's a problem with the economy, low inventory, etc. unless you have some solid reason to believe that's the case for your niche.

I've haven't seen a PSA on one of my sites in so long I had almost forget about them until this thread popped up.

I don't know if you can still do this, but years ago if you had a PSA problem on a page, you could email AdSense support, provide the page URL, explain the problem and a little later they would email back that the problem was solved and ads would be on your page.

If you're brave, you might try that or work on other things and wait it out.

FarmBoy

Does anyone know if PSA click-throughs show up in your AdSense account? Or are they just ignored entirely?

I don't know if you can still do this, but years ago if you had a PSA problem on a page, you could email AdSense support, provide the page URL, explain the problem and a little later they would email back that the problem was solved and ads would be on your page.

Sounds like a reasonable approach, just in case the problem isn't related to ad inventory. If there is a technical glitch, having examples of sites that are affected might make it easier for the tech people to figure out what's wrong.

I don't think they show up.

I think sometimes for technical reasons Google just can't show an ad. I have my AdSense set to show either a graphic or an Affiliate ad for something innocuous like Jelly Bellies whenever AdSense can't display - and I do get impressions on that every day. Not many, not even approaching a half a percent, but still, there are always some.

The best way to gauge how much it's affecting your bottom line would be to make a graphic of your own, hosted on your own site, and set your AdSense block to show that graphic whenever it can't display an ad. Then go look at your log files and see how many impressions that file has.

Finding out if you're serving up PSAs is trivial:
[webmasterworld.com...]

But that doesn't help with Adsense for Search. I *think* PSAs might be responsible for some non-paying click-throughs (see this thread [webmasterworld.com...] ), it would be nice to know...

[edited by: Reali_T at 3:08 pm (utc) on July 3, 2009]

Considering the ads are based on the search topic, which is beyond your control, how would you ever expect to eliminate PSAs?

The search results may not have any ads available, or be a topic Google blocks.

Not possible to fully stop the problem and if a high percentage of your searches are generating PSAs, when the same searches should be showing ads, then you would need help from the AdSense team to resolve it as there's nothing we can do to help.

Keep in mind that just because a search shows an ad in Google doesn't mean that advertiser has opt'd into the content network, so your search could still show a PSA regardless.

FWIW, here's Google's list of things to check. It's worth a look:

Why am I getting PSA's?
[google.com...]

Even if you haven't changed anything on your website, take each item into consideration because something might have changed at Google.