Everyday you have to set the new "better user experience" range
because change everyday. So yesterday for me was 63% and 99% revenue
today my "better user experience" is now 58% and 99% revenue
so take a look everyday on your ad balancer page and put it on the "better user experience" because today i was out of this range, they change everyday.

@skynet84 : this is only an indication/suggestion, this is not mandatory to stick with the exact percentage , also, I doubt that between 63% and 58% you would notice any significant changes.

This better user experience thing is quite interesting - from my experiments, you always get better user metrics with fewer ads so I'm going to guess that it will always go down.

Has anyone seen a 'better user experience' bar that isn't constantly shinking yet?

when i use ad balancer and set 99% revenue my revenue was 30% increased.
Ad balancer increased my earnings so much.

@Dimitri the "better user experience" range change everyday. So if you apply everyday and stay in the "better user experience" you will see an increase in your earnings, so after 25 days of testing with ad balance my earning is increased 30% more.

@Ian Turner

Has anyone seen a 'better user experience' bar that isn't constantly shinking yet?

Surprisingly, Yes. I set it at 59% right at the upper limit and the next the limit moved to 63%. I moved it to 63% and have not touched it since.
Everything seems okay earnings wise so I will leave it fixed for a while.

@skynet84 I would not recommend constantly moving the balancer around, the number of impressions, the quality of impressions, the number of clicks are constantly changing regardless of any action you take. To constantly fiddle with the ad balancer will make it more difficult for you to determine what is truly going, and what should be your optimal setting.

What is the 99% of earnings, is it 99% of yesterday's actual earnings? 99% of the some forecast earnings based on historical data? 99% of last month's daily average earnings?

when i use ad balancer and set 99% revenue my revenue was 30% increased.

I am not sure that you can attribute the 30% increase in revenue to the adjustment of the ad-balancer. Maybe had you set it 100% you would have had a 50% increase in revenue. You don't know, you can't know, at least over the short terms.

Google has made a giant step forward with this new tool. However, they do not explain the use of backup ads with this application. Their documentation simply says a white space will show in its place. Come on Google!

They should also work to make the missing ad space collapsible as if there is no code there at all. This way, if you have a backup ad or not, the user experience would be that of awesomeness.

anefarious, are you deliberately ignoring everyone in the entire thread or have you seriously not figured out how to do backup ads, which has been an option in Adsense since the very beginning?

My ads are setup in dfp, I passback to adsense, am I right that this would just affect adsense ads?

How does what I wrote ignore what was said in the thread? My point is that backup ads now take on much greater significance (they are actually useful now) and yet in no way have they been integrated into the Ad Balance tool. They aren't even mentioned in the Ad balance FAQs:

"What happens to an ad unit when you remove an ad?
When we remove an ad, your ad unit will show as blank."

Perhaps because they would rather not encourage publishers to use other networks. In any case, I think that Adsense backup ads are poorly implemented. So many ad networks allow for a simple copy and paste of ad unit codes from third parties. It's called a passback and this is only possible with DFP as I understand it.

Hi Anefarious! I'm not sure if you've looked at the documentation on Backup Ads instead of the Ad Balance Tool? But it is possible to add third party ad units via an HTML document.

We've used this solution to show our own affiliate banners/links but it would be easy enough to add in third party ad scripts instead.

[support.google.com...]

anefarious1 get the point! **They should also work to make the missing ad space collapsible as if there is no code there at all. This way, if you have a backup ad or not, the user experience would be that of awesomeness.*** +1 man!

I noticed this morning that there is a new feedback button on ad-balancer page in Adsense.

@aneferious1 and @skynet84 - Leave your feedback, the more people that make the suggestion the greater the likelihood that they adopt it.

In any case, I think that Adsense backup ads are poorly implemented.

It took me only a few minutes to set up backup ads with the Ad Balance slider, and I'd never used backup ads before. Google's instructions made everything clear.

@NickMNS thanks for pointing that out. Feedback has been sent.

A few things I am seeing.

I had my slider set on limit of the good user experience bar. Since not touching it for a few days that bar has shrunk and I am now outside it by about 5%. But what is really curious is that when I check my coverage numbers, my coverage is about 5 to 10% higher than my set point. I am set at 60%, good-ux is at 55%, coverage is at 65% to 70%. Earning are as expected.

I am seeing a lot of third party ad networks in my ad review. More than in the past.

Not usually one to jump in on cutting edge features, I just now implemented this. I set mine to 100 / 73%... which seems to imply that 27% of the ads I've been showing had no value?

@csdude55 : yes, roughly it means it. In a few days, you can look at the ad center , to see which kind of ads are being shown at your site(s) and you might see a difference, and some low quality or misleading ads fading away. At least, this is what happened to me, ads with the "big green download" buttons are now gone, as well as the ads for Facebook sign up too and other kind of ads.

So, this thread hasn't really touched the situation where you have several very different sites on one account.

Amongst mine, I have one with relatively low impressions but high paying ads. Another has high impressions but lower paying ads. I had my slider set 50% with 98% revenue. But could this be be removing most or all the ads from from the high volume low paying site?

I run 70+ sites on my account, too. When I researched it, it was my understanding that the balance would apply to each site independently, but I can't find the link now so take that with a grain of salt.

I can say, though, that comparing 1/27/17 to 1/28/18 (where 1/28 is the first day where I used the ad balancer):

Traffic: -1.5%
Impressions: -21%
Impression RPM: +22%
Total Revenue: -2.4%.

My ad balancer was set to 100 / 73. The fact that total revenue went down a little more than the traffic is disturbing, but not terribly so considering it's a 0.9pt difference. But I'm hoping that, over time, more ads will fill in for those no-value ads, so long term this will mean more money.

Yeah, I really wish they would allow publishers to set the ad balance on a website by website basis. For sure!

I wonder if the ad balance will have an impact on the "smart pricing".

What Google is actually missing now is a metric that would allow us to monitor our "real" PRM based on traffic, not on impressions, so that even after adjusting the slider we would have a number to look at except revenue

I like the Ad Balancer. The quality of my ads has improved. Also my revenue. One thing I've found is if I adjust the Ad Balancer, it seems I have about 1 day of less relevant ads and my revenues decline. Then it kicks in and revenue improves again. So I don't adjust frequently.

Thanks to a post by EditorialGuy in the Jan Adsense thread, I got the idea to check my coverage across platforms.
Wow! most of the ads are being suppressed on mobile.
My balance is set at 62%, Mobile coverage is in the low fifties, desktop and tablet are at the low to mid eighties.

This goes to show that mobile is still the problem, or the opportunity. (half full / half empty)

I missed EditorialGuy's post, so that's for reiterating! Same here... most of the suppression seems to be mobile. Mine is set to 100 / 73, and almost 100% of my ads being suppressed are mobile (which means that most of my mobile ads before had no value, anyway).

Which is killing me, man. About 1/2 of my traffic is mobile, and I make virtually nothing on it. Worse, pages per session for mobile is 1/2 of desktop, so the more my traffic goes mobile the less pageviews I get. Google is forcing me to rebuild the site to be mobile friendly (I've lost search engine placement because it's not), but by encouraging people to use mobile I lose more and more money. It's quite a conundrum.

I resisted mobile for a long time. But I finally started making the transition last summer, page by page, starting with the pages that receive the most traffic. Almost immediately my RPM jumped. I get about 50% mobile. Before the transition, which is ongoing, mobile was paying about 1/2 of desktop. Now it beats desktop. The epc is terrible but the ctr is good. So mobile is working for me, and I wish I'd made the change earlier.

Some more feedback...

My site's layout is exactly as this one - linear.
Now watch this graphic for the performance of my ads and see if you can guess what's happening.

[i.imgur.com...] (direct link to image)

The yellow ad was replaced by the red ad.

Can't guess? I'll tell you: the blue ad is the first on the page, above the fold on desktop, right below fold on mobile.
The second ad is the yellow/red, about "one screen" down...
Ads are the same size 300x250.

Ad balance: 100%/30%

Awkard, right? Adjusting ad balance doesn't mean you simply stop showing impressions, your whole "ad behaviour" changes.

So when I was at 100% and 90% the CTR went up and so did revenue. Then moving to 100% and 80% the CTR did not increase any more and with fewer impressions I received fewer clicks and revenue dropped. So I am back at 100% and 90% to increase the impressions again. We'll see what the CTR does. EPC has stayed fairly constant.

Ember, I think you are seeing what was pointed out earlier in this thread, that the % earnings figure is based on your earnings for the past few days, not what it would be if you were showing 100% of ads.

It seems to me that it is necessary every now and then to put the slider back to 100% for a few days to be able to judge the true situation.