It seems like G has launched new Adsense layout : do you see them too? [imgur.com...]

A couple of days ago Google obviously made a slight change to how my responsive link unit renders a boy has it made a difference to the amount of clicks I am getting. Before the change the links were quite small. Now links look like this and obviously they are coming to the attention of my users more.

[imgur.com...]

9th August was really good. I had 101$ but when I woke up today, I found 98$. Where did 3$ disappear?

So, there seems to be a vague explanation:
[searchengineland.com...]

Over the past 48 hours, a number of AdSense publishers alerted us to an issue with declining cost-per-click for ads on their sites. We were able to identify the issue and resolve it quickly: Several ad buyers were using irresponsible campaign parameters, lowering query coverage for specific creative types in some countries. The ad buyers responsible have been blacklisted and impacted publishers should see that their coverage is back to normal in their AdSense account.

To have such a huge impact, those buyers bust be big and probably they made a cartel to bring down the bidding.

Now, the question is: their huge inventory must be replaced with something.
I see a lot of ads to Google Adwords.

irresponsible campaign parameters - this should be intresting to find exactly.

If you do not know, ask Russians:

[facenews.ua...]
[facenews.ua...]

It's simple - place click area outside of visible document body (ad) and nobody can click the ad...Set CPC bid to 100USD and wait until AdRank kick you down... Repeat...Repeat.
They also commented that this is not too easy to detect.

And my 2 cents - is anyone so stupid to think this is just 2-day hack?

To such an extent that they affected our coverage? Yikes. Suspicious indeed. Would their systems not detect something like that? Or did it take them 2 days to debug and correct?

[edited by: Maximum44 at 8:28 am (utc) on Aug 10, 2017]

So we are not going to get our money back? Sigh.

Had the best day in years yesterday. I am not complaining. A few more days like that and it is like getting the money back :D

Yay my Adsense is now back working as normal. It would have been nice to have our money back as well.

@blazinec thanks for the articles
So How to fight hidden click buttons on AdSense banners:
I will describe it for Google Chrome (translation from [facenews.ua...]

1. Install Chrome extension called Stylish (it allows you to change styles for any website on your side)

2. Create new style (for all websites, for me it doesn't affect anything except google ads)
New style settings:
[dl4.joxi.net...]

styles to paste:

img.gwd-img-1bn6,
div.gwd-div-39rb,
div.gwd-div-1c8s,
.gwd-img-64dp,
.gwd-img-am0l,
.gwd-img-1tc0,
.gwd-img-c0a5,
.gwd-img-g5hd,
.gwd-img-1me5,
#header-wrap,
gwd-taparea,
canvas#canvas+a,
gwd-doubleclick img[source='cta.png'],
gwd-taparea img[source='cta.png']
{z-index: 667466 !important;
left: 0px !important;
top: 0px !important;
right: 0px !important;
background-color: rgba(250,0,0,0.5);
border: 3px outset #c00;}

gwd-doubleclick div div.gwd-page div div {
left: 0px !important;
animation: initial !important;
-webkit-animation: initial !important;
transform: initial !important;
transform-style: initial !important;
-webkit-transform-style: initial !important;
-moz-transform-style: initial !important;
-webkit-transform: INITIAL !important;
}

button#cta { top: -40px !important; }

3. Reload your browser

4. In Adsense go to Allow & Block ads -> Ads (Ad review centre) - now you will see hidden buttons on the ads stroked red in the left top corner of the ad.
for me it looks like this:

Preview
[dl4.joxi.net...]
Full size ad:
[dl4.joxi.net...]

Today will be a looong day...

I am unable to load the facenews page? Can you summarize what it is all about?

@taljanich great shot :-) I suppose this is not 2-days old problem, I see it moreover at the beginning of the year, according to stats and huge decline.. It seems who use it started to be too much hungry so people found it... It would be very interesting if big G wouldn't find this if it was used on their search related properties.

@Maximum44:
Advertisers can use the AdWords bug which affects Publishers.
Advertiser sets the CPC model for his ads (only html5 ads)
Places the CLICK button outside of ad visible area
Then setting the CPC price for $100 (but he will never pay it, because there is NO button to click), which means publisher will not get paid
After AdWords AdRanker will turn off the ad (because of NO clicks received) advertiser will have to create a new html5 ad with the same algorythm.

Guys from FaceNews told that after blocking such ads (detected with the described method) they has raised their AdSense revenue.
Will see.

@taljanich
Thanks, will try it.

Just to be clear, if the html ad is all red/green then they are valid? It is just ads that have little square boxes that does not cover the whole ad that are suspicious? I found one as soon as i logged in. Looked very suspicious. Some low ball dating. Could not even block the adwords advertiser, guess it was blocked by Adsense. It was all greyed out.

Maybe I would suggest to turn off image ads, since on text ads, there is no space for own code... As seen on some projects, this helped a lot (app +200% ROI) - I was always thinking it is due to competition and honestly, CTR rised heavily after turning off images.

You mean rich media ads right blazinec?

I am looking for many publisher accounts as you are asking - they have one thing in common - CTR on image ads is app 4x lower than text, animated 6x, rich media, totally dead, app 14x lower than text ads :-) NO time to solve it deeper, but from my historical knowledge, images ads was not too bad performing, never. I see it from beginning of the year probably, on domains that have traffic metered by alexa, so I suppose these guys are crawling Alexa sites and putting them as manual placements - seems like smaller websites have image ads on the same performance level as text ads. Now I understand why @taljanich started to clean image ads and provided us LIB with MANUALS :-)

@blazinec =))
At the moment I have 97 ads with "HIGH" impression index blocked by the algorythm from FaceNews (only AdSense, later will check the AdX)
Mostly there are ads from MacKeeper, some organic cosmetics from Russia and rat fighters with "Call Us" banners
[dl4.joxi.net...]

Are you kidding? I suppose your traffic sample is pretty valid (If your alexa is real) so this seems like large-scale attack, I suppose it's not problem of last 3 days - maybe most visible for last 3 days, but this was not idea from last weekend : -) . Are you able to track it into history, how long these ads stayed on your site?

@blazinec
history chart starts from 11th of July
Most of all blocked ads were showed in the end of July (20-31)

@taljanich and is it not because the list of ads you can block, is for last 30 days only? Today is 10th :-)

For me personaly, it seems the same as Methbot - working for years, visible for last 2 months, when ,,owners" were too hungry and started to do it on mass-scale ... until somebody found it. I can assure you it's not last 30 days

@taljanich
I got that ad as well. The pest control one. No clickable area exept for the top corner like yours. I can make a javascript or something that can detect a smaller or out of place gwd-taparea and log to a file. Thats what they all seem to have in common. I noticed however. The gwd-taparea might be tucked away in the corner but the rest of the ad is still clickable. Had one of those that should be from an ok advertiser. Will investigate further.

So these scumbags were uploading CPC ads that dominated auctions but could not be clicked, thus pushing legitimate ads off the GDN.

Makes you wonder why they did this. Was it to run a cheap CPM campaign, as per the T*pster ad flood a fortnight ago? Were they running interference for another advertiser? Or was this done purely to damage Adsense and/or its publishers?

It's easy - they had free CPM ads with hope a fraction of people will type in their message into Google and search, or direct type domain name. All that payed by legitime publisher's traffic, some of them payed hard by buying traffic from another source as well (since there is not only SEO). Lost billions in revenue, 1 b*tch win free traffic. Anything not clear? Anyone believing it's a weekend job?

That's the logical inference, though I'm still not convinced the return would be worth being blacklisted from Adwords.

It made more sense when T*pster (a new site monetised with Adsense) did it last month; that was effectively arbitrage without any Adwords outlay.

People who game systems in this manner, knowing that it will damage the livelihoods of others, really need to sleep with the fishes. As for Adsense, this tweet sums it up: [twitter.com...]

You can clearly see it from AdSense & AdWords quality in last months - for real non-arbitrage clients, we have much better quality of traffic & better conversion rates from Facebook & local PPC engines. For the amount of time need to spend on setting up AdWords, and especially GDN, I really think about forgetting them for any further budgets. As I know how they behave when there are problems on publisher account, I suppose they will be locked in their black room in Mountain View and even not apologize for billions that people lost during months :)
If you have time, read this BTW :
[kalkis-research.com...]

From [support.google.com...]

"If your non-Google Web Designer ad isn't clicking through, make sure that you've correctly implemented the exit api."

"If you don't include the extiapi.js (misspelled by Google) script, AdWords will make the entire ad clickable, and you won't need the exit() call."

I guess they did not check for how large people make the taparea after they included the exitapi.js :D

@Maximum44 Exact, I was looking at this yesterday. And the same PhDs laugh on you because of advertisement under page title and send you automatic emails.