@NickMNS

Were you impacted by august 8th drop specifically. That is did your earnings drop on August 8th (or during the 2 or 3 days leading up the 8th) in the order of 50% and then recover the next day?

No, I saw a drop on the 8th of August across all of my sites except one and no recovery so far.

On the one site, that is in a completely different niche to all of the others, there was a huge spike in earnings on the 9th, and then back to normal.

What have others seen? Did you see this same spike in CPM bids on the 8th?

Not so much a spike on August 8th as a pyramidal increase spanning four days. CPM bids began to rise on August 5th and remained high until August 9th, while CPC bids fell in the same period. This mightn't have been so bad but earnings for CPM bids tumbled on August 7th and 8th, impression RPM dropping by 20-40%.

Mine dropped significantly on 8th August and it returned back to normal on 9th. But again from 10th August, the earning dropped and it is constant since then. The numbers are really low, I have a quality site with good traffic and it is increasing.

Before 8th August, this month was looking very good but things have changed unexpectedly :(

I've been playing whack-a-mole with blocking non-clickable ads. Its only 1 a day the past two days, and it's not the same players as before (as far as I know). Perhaps word's gotten out about this Adsense exploit and some people are jumping in to try to make some bucks before getting banned?

This is still going on.. Just found an ad on my site for loans.. totally unclickable. When i tried to find it in the ad review center.. i searched the domain and even uploaded the image and it shows nothing... How can I track down this scam ad?

@kegnum,

You will not be able to find these ads using the url's as the url that the ads are pointing to are always different and unrelated to the ad. If you are looking for new ads that you have not yet seen, you can best do this by unchecking the "show reviewed ads" check box that is located in the top right corner or the ad-review center screen. It is checked by default.

They also seem to have a huge view count, they are pretty easy to spot once you know what you are looking for

@NickMNS

Thanks, I know that. I tried to search for the image as well and it didnt show up. There is an image search feature. I have been looking through the ads and dont see it. I also found this url attached to the ad in the code (Removed Specifics). Not sure what to do but my rpm is about 30% of its norm.

[edited by: not2easy at 3:37 am (utc) on Aug 17, 2017]
[edit reason] (Removed Specifics) [/edit]

You can block that URL and it should block some of the ads, but it is unrelated to the scam. From the ads that I have seen it was only used once. If you are not finding anything then it is possible that those specific ads have not appeared on your site. The are many variations of these ads. It is part of the strategy to avoid being caught. If we can find them easily than so could Adsense/Adwords.

Unsure if the image search works on html5/svg elements. A better search/filter would be awesome :D

Yes they are all rich media... the thing is.. that makes up such a small percentage it doesnt explain the drastic drop in RPM... so if these scam ads amke up 10% of my rich media ads and rich media ads make up 25% of my total ads.. it should be insignificant.

I really doubt that these ads are the cause. They are a nuisance for sure, but not much more.

Site riddled with non clickable ads. Im blocking multiple adwords accounts but it seems the worst offender is the ad that reads zloan.top, I see on my site it is unclickable, so I blocked it. However, its hard to tell in the review center, I assume the ones with the focal point a domain name are probably unclickable (because the want people to type it in) How do you guys tell wich ones are unclickable in the review center?

How do you guys tell wich ones are unclickable in the review center?

Same question here, will the mouseover not work? All that I've looked at will mouse over.

Is there a way to sort by the number of impressions or anything? Because I've been working on it for days, and still have 126,000 to go... I haven't found any that didn't mouseover, so I'm not even sure if I'm doing it right.

Go to filters, turn off text and image ads. You only want to look at rich media ads. Also uncheck show reviewed ads. You don't need to look through thousands, ads which only display a handful of times aren't going to impact your earnings, its those which get a big chunk of views. At least that's how it's been with my account.

In the Ad Review Center, will the "bad" ones still change the pointer when you mouse over them?

I found one that says "Tupster", big and bold, and the link says it goes to sockt.com. I understand Tupster to be the big problem, but it changes the pointer when I mouse over it. So should I be blocking this one or not?

Tupster should be blocked. Although at this point it may be done in terms of showing impressions. If you expand the ad in the ad-review by clicking on the icon in the bottom right corner than you can see additional info about the ad including the adwords account (that you should block), the destination url and when the impressions were recorded on your site.

I see. When I expand it I can see that mousing over it doesn't do anything, so I guess I would have had to have expanded ALL of them to find out. Egad, that's gonna take forever.

In this case, I had 1,491 impressions on July 27, 11 on July 28, and 0 any other time. So well before the time that Google reported, but no current impact.

I'm guessing that I should block the entire account?

[edited by: martinibuster at 3:50 pm (utc) on Aug 20, 2017]
[edit reason] Removed specifics. [/edit]

... found several on July 26, too, from the same advertiser So definitely before the period Google recognized

You have to expand the ad you are reviewing to find out if it is clickable or not. Some of them just have a little area in the top left that is clickable, i remove those as well if they meet the criteria.

Are you guys having a coverage issue again ?

Seems like my coverage has been slipping down since August 13, and is now at around 90%, down from 97% on August 12.

seroundtable posted an update

Google said what is documented above is unrelated to the CPC drops and blacklistings they did the other week.

It means there's something which Google fixed and we don't know what was that.

@Levo

Google said what is documented above is unrelated to the CPC drops and blacklistings they did the other week.

Can I gloat publicly? I told you so....
Of course all the gloating doesn't change the fact that these spammy ads continue to appear in a multitude of new and ever changing formats. The game of whack-a-mole continues.

And while I'm riding on a high note let me push my agenda:
The only tool that can stop this spam is the ad-balancer. Please Bring It Back!

I second the Adbalancer. One of the best additions to the Adsense system ever.

It just did not work as intended for them :D

The Ad Balancer was taken off-line for a reason.

Google is in the process of integrating The Initial Better Ads Standards [betterads.org] into its Chrome desktop & mobile browser ad blocker.

As soon as that is released out of beta, the Adsense inventory will reflect those changes.

The Ad Balancer will then be updated to the new metric.

There is also a reporting tool in GSC to determine if all your published ads pass this new standard. Currently off, but will go live sometime after your sites get evaluated.

All this should happen at relatively the same time.

30-40% drop in earnings and it is like this since one week now. Is something wrong with my account?

Somethings seems to be off for you as not everyone is experiencing an issue. :(

Yep :( I asked my manager and he knows nothing. These managers are literally dumb and useless!