AdSense Ads Disappearing and Becoming Irrelevant?

[MattinSD]

Hello everyone. I'm new to IM, and have just recently joined the WF and found it to be a great community with lots of excellent information. This is my first post, but certainly won't be my last.

That said, on to my question...

I have a site that is about 6 months old and has been showing AdSense ads that entire time without issue. Today, after noticing an unusually low CTR, I checked the site and found that my ads had completely disappeared. They then reappeared shortly after, but then disappeared again and were replaced by a bunch of non-contextual stuff (they don't appear to be interest-based either).

I don't believe that this issue is related to a problem with my Google account, since I have other AdSense sites that are perfectly fine.

My question is, has anyone else experienced this? If so, does it correct itself or is there some action I should take to fix the problem?

I'd appreciate any help. Thanks.

[lisakleinweber]

was it late in the day? If there aren't any ads to show google will put in psa ads or a blank space, depending on what you picked when you created it.

I find that later in the day there are less ads and sometimes I get some that don't apply to my site at all.

[kkrueger]

Were you doing any surfing before you went to your website? Google will serve up ads that are related to what the visitor was searching for. The other day I had been searching for camping equipment. Then I checked out an abuse site for a WF member, camping ads showed up on the site.

The site content was not related to camping at all, but google had remembered my search terms, so it served ads relating to what I had been searching.

Do a google search about it, you will find some interesting information. I think there is a way to change your settings in your adsense ad setup so that the ads relate to your site only.

But then the other side of the coin is, why not show ads related to what the visitor had been searching for previously. They might be more likely to click.

There may not have been any ads relating to what you had been searching for before going to your site so that might be why you didn't see any ads.

Just something else to consider.

[MattinSD]

Thanks for the advice. What I'm seeing, however, isn't interest-based ads (i.e. from my browsing) that are replacing the targeted ads that usually appear on my site.

This is a case where several pages are now showing no ads at all, and the main landing page has one whole ad panel blank and two others showing generic garbage ads (e.g. Wordpress advertisements). This problem started on this site earlier today after 6 months of having no issues.

I haven't added new content, updated plug-ins, or otherwise changed anything about the site this entire week, so I doubt that the problem was caused by anything I've done. All of my other sites are perfectly fine, so I'm wondering if it isn't some kind of coding error that got picked up?

Anyways. I'll give it a day and see if it goes back to normal since I did find several threads elsewhere where people talked about experiencing similar issues that eventually corrected themselves. I've also added the Google ad start-ad stop html into the text that highlights the relevant keywords.

Thanks again for your responses though. I'm sure I'll chime in again if I get more desperate and can't find a solution (sorry for the venting, but this site is actually #1 for its kw, and usually earns well - it isn't right now because there are no relevant ads for visitors to click).