Seeing blank Adsense Ads?

One of my blog readers emailed and asked “Why are some of the Adsense ads appear blank?”

There are a couple of reasons for this to happen. You may also refer to the Adsense Stop Words I discussed here before.

First, the Google MediaBot (Mediapartners-Google 2.1) may not have crawled your site/blog yet. This is the index robot or the ad server crawler for Google Adsense. Supposedly, once you paste the Google AdSense codes in your page, the Mediabot will crawl your site and index it. The ads will show for relevant keywords. However, the ads might not show up if you don’t have content yet (although it will check on other keyword elements such as the URL).

Second, you may be displaying too many ad blocks. The limit is 3 content ads and 1 link unit ad. Imagine if you have one 728×90 (5 ads max), a 336×280 (4 ads max) and another 160×600 (7 ads max) ad blocks in one page, that’s around 16 adverts in all. What if there are only 5 contextual advertisers available? You’ll end up with 2 of the 3 ad blocks empty.

It’s also possible that there are no advertisers for the keywords in your page’s content. Either you get them PSAs (Public Service Ads) or a blank ad block. To remedy this, you could use alternative ads in place of the blank spots.

Google recommends the Collapsing Ad Units:

Collapsing ad units are an optional advanced feature of alternate ads — the collapsing ad unit code will ‘collapse’ your ad unit so that it takes up no page space if there are no targeted ads available. This allows you to minimize any blank space that would otherwise occur through the use of alternate colors.

To implement the collapsing ad units feature, you’ll need to host a small HTML file on your domain. Your alternate ad URL will reference this file, which will be called if there are no ads available for that particular ad unit. Please follow the instructions below:

1. Download the collapsing ad units file by right-clicking the link below and selecting “Save Target as…”

http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/google_adsense_script.html
2. Copy this file to any location on your domain. Important: if you are running ads on multiple domains or subdomains, you will need to host this file on each of your domains and subdomains in order to use the collapsing ad units feature.
3. In the Alternate Ads URL text box, enter the fully defined path to the collapsing ad units HTML file on your domain. For example: http://www.example.com/scripts/google_adsense_script.html
4. Click Continue.
5. Copy and paste the ad code into your web pages. You must ensure that the alternate ad references the collapsing ad units script on the same domain or subdomain as your web page. For example, if your alternate ad URL references the collapsing ad units HTML file on www.example2.com, you cannot place this ad code on any page of www.example.com or on any page of forums.example2.com. Doing so will result in errors on your page.

If you have successfully implemented the collapsing ad unit code, your ad units will disappear when targeted ads are not available. Please note that this feature will not work with Internet Explorer version 5.0 or lower â€“ any unused ad units will appear as empty, transparent boxes.

[tags]tips, adsense, google, ads, advertising, contextual[/tags]

Abe Olandres

Abe is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of YugaTech with over 20 years of experience in the technology industry. He is one of the pioneers of blogging in the country and considered by many as the Father of Tech Blogging in the Philippines. He is also a technology consultant, a tech columnist with several national publications, resource speaker and mentor/advisor to several start-up companies.

https://www.yugatech.com

9 Comments

Little Wolf says:

19 years ago

Kuya, thanks for the tip! I didn’t know that adsense had that script until I saw this article. Thanks po ulit. ^^
- Reply
Enigma says:

17 years ago

Thanks for the tip. I was scratchin my head all day long trying to figure this out.

Engima.
http://dotspecialists.com
- Reply
N.Blaster says:

15 years ago

Whew, thanks. I thought I have been penalized or my adsense account revoked.
- Reply
Free Proxy says:

15 years ago

Wow, I never knew google had a script like this. How did you find out about it? I’ll be using it on my new proxy.

Thank you
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Slice Toaster Guy says:

15 years ago

Thanks for the tip!

Now I know.. Why it’s blank sometimes
- Reply
Janel says:

15 years ago

It may take sometime
- Reply
kelmen says:

15 years ago

Just wait and see the result, thanks for the tips.
- Reply
Erik says:

14 years ago

I have had this problem the way I fix it some of my ads where blank on some of my pages then what I did was Delete the code then published the site then refreshed the page to make sure the blank ads where gone then I put the code back on then published it again and walla they started showing some ads.
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Atinder says:

12 years ago

Hi i have same problem. This is my blog and i have put google ads on my blog. But all ads are showing blank box. I have tried so many things but unable to find the solution . If anyone knows then help me
Thanks
- Reply