This website has been serving display ads for almost 14 years. While experimenting a little, these ads were powered by Google Adsense for most of the time.
Adsense offers content publishers an easy facility to incorporate ads into their website. Then the game becomes the number of eyeballs you can win for your content.
After techAU’s audience grew to 1,418,447 views in 2020, advertising revenue not only pays the cost of running the website, but doesn’t bring in a negligible amount of money either.
All of that changed at the end of December.
I checked the mobile website and found that my Adsense earnings basically went down to zero. In the past few days, after some successful posts, I’ve had some of the best traffic to the website I’ve ever seen.
As the site progresses, it is not uncommon to see large spikes in traffic as posts are shared online with new communities or linked from higher profile sites. There have been cases where the website received months of traffic in a single day and this was an example of that. Given that this surge in traffic continued pretty much for 24 to 48 hours, I expected the revenue to reflect this, but the opposite happened.
While investigating the problem, I was presented with a banner above in Adsense that reads:
There is a limit to the number of ads you can run. See the Policy Center for more information. ‘
At the end of the red warning banner there was a link to the Policy Center, so of course I followed the link to find out more. Policy Center announced that ads were restricted and listed “Invalid Traffic Problems” in the Problems column.
Of course, I’m starting to investigate what this means and why Google considers some of the traffic on my website to be invalid.
When I click the down arrow on the page I see the following detail.
The number of ads you can run is limited.
details
Your account is currently restricted from showing ads due to invalid traffic issues. We will automatically review and update this limit as we continue to monitor your traffic. Learn more about the limits of showing ads.
What you can do
Make sure you understand your ad traffic and website visitors. Never click on your own ads and avoid partnering with untrustworthy or inferior parties. Learn more about preventing bad traffic. While this ad serving limit is typically less than 30 days for publishers, in some cases it can take longer.
I read through (several times) and immediately had more questions than answers. I don’t do the things listed here so I was very confused. I’m assuming that Google noticed the increase in traffic on the site and raised an alert that looked like suspicious behavior.
The worrying part is the statement about the period of 30 days (possibly more) that someone on Google can check this out while I’m missing out on sales.
I looked everywhere on Google, YouTube and Twitter for more information about others who certainly had the same problem and were hoping for a solution.
What could I do to improve the situation? Not much, basically nothing. Google is essentially a web form, there is no number to call, not even an email to write to.
Eventually I stumbled upon some forum posts and YouTube videos in which the content creators had left the platform in favor of another monitoring platform called Ezoic.
After researching the service, I became familiar with the idea that switching platforms would give me the best chance of getting revenue back without waiting more than 30 days for Google.
The Ezoic setup was pretty easy to sign up, but there was quite a bit of learning and testing over the next few days to make sure the configuration was correct. Ezoic actually assigns you a support person who made it very easy for me to answer the questions I had.
Ironically, at Ezoic you need to connect your Google Adsense account. From there, Ezoic offers publishers the rare opportunity to get into the Doubleclick Ad Exchange.
After my website was configured to use Ezoic, the pageviews were displayed in the analytics section of the platform, followed by advertising revenue. It was slow at first, but at this point I was happy to see money after Adsense basically dried up overnight.
I’ve had a few more oversized successes in the past 14 days and that has generated $ 336.41 in the last 10 days.
Of course, display ad income isn’t my only income, but I’m incredibly happy with the results I’ve had with Ezoic so far. There are probably many more improvements I can make over the coming weeks and months to keep tweaking it without annoying users too much, but I’m grateful that I’ve found a new home at Ezoic.
Like all great services, Ezoic offers a referral program. If you’re looking at these, please use this link to sign up.
