Coverage relates to the ability of ads to be served on your site, which can be affected by various factors. Here's how to verify that a decline in coverage is the cause of the earnings drop:
The example above shows earnings declining along with coverage while page views are stable. (Note, if you’re filtering by breakdowns, you can use ad requests instead of page views.)
Possible reasons for a decline in coverage:
- Ad serving limit
- Ads.txt issues, policy issues, and crawler errors
- Invalid traffic
- Ad setup and blocking controls
- Market trends
Ad serving limit
Google may sometimes place a limit on the number of ads your AdSense account can show. This might be a temporary ad serving limit while we get to know you and evaluate your traffic quality, or it might be because we've identified invalid traffic concerns in your AdSense account.
How to check
- Visit your Policy center, and check if you have any account-level issues that affect ad serving.
How to fix
- Review the guide for ad serving limits.
- Be proactive in making sure your account complies with the AdSense Program policies.
- Learn how you can help to prevent invalid traffic and improve your traffic quality.
Ads.txt issues, policy issues, and crawler errors
If your site's ads.txt file is incorrectly configured, it can impact your revenue. Not having an ads.txt file can also prevent you from receiving more advertiser spend. Policy issues and crawler errors can lead to your serving to be restricted or disabled.
How to check
- Check the ads.txt status for your site. If there's an issue with ads.txt on your site, you'll have an alert in your AdSense account.
- Visit your Policy center and check for policy issues, regulatory issues and advertiser preferences.
- Check your account for crawler errors. You'll find these listed in your Policy center.
How to fix
- Fix ads.txt issues, or create an ads.txt file to help buyers identify counterfeit inventory and help you receive more advertiser spend. Learn more in our Ads.txt guide.
- Fix policy issues that affect ad serving, and then request a review.
Remember, you're required to fix policy issues. We recommend that you review regulatory issues and advertiser preferences, too, as you'll likely receive less advertising, which may impact your revenue.
- Review the list of crawler issues to fix crawler errors.
Invalid traffic
If we're unable to verify the quality of your traffic, we may limit or disable your ad serving. Additionally, if we observe high levels of invalid traffic on your account, we may suspend or close the account to protect our advertisers and users.
How to check
- If you have none of the issues above, and you see a drop in performance.
- You can also check your finalized earnings to find the adjustments made for invalid impressions or clicks.
How to fix
- Monitor your ad traffic to ensure that your account is compliant with our Program policies and not accruing invalid traffic.
- Review this article on how you can help to prevent invalid traffic, and visit our Ad Traffic Quality Resource Center.
Ad setup and blocking controls
Fixed-sized ad units may have a limited pool of ads available, which might result in lower earnings than using responsive ad units. Blocking too many ads can lead to decreased matched requests.
How to check
- Check which ads you're implementing on your site.
- Check which advertisers, ad networks, authorized buyers and categories you're blocking.
How to fix
- For manual ads, switch your fixed-sized ad units to responsive ad units or turn on the ad sizes optimization setting. If you need to use fixed-sized ad units, make sure you're following the guidelines for fixed-sized display ad units and learn about the most common fixed ad sizes.
- Turn on Auto ads if you haven’t done so already. Auto ads scan your site and automatically place ads where they’re likely to perform well and potentially generate more revenue.
- Make sure you're not blocking any ads you don't need to. If you block too many advertisers, ad networks, authorized buyers, general or sensitive categories, it can decrease matched requests because there are fewer advertisers in the auction bidding on your inventory. Review the AdSense guide to allow and block ads on your site. You can try using the blocking controls experiments to discover which variation performs better for your account.
Market trends
Your drop in performance might be market driven and impacted by various factors like the number of advertisers bidding and competitors. Fluctuations in revenue can also be due to seasonality. For example, seasonal increases in traffic and CPMs generally begin in September, peak late November, and drop back to normal in January.
How to check
- If you have none of the issues above, and you see fluctuations in performance.
How to fix
- Understand that market driven trends cannot be mitigated. However, you can learn the seasonal drivers and prepare your site before seasonal increases. Before the holiday season begins, make sure your site is in top shape to benefit from increased user traffic and high advertiser CPMs.
- Make a great first impression
Keeping users on your site is key to serving more impressions and earning more revenue. Make sure your homepage is engaging and your site navigation is clear. These initial features often determine whether users will stay and engage with your content or become impatient and leave the site. You can also use site search to help users find what they need more quickly.
- Develop a traffic strategy
The holiday season is a great time to attract new users. One way to do this is through partnering with other content creators to share each other’s content. Another is to expand your presence on social media. YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter can be great ways to reach users across different platforms.
- Test your page speed
Users who have to wait for pages to load or can't browse will likely go elsewhere. Page speed on mobile devices is particularly important, as more users are browsing content through their smartphones and tablets. Use Google PageSpeed Insights or other tools to ensure users can get to your content quickly.
- Consider keywords
Certain keyword searches spike on Google and other search engines during the holiday season. For example, searches related to Black Friday shopping increased by 1,150% on Google in 2018 from November to December.
Google Trends or other similar tools can help you discover key topics during the holidays for your audience. For example, you can explore trends for YouTube traffic on Google Trends in order to create videos relevant to search terms and your audience. - Think about mobile
Mobile usage and search is increasing. Test your site on mobile to make sure users can access a positive experience across devices.
- Make a great first impression
- Refer to ad setup and blocking controls above to find what optimizations you can make.