Blank AdSense Ads: Causes and Possible Solutions

If when entering your monetized website with Adsense you see your ads blank, Adsense ads showing blank, it may be due to one of the causes that I will explain in this article.

Most common causes of blank Adsense ads

These are the most common, but surely there are more reasons. Google ads approved but not running.

If you know any, leave them in the comments and I will add them to expand the article.

Excess of invalid clicks

Invalid clicks are those that occur on Adsense ads without real (genuine) interest or by accident.

In this sense, Adsense makes publishers responsible for making a friendly integration that clearly differentiates them from the content, as well as reviewing the traffic sources that may cause an increase in these clicks. google ads no impressions.

The maximum that they have deducted from me in a month has been $ 20, but with little income, this amount can be a very high percentage.

While Adsense now warns of impression limitation when this occurs, it is not exempt from banning if invalid clicks are numerous and constant. Google ads not showing on my website.

Unapproved website

Since October 2018, Adsense applies new automatic and manual filters to the website approval process, which generally rejects the first attempt by default.

Scrambled content, low-quality content, or insufficient content are usually the main reasons, although account managers themselves have recognized that the system fails a lot by default.

Ads.txt file missing

It is already a standard in the advertising industry, so even if you only use Adsense on your website and have it verified, you must install the ads.txt file on all your domains where you show Adsense ads.

Once done, it will take 24 hours to process and show ads again.

Recently created banners

When you create a new ad unit, it typically takes 5-20 minutes for it to start displaying ads.

This is completely normal, as the Adsense bot must crawl the content where it is displayed, categorize it, and serve it to advertisers on the network for Google Ads to start accepting bids for it.

Minimal traffic

Here Adsense stops showing ads in cases of websites with few visits, between 1 and 10 a day per URL.

Directly leave your ads blank because you know that impressions will not be profitable to advertisers.

This has happened to me with abandoned niches, but the ads recover quickly as soon as you send traffic again.

New content

Related to the previous two, when you launch a new article it is normal that no ads are displayed until Adsense processes it.

At the end of 2017, I already reported this same bug in URLs with parameters or dynamics, something that seems to have been corrected, although I still see cases in which it does not show ads for hours, and in part, it has to do with the following case.

Content not allowed

Adsense policies are very clear, and there are a number of content that do not allow monetization.

Although you may be showing ads at first, it is a matter of time before they remove the ads from the URLs that deal with these topics, or they directly cancel your account.

Be very careful with this.

Browser cache

Chrome has a lot of persistent cache issues, so check ad impressions with other browsers and devices from different locations.

On more than one occasion I have seen blank Adsense ads on a computer, but they are displayed on mobile, for example.

Banned Account

I have known cases where Adsense has terminated accounts without prior notice, no email, or notification in the policy center.

You will not be able to enter your account directly, so showing blank ads will be the least of your problems.

Traffic quality

This is the one that is being discussed the most in the support forum since apparently there is an official response in some cases. Google display ads with no impressions.

Potentially invalid traffic and high-risk activity

This has been the first official confirmation of Adsense on this point.

Until now we already knew that they discounted the invalid clicks produced by accident, or they reduced the CPC when there were strong peaks of visits and clicks that did not convert on the advertiser's websites (known as Smart Pricing).

Well, now their systems are able to predict when traffic has a high probability of generating invalid clicks or high-risk activities for an Adsense account, stopping printing ads in advance.

Social or direct traffic

Just in mid-August 2019, a fake news story went viral that claimed that Adsense blocked ads when visits came from social networks or directly.

This is flatly false, but it does relate to the official announcement regarding their ability to preventively limit impressions if they consider that the traffic is not of quality.

Hence they erroneously ventured to confirm it as true.

And it is that ad platforms such as Facebook Ads allow you to send very cheap mass traffic to monetize Adsense niches by arbitrage (generate more income for the Adsense CPC than the cost of clicks on the ads). Google ads.

It is a technique that I tried and explained in the Advanced Adsense course, but it scratches the Adsense policies and I strongly discourage it due to the high risk of banning.