Earlier this week, we
started a two-part series to help you better understand the AdSense ad auction and how it helps you earn the most money possible. We shared how text and image ads compete in the same auction, and that our system selects either ad type based on the predicted value -- sometimes resulting in one image ad winning out over multiple text ads. Following on that discussion, today we’ll turn our attention to just text ads.
If you’re using one of our large ad unit sizes like the 300x250 medium rectangle or the 160x600 wide skyscraper, you may have noticed that you’ll sometimes see multiple text ads in the ad unit, while only one or two ads at other times. As we noted earlier this week, our system predicts the value of each competing ad for every impression, based on historic performance and comparison across a variety of scenarios. There can sometimes be cases where our system determines that one or two specific text ads are significantly higher-performing than the other eligible text ads, and that showing them separately would result in higher performance than if the ads were shown together with lower-performing ones. When this occurs, we’ll show them alone, and this means you’ll see less than the full number of text ads in the ad unit.
We know that it can sometimes be confusing to see fewer text ads appearing in an ad unit, and that it can create extra white space, but please know that this behavior is intended to help you earn the most from all of your impressions. As we continue to make improvements to the rendering of the ads and develop new ad formats, we’ll keep you posted right here on our blog.
Thanks for joining us for this series. We hope you found it useful; please feel free to share your thoughts and suggestions on our
AdSense +page.
Posted by Johan Land -
AdSense Product Manager