How to Troubleshoot & Fix Blank Ad Units in Adsense

It is quite common these days to see publishers work hard, night and day, only to see their ad slots empty despite Google Adsense code present. Blank ad units in Adsense is pretty much on the increase, all thanks to Google’s recent update. If on occasion you open your website pages and you see blank ad units in Adsense, apparently your site has been affected either by Google Adsense recent update or by something else.

Fortunately, there are ways to fix this. This is the essence of this post in the first place – to point you in the right direction and fix blank Adsense units on your website and start earning again.

First, be sure your ad units are not showing as a result of your Adsense account being disabled. If this is your case, then know this can’t work for you. If you are banned from Adsense, it is for life, meaning you can never use your name and account details, including your PAYEE name on Adsense. Failure to adhere to this would subsequent your Adsense accounts banned.

How to Verify if Your Adsense Account is banned

More often than not, the Adsense team ban accounts without sending emails to the affected publishers. So it is possible that your account has been disabled without knowing it. If you see blank ad units all over your website, first check your mail to see if you received an email from the Adsense team. A banned Adsense account would have the below:

Account Disabled

Your AdSense account for this login is currently disabled. We recommend checking your email inboxes for any messages we may have sent you regarding your account status. Sometimes our messages can be caught by email filters, so please be sure to check the Bulk/Spam folders of your email accounts as well.

In situations where you did not receive any email, it is advisable you login to your Adsense account and see if you see something similar. A banned Adsense account would show you the below rather than your typical Adsense dashboard with your earning details.

If you see any of the above in either in your Adsense dashboard or you received an email, perhaps you should stop reading this and focus on other means of monetizing your website. If otherwise, then lay back and continue reading this as I will show you how to troubleshoot and fix blank Ad units on your website.

How to Troubleshoot & Fix Blank Adsense Ad Units Issues

Since your Adsense account is not banned, there is hope as you can always revive your account and get Adsense to serve ads to your website again. Below is a list of how to fix this issue:

1. Review your ads.txt file details

While we have detailed how to properly set up ads.txt on your site and the several ways to do so, it is important to note that without this properly set up on your site, AdSense might not serve ads to your website. It is a Google Adsense requirement for publishers to enable ads to get served to their websites and a must-have for your website. So I suggest you read how to fix ads.txt issue on your site.

The essence of revisiting your ads.txt file is to verify if your Adsense publisher ID is the same with the one you uploaded to your website’s root folder. For weird reasons unknown, I had the same issue recently and ads disappeared from this very website for three days before I found out I missed out on some numbers while uploading the ads.txt file to my root folder.

2. Create new ad units

Why should you create new ad units when the previous ones are already embedded on your website, right? Well, it has been discovered that Adsense codes sometimes get corrupted. When this happens, you’re likely to see blank ad spaces on your website instead of ads.

3. Doublecheck for double ad codes

Unfortunately, this is one of the main problems affecting new publishers. It is possible that you mistakenly added double ad codes, particularly auto ads on your site. Since they go in the header section, having them multiple times might impact your site and prevent ads from showing. So you need to duly investigate this and do the needful. Remember you are only allowed to enter just one auto ad code to your site. JUST ONE.

4. Remove duplicate contents from your website

You cannot fool Adsense, at least not for long. If at all you have duplicate contents on your site, Adsense will stop serving ads to those pages or worse, to your site. You know your contents like the back of your hands, so it is advisable you sieve through them and remove duplicated contents.

5. Remove plagiarized contents from your website

Some category of publishers feel they are ‘good to go’ by making money off of people’s sweat and research by copying contents. This is no doubt against Google Adsense’s policy. Normally, you’d be notified that you have plagiarized contents on your website and must take them down. In other cases, Adsense slaps your website with a hammer without warning you. To fix this, remove such contents from your website and wait a while.

6. Investigate your traffic & its sources

Adsense has made it known that websites with questionable or invalid traffic they are not able to verify would not be served ads. So you must at all times be sure your site is not generating invalid traffic. If it does, know you are just a stone throw from having your Adsense account disabled. If you have been buying Facebook traffic/ads or from other sources, you must stop immediately.

As a matter of fact, Adsense does not in any way fancy ‘low-quality traffic sources’ because they are mostly not interested in the ads shown on your website. Should your account get disabled for invalid traffic, there is a 99.8% probability that you won’t get your Adsense account back no matter what.

If your website is receiving poor quality traffic, ad serving would no doubt be disabled on your website to protect Adsense teeming advertisers. You won’t be notified in this case and the ads will just disappear. If your traffic sources are questionable, it could pose a problem to ad serving on your website.

Aside

If you are sure that you have done all of the above and ads are not being served to your website still, then it is possible that your website is under investigation. Google Adsense, as much as possible tries to protect its advertisers from discrepancies. If your site is being investigated, there is basically nothing much you can do to have ads served to your website as soon as possible. So you might just need to wait pending when your website is investigation is completed.

7. Use Adsense troubleshooter

If you are however not convinced, you could use Google Adsense troubleshooter to check a thing or two.