Adsense Revenue Down? This May Be Why: Adsense Experimenting on Your Site without Your Knowledge

Google Adsense Conducting Ad Experiments on Your Sites Without Your Knowledge
Share the knowledge

Adsense revenue down? Google may be conducting Adsense experiments on your site without your knowledge. It’s enough to have you look for Adsense alternatives and close your Adsense account! Imagine our shock at finding that Google was experimenting on our site by placing experimental Adsense ads on our site without our knowledge or, as far as we can tell, permission.

Of course, it’s impossible to find all of the places in which you may have given consent in the byzantine layers of pages through which you have to navigate to find pretty much anything in a Google business-related account, but we definitely did not give knowing, informed consent to Google to replace the ads that we set up with their own Adsense experiments! Nor did we give knowing, informed consent to have Google place additional ads on our sites for their own experimenting pleasure.

In our case, right here on the Internet Patrol, Google Adsense decided to set up an experimental vignette ad. And the only way that we figured it out was that we’d noticed that our (already paltry) revenue from Adsense had suddenly become paltrier (is that a word?), and so we were noodling around the Adsense site to see if we could figure out why, and literally stumbled across the ‘Experiments’ section.

Knowing that we hadn’t set up any experiments we almost didn’t even go to that section, but we sure are glad that we did! It turns out that Google had ‘helpfully’ set up two experiments for us in the past week, one for The Internet Patrol, and one for another site that we manage!

Google Adsense Conducting Ad Experiments on Your Sites Without Your Knowledge 2

The Internet Patrol is completely free, and reader-supported. Your tips via CashApp, Venmo, or Paypal are appreciated! Receipts will come from ISIPP.

CashApp us Square Cash app link

Venmo us Venmo link

Paypal us Paypal link

And they even cop to it!

Adsense experiment ads created by Google without consent

Infuriating, right? And once we ended the experiments our revenue returned to paltry levels, rather than worse-than-paltry levels. (And this, folks, is why we have the option to tip us if you find our information helpful or useful, it really truly does help us keep the site up and running, most importantly helping to cover what we pay our authors, as well as the annual fee to keep the domain, and the monthly web hosting fees – we so appreciate your support! ❤️)

Here’s how to check to see whether Google is running experimental ads on your site.

How to Check for Adsense Experiments Running in Your Google Adsense Account

It’s actually pretty easy to see whether you have Adsense experiments running on your web site, whether you intended for there to be ad experiments or not.

Simply go to the left-hand sidebar in your Google Adsense account and click on ‘Optimization’. Then click on the ‘Experiments’ subsection under the ‘Optimization’ section.

Find the Google Adsense experiments section

Let us know if you find that your site too has become a host to Google’s Adsense experiments without your knowledge!

Get New Internet Patrol Articles by Email!

The Internet Patrol is completely free, and reader-supported. Your tips via CashApp, Venmo, or Paypal are appreciated! Receipts will come from ISIPP.

CashApp us Square Cash app link

Venmo us Venmo link

Paypal us Paypal link

 


Share the knowledge

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.