Responsive Ad size randomly changed

Hi kurtau22,

thanks for reaching out.

There was no change in the plugin that could cause this. AdSense does indeed “optimize” its behavior constantly so it is definitely on them.

There are a few options to change their behavior. Just let me know which changes you would like to see and I can try to guide you through them.

Best regards,
Thomas

Honestly, I would just like for the ads on my single posts to go back to leaderboard.

Hi kurtau22,

you could just switch the ad type from “Responsive” to “Normal” and select a specific size or create a new ad unit in your AdSense account with a fixed size.

You should be aware though that this ad size might not fit on smaller devices.

Best regards,
Thomas

Any idea why this ad group wasn’t affected on any other pages?

Hi kurtau22,

is the behavior still different on different pages? If so, could I ask you to send me links to them? It might be AdSense doing something automatically, but I can only tell after looking at the code.

Thanks,
Thomas

I have noticed that it appears to just be the ads that should be leaderboard. If you look at my home page, warblogle.com, I have some spaces for square ads and they display correctly. But there are two spots where there are leaderboard ads and they are the new “too tall” size.

There’s even a footer one that is right, so it’s the smaller leaderboard size that is wrong. Not all ads.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 2 months ago by kurtau22.

Hi kurtau22,

it is as I suspected just the AdSense magic happening here.

You have the following options:

– force AdSense to show a lower ad by limiting the size of the container the ad is in using some CSS in your theme
– use the “Plain text” ad type in Advanced Ads to manipulate the responsive ad code according to https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/9467650
– use the manually set responsive sizes in Advanced Ads as described here.

Please let me know if you need anything else.

Best regards,
Thomas

Here’s the thing, when I go to google adsense and look at the ad types it should be giving, it’s all squares, skyscrapers, and the thin leaderboards. So why would the space they live in on the page be affected by google when they don’t have an ad that would ever fill that space?

All I can say is that they are trying to fill ad space with the highest bid and if this means using a different size then they will do that, unless you are using an ad unit with a specific size. The responsive ad format you are using allows them to place almost any ad, though their algorithm is smart enough to not place a Skyscraper here.

If you think I am missing something from your previous reply then please send me a screenshot. You can use a service like https://imgur.com to do that.

Thanks,
Thomas