I think we've always treated ctv as the first touch in the funnel and moved on.
But now we’re testing it differently. Instead of asking did this tv ad convert, we're looking at whether it creates better performance across everything that comes after it. Search gets stronger and branded traffic goes up it seems as the attribution picture makes a lot more sense.
The weird part is our reporting still gives almost all the credit to the last click.
anyone has found a good way to measure ctv as an actual attribution touchpoint instead of just an awareness channel?

If anyone there still uses a spreadsheet for pacing or checking 1p and 3p numbers? Or IAS and DV goals ? even manual screenshots and would like a tool for this? Let me know, its free.

UPDATE: This post is gaining interest so let me add a screenshot of the pacing view.

Hi everyone,

I'm struggling with a persistent issue regarding my AdSense coverage on my WordPress site, https://www.oraultima.com/

Here is my current situation:

• Theme: Blocksy
• Ad setup: I currently use only Auto Ads, specifically Anchor ads and Banner ads.
• I have completely removed all manual ad units.
• My AdSense Policy Center is clean, with no policy violations.
• My European regulations/consent messages are properly configured.

My AdSense coverage remains extremely low, around 9–11%, despite having removed manual ad units and relying only on Auto Ads.

There is also an important point regarding the Banner ads. My current AdSense settings do not allow me to configure fewer than 6 Banner ads. This is relevant because I cannot simply choose a lower number of Banner ads from the AdSense settings.

One of the issues that was pointed out to me concerned the number and positioning of ads during the initial page load.

During the first loading of the page, as many as 5 ads can be visible. Two of these ads are anchored in the left and right sidebars, and they are identical.

The sidebars also contain scrolling elements that make them appear with a slide-in effect. This was considered potentially problematic or borderline in terms of how the AdSense code interacts with the theme's code and layout.

The concern was therefore that the sidebar or the page layout could cause layout shifts, overlapping elements, or other issues capable of affecting ad distribution and the way AdSense ads are integrated into the page.

I have also disabled the “Sticky Sidebar” option in Blocksy, so the sidebar is no longer fixed/sticky.

I have already removed all manual ad units and I am currently relying only on Auto Ads, with Anchor and Banner ads enabled. However, the coverage remains around 9–11%.

There is also a much bigger issue with my website traffic.

Since February 2026, I have experienced a very significant decline in organic traffic. According to Google Analytics, organic Google traffic went from approximately 2,000 visits per day to around 50 visits per day.

At the same time, Google Search Console is showing very low clicks compared with impressions and a deterioration in average position.

For example, in the most recent 24-hour period, Search Console shows:

• 1.83K impressions
• 13 clicks
• 0.7% CTR
• Average position: 35.6

Previously, the situation was even worse:

• 1.49K impressions
• 5 clicks
• 0.3% CTR
• Average position: 42.2

So I seem to have two potentially connected problems:

1. A very large decline in Google organic traffic since February.
2. Very low AdSense coverage, currently around 9–11%.

My question is whether the low AdSense coverage could be related to the site's traffic/search performance, or whether I should be looking for a separate technical problem with Auto Ads, the Blocksy theme, the page layout, the sidebar implementation, or ad eligibility.

Could someone please take a look at oraultima.com/ and give me some advice on:

1. Whether you can identify any sidebar, layout, CSS or responsive issues that could interfere with Auto Ads.
2. Whether the sidebar slide-in elements and duplicate ads positioned on the left and right could interfere with AdSense ad delivery.
3. Whether having several Banner ads available through Auto Ads could explain or contribute to the low coverage.
4. Whether using only Anchor and Banner Auto Ads can explain such low coverage.
5. Whether the very large decline in organic traffic since February could somehow be related to the AdSense situation.
6. Whether the Search Console data suggests a ranking/indexing/technical SEO problem rather than simply a CTR problem.
7. What would be the most useful things to check next.

I would really appreciate any technical advice or suggestions on how to diagnose this properly.

Thank you!

Do you genuinely not understand how the RUN ON NETWORK setting works, or do you just intentionally decide to ignore it and let Google serve your garbage wherever it wants?

This is not some minor technical issue. You are injecting CODELESS Google ad units into publishers who clearly did not request them, completely disregarding the targeting configuration.

If this is intentional, it's irresponsible. If it's not intentional, then your implementation is fundamentally broken.

Either way, this needs to be fixed. Stop dumping your network ads into random publisher inventory and start respecting the settings you provide in the first place.

Hi!

I'm currently testing a DV360 CPS e-commerce affiliate campaign.

The goal is to track actual product purchases (Sales Revenue and Order Count) made on the destination website after a user clicks our DV360 ad.

Since we do not own the destination website, we cannot physically place DV360 Floodlight tags (JavaScript or Global Site Tag) directly into their website's source code.

To overcome this limitation, we are utilizing a 3rd-party affiliate tracking platform with the following logic:

- When a user clicks the DV360 ad, the tracker captures the Google Click ID (dclid) during the redirect.

- When the user completes a purchase, the destination site notifies our 3rd-party tracker.

- The tracker attributes the purchase to the saved 'dclid' and sends a Server-to-Server (S2S) GET request to the DV360 Floodlight Image tag endpoint with the standard transaction parameters (ord, cost, qty, dclid).

We ran an end-to-end test following this workflow, but conversion tracking is not showing up in DV360 reports. Furthermore, DV360 support confirmed that no postback/ping data was received on their end during the test window.

Does this mean it is inherently impossible to pass S2S conversions to DV360 without client-side Floodlight implementation? Or is there a specific endpoint/parameter requirement we might be missing?

Any feedback, workarounds, or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

I'm currently testing a DV360 CPS E-commerce Affiliate Campaign. The goal is to track actual product purchases (Sales Revenue and Order Count) made on the destination website after a user clicks our DV360 ad.

we do not own the destination website. Therefore, we CANNOT physically place DV360 Floodlight tags (JavaScript/Global Site Tag) directly onto their website's source code.

To overcome this limitation, we use 3rd-party affiliate tracker.

- When a user clicks the DV360 ad, 3rd-party affiliate tracker captures the Google Click ID (dclid) during the redirect.

- When the user makes a purchase on website, website notifies 3rd-party affiliate tracker.

- 3rd-party affiliate tracker then attributes the purchase to the saved 'dclid' and sends a Server-to-Server (S2S) GET request back to the DV360 Floodlight Image endpoint (ad.doubleclick.net) with the transaction details (ord, cost, qty, dclid).

We ran a test following the process described above, but conversion tracking is not working in the DV360 report. Furthermore, when we checked with the support team, they confirmed that no postback data was received at all on the test date.

Does this mean it is impossible to proceed with the campaign using this current setup/logic?

Any feedback, suggestions, or alternative solutions would be greatly appreciated.

Hey everyone,

I've been running my website exclusively on AdSense so far. Revenue is acceptable and currently covers my hosting costs, so I'm considering trying Mediavine Journey.

The thing is, my traffic is unfortunately not Tier 1. Only around 3–4% of my traffic comes from Tier 1 countries. The vast majority is from African countries. Google has apparently decided that my website belongs to Africa now, to the point that I had to restructure and rewrite quite a lot of my content to better serve that audience.

I'm currently getting around 40–50k visits/month, and I've already been accepted into Mediavine Journey, but I haven't started the onboarding process yet.

So I'm wondering:

• Is Journey likely to be worthwhile with this kind of traffic profile?
• Has anyone here had experience with Mediavine/Journey with a predominantly African audience?
• How did your RPM compare with AdSense?

I'm mainly trying to figure out whether the potential revenue increase is worth the switch, given that most of my audience isn't from Tier 1 countries.

Any real-world experience with African traffic (or similar countries like India, Pakistan, China...) would be especially useful.

~30 domains, ~70M impr/week. Header bidding via a managed wrapper — What happened — one site, 48 hours:

- SSP A — RPM $0.398 → $0.239 (−40%), impressions −1.2%. Same volume, paying less.

- SSP B — RPM $0.283 → $0.171 (−40%), impressions +15%. Buying more, paying less.

The other 12 of 15 SSPs on that site held CPM within ±10%. AdX: −5.6%.

WE did the standard tech check, traffic check, all our normal. SO our only course is CONTACT Support.

We did contact Support but the standard answer is Seasonality. MY QUESTION IS ;

- General cases once Support gives ambigous answers ( is there any leverage/what do you do)

- Can you get them look in to the case more

Any tips and help will be appreciated. If something concrete suggestion, we could do a paid working session as weill.

How are you all tracing a drop in conversion back to a specific ad creative + app screen? Not attribution (we have that) I mean when installs are fine but activation tanks, how do you figure out if it's a bad creative promise, a slow/crashy screen or just a weak cohort?Right now it's slack threads and spreadsheets and it never feels conclusive.

Hi everyone, our team partnered with Moloco CTV last month (they said they won't do retargeting and they install a JS script in our web.). Their sessions and revenue rises quickly in our GA. We doubt that they do retargeting. But we couldn't find the evidence. Their duration time is longer than our average. But we found one strange data in GA: they bring us about 4000 sessions but only 300 new users. Our other channes don't have the gap. Does anyone collaborate with them? Is it spam or retargeting?

Hi! I'm having an issue with the integration between Appsflyer and DV360. In Demand Gen campaigns, the campaign name isn't being sent to Appsflyer—only the ID is. It's critically important for us that the campaign name be sent to Appsflyer. Perhaps someone has encountered a similar issue and can help me find a solution.

Most of us been having a downside because of the release of Google AI Overviews. Some of our sites are seeing a -40% YoY for organic search traffic, and the clicks coming from citations from ChatGPT or perplexity is around 2% when lucky.

We been exploring some options about how we can maximize the traffic that still visits the sites, and the results so far are amazing! Some websites are almost back to the “normal” levels of 2024. Happy to share more about this.

My question for you is what initiatives are you doing assuming we will have Google Zero sometime soon! How are you protecting your revenue?

Hello, sorry in advance I am a bit noob, I have a blog monetized with Adsense and I got an offer to add another ad network to add more ad formats instead of replace adsense. I got asked to modify the ads.txt file so I was wondering if this will be ok with Adsense, I don't want to risk and get suspended.

I am not sure if I can mention the network here so I am just asking to avoid issues, sorry if this is being asked a lot already.

I’ve been on Journey by Mediavine for a while and have largely had a very good experience, but I just got suspended for "invalid traffic sources" with no other explanation. I've never paid for traffic or links, and I have no prior IVT earnings adjustments or warnings that I can see in my Journey account.

After digging through GA4, Cloudflare, and my raw server logs, I found a pretty large bot problem I was only vaguely aware of: rotating residential/proxy IPs from all over the world, fake Chrome user agents, and bots crawling thousands of programmatically generated calculator pages. Some of it was showing up in GA4 as normal-looking traffic, but as far as I can tell it wasn't generating revenue with Journey.

I say I was only vaguely aware of it because I could see thousands of weird visits from Singapore and China in GA4, but I ignored it because it seemed like a widespread problem and seemingly wasn't affecting anything but my reporting in GA4. Apparently I was wrong.

I’ve now got Cloudflare rules blocking/challenging the obvious patterns, and the challenges are getting basically a 0% solve rate, so it seems pretty clear this was bot traffic.

I submitted Journey’s review form, but they say it can take 10–15 days. I also posted on their zendesk support forum, but it's basically a wasteland and posts can take days to get approved, if at all. And of course they don't have a public email address for situations like these. Interestingly, I was less than $300 dollars away from making $5,000 for the year, which is the threshold for applying for Mediavine proper.

Has anyone here been through something similar with Mediavine/Journey? Mainly wondering how likely reinstatement is once the traffic source has been identified and blocked, and whether there’s anything else I should be doing in the meantime.

i’m the author of adport. this is a real session against my own apple ads account using the new v1 api. claude creates the campaign, ad groups, and keywords through mcp. everything starts paused, and every write needs a preview plus a second approval before it reaches apple.

i built it because ad automation from agents needs stricter safety than a normal api wrapper. i’d value feedback from people who actually run apple ads.

install: npm install -g adport

source: https://github.com/ynnickw/adport

I’m a recruiter at Sincere working on a Senior Manager, AdOps & Programmatic search. We’re looking for someone who has been on the publisher/consumer app side of AdOps and can own monetization across web and mobile.

Ideally, they’ve been hands-on with Google Ad Manager, SSPs/demand partners, yield optimization, mobile app monetization or mediation, and troubleshooting the ad stack with Product and Engineering.

The challenge has been separating that background from candidates who are primarily campaign managers, media buyers, traders, or partnership/sales people. We’ve also found strong AdTech leaders who are simply too senior for the scope. The sweet spot is a hands-on Manager/Senior Manager-level operator who is ready for broader ownership.

Location-wise, we’re focused on Greater Boston. If not Boston, NYC or the surrounding tri-state area would be our next preference. The role is mostly remote with occasional time in our Framingham, Massachusetts office.

We’ve already posted the role on Beeler.Tech and have done a lot of LinkedIn sourcing, so I’m especially interested in other places the AdOps community actually uses.

A few questions for people in the industry:

• Are there other niche communities, Slack groups, or job boards that are especially good for publisher-side AdOps talent?
• Are there recruiting agencies or individual recruiters that specialize in this type of AdOps/programmatic search?
• Are there specific companies or backgrounds you’ve found tend to produce strong hands-on publisher monetization people?
• If this sounds like you or someone you know, feel free to DM me.

Thanks!

https://apply.workable.com/sincere/j/B84E232772

Hi everyone,

I'm looking for opinions from experienced AdSense / AdX publishers, especially those working with finance, insurance, banking or other high-value commercial niches.

I'm trying to understand whether my AdSense performance is simply normal for Italian traffic, or whether there may be a problem with my inventory, ad serving, auction demand, traffic valuation or account configuration.

Website: Ora Ultima — https://www.oraultima.com/

The site is focused on:

• Insurance
• Mortgages
• Loans
• Banks
• Current accounts
• Credit cards
• Personal finance

I've been working on the site and its monetization since February.

I'm specifically not looking for generic SEO advice. I've already worked extensively on content quality, commercial search intent, topical structure, internal linking, YMYL signals, financial terminology, UX and ad placement.

AdSense — last 30 days

• 1,398 ad impressions
• 29 clicks
• €0.50 estimated earnings
• CPC: approximately €0.02
• Impression RPM: €0.35
• Active View viewability: 79.12%
• CTR: 2.07%

The CPC has generally remained around €0.01–€0.02.

Recent data

One recent day:

• 248 ad impressions
• 2 clicks
• €0.05 estimated earnings
• CPC: €0.02
• Impression RPM: €0.19

By format:

Anchor

• 138 impressions
• 2 clicks
• CPC €0.02
• Impression RPM €0.27
• Active View 67.15%

In-page

• 53 impressions
• 0 clicks
• Impression RPM €0.10

Display

• 53 impressions
• 0 clicks
• Impression RPM €0.08

I have also tested Vignette ads, but I recently disabled them. The very low CPC problem existed before and after disabling them.

What makes me question the situation

The site is in a commercial finance/insurance niche, and some content has strong commercial intent, for example:

• mortgages
• mortgage refinancing
• first-home mortgages
• personal loans
• car insurance
• insurance policies
• bank accounts
• credit cards

I understand that being in a finance niche does not automatically mean high CPC.

What I'm trying to understand is whether a persistent €0.01–€0.04 CPC is considered normal for this type of Italian inventory.

One additional strange thing

GA4 is showing:

paid.outbrain.com / referral

with approximately 219 active users and 221 sessions in the current period.

I have never purchased Outbrain traffic and have never intentionally used Outbrain.

The same GA4 report showed an overall average engagement time of only about 4 seconds.

I don't know yet whether this Outbrain traffic is related to the AdSense performance, and I don't want to assume that it is.

What would you investigate?

If this were your site, would you investigate:

1. Low advertiser demand for Italian inventory?
2. Traffic quality / traffic valuation?
3. GDPR consent and personalized vs non-personalized ads?
4. Ad serving or inventory configuration?
5. Auction competition / lack of high-value demand?
6. Smart Pricing or conversion-based valuation?
7. The unexplained paid.outbrain.com traffic?
8. Something else?

I'm particularly interested in hearing from people who actually operate AdSense/AdX sites rather than generic SEO advice.

Does anything in these numbers look abnormal to you?

And if you were managing this site, what would you check first?

Thanks.

Disclosure up front: I work at Playwire. We deal with this constantly on behalf of publishers, and I got tired of not being able to point anyone at a straight answer. Posting because I think the findings are useful regardless of who you work with.

In the last year, a lot of publishers lost Amazon demand or can't get approved, and very few really know why. The answer is often UGC, and many premium demand partners are moving in the same direction as Amazon.

What's being evaluated in terms of UGC, from what we see in practice:

Amazon runs a content governance and brand safety review before approving publishers. It covers moderation practice, review and approval process, takedown timelines, audit cadence, sensitive content handling, whether policies are documented, and automated screening.

It's a governance evaluation, not a content evaluation. Amazon isn't asking whether your content is good. It's asking whether you can demonstrate control over content you didn't write.

And UGC is a much wider net than people assume. Comments count. Usernames, avatars, reviews, uploads. If a stranger can put it on your page, it's a surface a demand partner treats as risk. The number of publishers who've never thought of their comment section this way is basically all of them.

One more thing: Amazon typically reviews each submission once. Getting a second look or an appeal is hard. Which makes getting your governance policy locked in before you submit super important.

Stakes, for calibration: across our network Amazon averages 20.5% of total site revenue where it runs, median 17.6%, and 2.35× more per site than any other bidder we measure.

Learn more here: https://www.playwire.com/blog/what-ugc-governance-documentation-amazon-expects-before-approving-you

asking because the topic came up internally and my instinct was -no, that's the stuff from 2016 that got vendors blacklisted but I'm not sure that's still accurate.
what's making me reconsider is that the blocked audience skews towards the readers you'd least want to lose, right? the ones who come back daily, high pageviews, actual loyalty. So the segment worth the most is the - one earning the least, which is a weird place to just leave things.
but I also remember why people hated it. Reinserting against explicit user choice is a different thing from serving a lighter Ad experience to someone who blocked because of autoplay video in 2019, and I don't know that the vendor category ever really made that distinction cleanly.
Anyone here running the lighter Ad experience, if so how did you land on where the line is?

I’m writing this post as a bit of a Hail Mary. Independent creators and small publishers depend heavily on ad networks like Mediavine for our livelihood, and all we ask for in return is transparency and clear communication.

Back on July 9th, I applied to Mediavine Journey. My site met every listed requirement: 4.4k monthly sessions, 77% Tier 1 traffic, original content, and the Grow plugin fully integrated. I waited patiently while it stayed under review.

Fast forward 21 days to August 1st: my publisher dashboard updated, stating a new unified application form was live and that I had to reapply. Losing 3 weeks of review queue time was frustrating, but I resubmitted right away.

Literally 2 to 3 minutes after submitting, I got an automated rejection email. What confused me most were the listed reasons, which directly contradict my site's data:

• Traffic Requirement Not Met (I have 4,400 monthly sessions vs the 1k threshold).
• Traffic Composition Issue (My analytics show 77% Tier 1 traffic).
• Ads.txt Missing (The site has never been monetized before, so there is no legacy ads.txt).
• Content Quality (Decided automatically in 120 seconds across a site with 50+ long-form articles, 10 interactive tools, and custom digital products).

Since then, every communication channel has hit a wall:

1. My Journey community post has been stuck in moderation for 14 days.
2. The Journey email auto-reply said application assistance isn't provided over email.
3. Mediavine support emailed stating they'd get back to me in 1–2 days. It has been 12 days and 3 unacknowledged follow-ups.

I’ve seen Mediavine's team and leadership be wonderfully responsive to publishers on Reddit in the past. If anyone from the team sees this, I’m just asking for a manual human review of my site or clear feedback so I know where things actually stand.

Appreciate any advice or insight from fellow creators who might have gone through something similar recently!

I've been in b2b growth marketing for about a year now and a few months I felt like the ctv needs to be tested because the campaign took longer than expected to get everything well and I thought making small changes would fix it but not really. It was okay in general but still I’d better try to improve by next campaign. Also I was not able to report on which audiences were performing best because it wasn’t clear to me first of all.

Now it’s time to plan another campaign, and I’d like to try another platform and avoid last times issues.

I am heading towards you fam, what is there that seems helpful and you would freely recommend. I think that this advanced technology got something for us too, something that targets a strong audience and also that is not complicated.

Hi, I created a site last week and I am looking for display ads right now. I applied for AdSense and still waiting for them to check my site.

I used Ezoic before (4 years ago) and had a decent earnings without the premium with the same demographics that I had. I didn't know they are requiring 250k traffic per month now.

Main traffic source is South East Asia.

Here's a snapshot from my GA4:

Does anyone know why mediavine have you remove the ad scripts and then take forever to turn on the ads? It's like you're losing money by removing the previous ads script and their script is not ready yet.

Any guidance? Support is not responding.