Thursday, July 25, 2019

AdSense - Earnings at risk – You need to fix some ads.txt file issues to avoid severe impact to your revenue.

Participating in Google's AdSense means that you have to keep up with the changes it requires. Some changes can take a lot of work, some not so much.

The latest message I received when going into AdSense was, "Earnings at risk – You need to fix some ads.txt file issues to avoid severe impact to your revenue.". What's this all about I thought.

Not really quite sure of what ads.txt is about from an industry point of view, but it appears that as a publisher I'm giving approval to have ads from Google on my site/s. Since this is a public file it means companies advertising can also check the file. How this helps the companies avoid fake inventory I'm not sure. There's obviously something going on that I'm not aware.

Whether it makes sense or not isn't really an issue. If AdSense suggests your earnings are risk, then it's time to do something. In this case it's a matter of adding a file ads.txt to the top level of each of your sites. AdSense will even create the file for you.

With your own sites it's then just a matter of uploading the ads.txt file to the root or top level folder of your site.

Now if you also have Blogger accounts where you don't have access to the folders directly you can use the Blogger interface to edit the ads.txt file. In my case not all my blogs are listed as having an issue. Not sure why. At this time I'll only fix the blogs with issues as identified by AdSense.

I did this as follows:

Log on to Blogger
Select the blog
Select Settings
Select Search preferences

Under the section Monetisation there's Custom ads.txt. This showed as disabled.
Select Edit
Select Yes
Paste in the line from the ads.txt file provided by AdSense
Click Save changes

Repeat for all blogs with issues as identified by AdSense.

There appears to be no way to remove the warning message, "Earnings at risk", but as Google scan each site and finds the ads.txt file I suspect the error message will go.

What doesn't make sense to me is not all sites and blogs I have, have been identified as having issues. Perhaps the other sites will be identified over time. Only time will tell.

Kelvin Eldridge
www.OnlineConnections.com.au

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