New Ad Units for Google AdSense

The Google AdSense program for publishers has added the ability to create and manage Ad Units, which maintain most of the ad parameters on the Google server so that you can edit the parameters without having to edit the ad script code on your blog or web pages.

In theory, the old ad script code should continue to work fine, but I have seen my AdSense ad revenue plummet over the past few months and am not even seeing any page views for most of my blogs. I only heard about the new Ad Unit feature when I was poking around in AdSense to try to figure out what might be going on.

Technically they are called "AdSense units", and I also see reference to them as "slots", but I will refer to them as "Ad Units."

I am in the process of converting all seven of my Google Blogger blog templates to use the new Ad Unit code script snippet. It takes a while after creating a new Ad Unit before it is fully active on the Google server. So far, two of my seven ad units are active. AdSense says it takes up to 10 minutes to activate, but it seems more like 20 minutes oe even longer. And, I get this full-page "Google Server Error" error page display that tells me to wait 30 minutes before retrying, shortly before the Ad Unit does become active.

I created a separate Ad Unit for each of my blogs and each has a distinct channel for ad tracking.

I am not sure if any of this will fix the problem that was causing most of my blogs not to be counted even for page views, but it was an appropriate cleanup step anyway.

-- Jack Krupansky