Lately, while I was looking through some of the statistics of Ask Will Online on Adsense, I came across that nearly 9% of my traffic is getting ‘unmatched ad requests’ instead of a CPC or CPM bid. What is this unmatched ad request Google Adsense displays in reports. How can a publisher and blogger reduce this?
The way you can view your unmatched ad requests if through clicking on the ‘Bid types’ column under reports. This will show you the amount of impressions you gain through unmatched ad impressions:
Notice how the coverage of unmatched ad requests is 0% meaning you will not gain or even have the opportunity to gain a click from it. Unmatched ad requests are not good.
Unmatched Ad Requests Explained
Every time a web user visits your website, your Google Adsense adverts will send an ad request to Google to display an advert for that web user. If you have three adverts per page, every view, your adverts will send three advert requests and so on…
An unmatched ad request is when you send off for an ad request. However, you do not display an advert for the request. This means the advert will be displayed as blank to the web user preventing any clicks on any adverts from happening.
From what I have seen, most publishers of Adsense will get unmatched ad requests every day. The trouble is that some publishers will have more unmatched ad requests than others. For example, mine is 9% whereas I have seen people with up to 20%. Even so, that is 9% or 20% of earnings publishers are missing out on!
This is where ‘backup ads’ come into place. When creating your ad unit in Adsense, there is an option of what to display as backup ads:
As default, backup ads (which are basically unmatched ad requests) display blank space which is no good for us publishers and I can strongly guess that most publishers forget about even looking at ‘backup ads’ when creating their own adverts. There are two other options in the scroll down:
- Show ads from another URL.
- Fill space with a solid colour.
Both options are not exactly the best solutions…
Reasons For Unmatched Ad Requests
Below are some of the reasons why you may find yourself having a few too many unmatched ad requests:
- You have blocked to many categories and websites in the ‘Allow & block ads’ column.
- Your content is not being bid for by advertisers. This may be because your content is poor or the topic the content is about is negligible to advertisers.
- You have too many adverts on one page (supply and demand).
- The advert type. Limiting yourself to juts text or image stops advertisers using the other type of advert from bidding on your advertising space.
- The advert size – I have found that the linked units such as the 468×15 unit has a much higher unmatched ad requests than the normal squarer adverts.
From this, you can look to reduce your unmatched ad requests through:
- Limiting the amount of websites and categories you block from advertising on your website.
- Write high quality content advertisers will want to bid for.
- Keep your articles to one topic to make it easy for advertisers to pick out keywords to bid for.
- Limit the amount of adverts you have on your page.
- The bigger and squarer the advert, the less chance of an unmatched ad request.
Unmatched ad requests is quite a new and unexplored feature from Adsense which they have only just introduced. Therefore, if you have any information on unmatched ad requests, be sure to comment below.
Got 50% UNMATCHED.. 9% for me would be a walk in the park..
Same here. 50% is insane and all I had blocked where gambling (which is opt-in).
I've just blocked all those scammy Windows software sites so let's see just how bad things get!
From my experience, Adsense has almost all kind of inventories. Here is what you can do:
First check what ad units are causing unmatched requests. According to adsense, using link units will cause this number to go high as it will be counted 0% coverage unless someone clicks it. In other words, every time the link unit ad is requested and not clicked it will up your unmatched ad request count. Go to performance tab and go to ad unites section where you can see coverage % for each ad units you have in your pages. If all the units except link units are giving 90-100% coverage you dont need to worry about it. You can see your "not clicked link units" will show 0% coverage if it was never clicked. If you see less coverage on bigger units then it is a problem and you need to aggressively start working on it…
50%? Is it really that bad? What type of website are you displaying adverts on? If you are targeting a niche, that might be the reason for the unusually high unmatched ad requests.
I found a post from Google about this- if you are using link units, and if none of the links are clicked, it logs as a "no coverage" event. So this can lead to a high number of no coverage entries in your reports. (I think someone else just posted this above, woops 😉
mine also has around 50% unmatched add request…does visitor using opera mini can cause this?since i have alot visitor using mobile device that cant display addsense
Thanks Will and the commentators whose insights helped me bringing my "unmatched add request" down to 10% from a whopping 40% 🙂
i put noindex for robot, how to allow adsense index