Tuesday, May 14, 2019

Google ads appearing over site content making it impossible to use the site.

I've noticed recently Google ads appearing over sections of pages on my sites that means it's no longer possible to enter data into the fields making it impossible to use the page. This is only occurring on mobile sites to my knowledge.

If you find pages on my sites where Google ads are damaging the user experience (such that you can't enter information into the forms) please let me know and I'll temporarily remove or replace the ads.

This appears to be a recent change by Google. I've never seen this happen before and it's only started to happen recently. When the Google ads appear they should simply take up space. Instead they appear over the content of the page and that makes it impossible to see what is now under the ad. This is obviously a recent flaw in Google's programming and hopefully they'll realise and correct the issue.



The issue with Google ads affects pages with forms where the Google ad is above the form and the person is using a mobile device.

Please contact me using the details on the Contact page if you find a problem. Thank you in advance for any assistance.

Kelvin Eldridge
www.JustLocal.com.au

Update: 14/05/2019
A quick solution to ads covering the page is to click on the X in the corner of the ad. Then click on the option to Stop Seeing This Ad. There's options then for the reason you're closing the ad and one option is the ad is covering content. Not all ads are a problem, but getting rid of the ads that cause a problem may flag a problem. If lots of people close problem ads you would hope it may get noticed. That should fix the immediate issue for a user, but of course doesn't fix the issue if people don't know this is an option.

Update: 16/05/2019
The quick solution mentioned previously is useful to clear the screen temporarily, but the ads often keep coming back, so the problem keeps occurring. For me the way I'll work around this issue, as there's no telling how long it will keep happening, is on web pages that can be used on mobiles, where there's a form that will get blocked by an ad overlaying the form, I'll remove those ads and replace them with a different ad that does not impact the form. You could also simply delete the ad, or alternately, instead of using a responsive ad use a fixed size ad instead.

Update: 20/05/2019
I found through further reading it is possible to limit the height of the response adsense ad, so today I decided to create a new size limited ad and test the result. I used the following code in the adsense code, but modified to take into account the maximum width of the web pages I have. This code was found in the Adsense help pages.

   style="display:inline-block;min-width:400px;max-width:970px;width:100%;height:90px"

Unfortunately it didn't work. Some ads had a height which was much greater then 90px. The good outcome however it looks like Google may have fixed the issue, or at least made it better. In general when I went to type into the form the larger ad was replaced with a shorter ad and the fields were not covered by the ads. On one occasion the was a huge amount of white vertical space, so Google's code is still not perfect, but appears to work most of the time.

Unless something unexpected occurs it looks like I can return to using the standard responsive code from Adsense.

No comments:

Post a Comment