Your thoughts on this Adsense warning?

[Sutra]

Recently, I got the following email from Google:

"This is a warning message to alert you that there is action required to bring your AdSense account into compliance with our AdSense program policies. We’ve provided additional details below, along with the actions to be taken on your part.

Affected website: xxxxx.com

Example page where violation occurred:http:/xxxxx

Action required: Please make changes immediately to your site to follow AdSense program policies.

Current account status: Active

Violation explanation

Why was this action taken against my account:
Publishers are not permitted to cause users to click on Google ads unintentionally or drive excessive attention to ad units. This includes implementations, such as:

• Placing Google ads in floating box scripts
• Flashy animations that draw a user attention to the ads
• Arrows or other symbols pointing to the ads
• Site layouts which push content below the fold"

In the Adsense dashboard I received a message about the policy violation. Details are:

• Site-level Enforcement
• Violation: Unnatural attention to ads
• Status: Warning
• To Resolve: Fix the violation then mark as "Fixed" in policy center. After you mark this warning as resolved it will be removed from the Policy center.

I checked the page and other pages on the site it doesn't seem that I'm violating their terms except for perhaps one type of instance. When pages are viewed on mobile the sticky social sharebar was appearing (at bottom of viewport) at the same spot as some Adsense ads were being shown. I fixed this right after getting the warning but here's what it looked like:

In case it matters, I am dynamically showing ads based on user agents (the above screenshot is on mobile view).

1) Do you think the social share bar showing as per above was the reason for the violation?

2) I assumed a person looked at the site and flagged it for a warning. But do you think it was a bot that crawled it, saw the dynamic ads code and didn't realize that they show based on user device/viewport? Wondering if it just saw the code and thought 8+ Adsense ads are showing per article when really it's only like 2 or 3.

 

[Calamari]

1) If that bar was overlapping the ad that could have triggered an accidental click warning.

2) No idea honestly but I'b be very surprised if the adsense crawler didn't use some sort of user agent that accounted for that.

You can pm me the exact url if you want and I'll take a closer look on a few different screen sizes.

 

[Future State]

My guess is it's the anchored social share buttons. They seem to be happy if it's their own anchored ads there, but not if it's anything else overlapping that's asking for a click. I guess they have enough data to assume anchor ads don't get a ton of accidental clicks.

 

[Sutra]

1) If that bar was overlapping the ad that could have triggered an accidental click warning.

2) No idea honestly but I'b be very surprised if the adsense crawler didn't use some sort of user agent that accounted for that.

You can pm me the exact url if you want and I'll take a closer look on a few different screen sizes.

Thank you good sir. Sending the url in 5...4...3...2...

 

[DarkRed]

Do you have page-level ads activated? Maybe that floating share bar side by side with the anchor page level ad in mobile.

 

[Future State]

So did you figure it out or get banned? Don't leave us hanging here!

 

[Sutra]

So did you figure it out or get banned? Don't leave us hanging here!

I lost my entire account. Shit.

Nah, just messing. Everything is ok so far. Calamari took the time to check it out and he also thinks it's likely social button overlap thing.

The whole warning was vague enough that it's hard to say for sure. But I don't see anything else that's bringing undue attention.

Do you have page-level ads activated? Maybe that floating share bar side by side with the anchor page level ad in mobile.

No, no page level ads. Don't use any anchor ads either.