You may have noticed that at the top of the page, there is a blue/grey bar that says Bubba On The Road and has links to our social media pages. Then below that, there is a green bar with a Google AdSense ad in it. Then below that, there is our menu. The menu is supposed to be inside the green bar, all by itself. Its not supposed to be underneath it.
What changed? Well, Google decided to add a “feature” to their AdSense program that automatically puts ads in pages, aptly called “Auto Ads”. It doesn’t let us control where these ads go, but it does theoretically allow us to turn them off. Since this ad in particular is in the menu and breaks it to boot, I decided to shut it off. From all the resources I’ve been finding about the Auto Ads feature, it takes some time for it to go away. How long? Nobody knows exactly.
I turned off Auto Ads last night around 9pm. its not 1:15pm the next day and the ad is still there. I’ve gone through help pages, plugin instructions, searched Google itself, and by all accounts, I have correctly done all I can to disable this feature aside from just closing the AdSense account completely and losing all the ads.
We don’t make a lot on a ad revenue, but every little bit helps so having some ads on Bubba On The Road is normally a good thing. In this case though, it has broken our menu, makes it look like I don’t know how to design a webpage, and in general makes the page look like crap.
I am hoping this issue is gone in a few hours, but really, I don’t know how long it will take. I had a popup asking for feedback, so told them how crappy it was to put an add inside a menu and break that menu and at the same time, not give me an easy way to fix it.
There is no way in my theme settings to get rid of this ad-inside-the-menu and it seems to be stuck there until somewhere some server updates its cache and it will hopefully disappear.
So if you are seeing that ad and think it somehow detracts from Bubba On The Road, well, I agree with you and I am doing everything I can to resolve the problem. If its not corrected in 24 hours, I’m going to have to find some way to get rid of it that may require the nuclear option of scrapping the whole AdSense program and starting from scratch. We won’t lose any posts, but I may have to redesign this blog into a way I can make the ad in the menu less intrusive and just somehow get rid of it.
