I wouldn’t have much of a problem with this except it makes it hard to manage fonts. I like having my fonts match the ads and this makes it hard. I use blended ads on one site and it switches back and forth a lot from 2 to 4.

I will agree that fewer ads on a page works better, as I believe lower paying ads can distract the user away from higher ones.

What I would like to see is a script webmasters could paste into their header or something that would automatically adjust the fonts on the page to the ads. Either that or Google just giving us a choice between, say - 2 or 3 fonts which remain consistent.

Carole, you still get 4 sometimes? That’s a rarity now :) I don’t think Google will allow us to modify the code in any way, although it would do Google well to listen to your advanced ad formatting suggestion :)

Yeah, I’ve been following this trend on all kinds of different websites and pages within those sites actually and I think I’m starting to see a pattern. These are just theories based on observations across the web so I hope anybody reading this keeps that in mind.

- I’ve noticed that the more links vs. content on your page may perhaps means you only get 2 ads showing.
- Pages with mostly a handful of links and slim content get 3 or 4 ads. I see this alot on download pages at software sites.
- More keyword rich filenames get more ads when the filename echoes the keywords in the page.
- Pages which are 95% content and very few links are getting mostly 2 ads, especially when there are 2 similar ad units.
- Multiple ad units and/or multiple similar sized ad units means fewer ads more often than not no matter what the content or link saturation of the page is.
- The search term used in search engines to find your site influences the ads as well. And why not? Our own internal stats pick up on terms used by surfers, so why wouldn’t Google? I’ve seen this in action on sites using different search strings not native to the topic of the page, but still brings the page up in search results based on the content of the page.

I believe there is an equation we could develop in there somewhere….

The only problem with coming up with theories is that any number of ads can be blocked depending on where you live. I’m in Canada, so if there are 10 advertisers restricting their ads to the US, then the Adsense ads I see will be different than what my visitors see.

The other problem with theories is that there are so many unknown factors at work behind Adsense.

Shoot, this turned out to be more of a book than a simple reply :)