There are a few reasons why you may not be served ads on your site, so knowing WHY your ads are missing is the first place to start. Here are all of the things you should check.
Publishers are sometimes not served ads on their own sites
There are several common explanations for this. The first is that we are on our own sites more often than any reader ever would be. Mediavine does not fill at 100%, so if you have been working on your site or visiting multiple pages, advertisers are probably going to stop spending on you. It's important to remember that YOU are not the person advertisers want to reach; it's your audience. This is more common in the first two weeks a site is live as advertisers learn how to spend on your traffic.
Here's how to see if this is the issue you're experiencing
Go to your Mediavine Dashboard and scroll down to the Top Pages report.
Open 2-3 of your top posts in an incognito or private window**
Add ?test=houseads to the end each URL and then refresh the page and scroll through the content
Do you see ads? If so, then ads are serving to readers and you are likely just not being served ads on your own site right now.
Some countries have a lower fill rate
If you are working on and visiting your site from a country with lower competition in the auction (examples include India, the Philippines, Thailand, Brazil, etc), you'll run out of inventory faster than a publisher working on their site in the US would.
To test, use a VPN to visit your site from the US and follow the steps on how to see if this is the issue you're experiencing.
Additional steps that you can take so that you can see where ads slots are on your site, even if you've "run out" of inventory as a user
➡️ Enable PSAs
Check to be sure you haven't blocklisted ads on the posts
You can disable ads on a per-post basis using these instructions. Sometimes publishers forget that they blocked ads for a sponsored post or specific affiliate or email conversion goal. To check for a blocklist code, you can look in the edit screen for that post in Wordpress (or your chosen CMS) and search for the blocklist HTML OR you can view the page source and CMD+F and search the word 'blocklist'.
Check the Mediavine Control Panel plugin (or your script if you are not on Wordpress)
If you are using Wordpress, in your Wordpress admin, you can either go to Plugins > Installed Plugins and then in the Mediavine Control Panel click Settings OR you can click the Mediavine logo with the word 'Support' in the lefthand navigation bar.
In the plugin Settings, you should have a site ID present AND Include Script Wrapper should be checked.
If your site is not on Wordpress, check to be sure that the Mediavine script wrapper is still installed in the head element of your site.
You can find your Mediavine script in your Mediavine Dashboard by going to Settings > Ad Setup.
Instructions for Blogger sites can be found here, and Squarespace can be found here.
If you have gotten this far and everything seems to be fine, there's one more thing to take a look at.
Check for Brand Safety
Mediavine adheres to strict brand safety standards as part of our agreement with the advertisers that spend on Mediavine sites. Google Ad Manager has a policy center that flags any URL on any Mediavine site that is experiencing restricted ad spend due to a brand safety violation.
Google's systems are automated and so our Ad Operations Team works hard to review every flagged post and if no issue is present, they submit for re-review and help to get that restricted spend overturned. BUT!
There are some things that cannot be overturned. You can view Mediavine's Brand Safety Policy here.
Review the content that is missing ads. Is it violating any of Google's stated ad policies? If so, we've likely blocked ads on that post for you to protect the rest of your site from penalties or reduced spend.
Still stuck or not seeing ads? Please email publishers@mediavine.com and a Specialist will help take a look.