Earnings At Risk – You Need To Fix Some Ads.txt File Issues To Avoid Severe Impact To Your Revenue

I got this message from Google Adsense not too long ago and finally got around to addressing it. Don’t be intimidated by this task – it’s not as difficult to resolve. There’s a neat guide provided here: Google’s Ads.txt Guide. The guide is good BUT there was a lot of extra information I didn’t need. A couple of steps that helped me are listed below for quick reference. Take note that I only use WordPress self-hosted sites and a few Blogger-hosted sites.

1. Go to your Google Adsense account and at the top, you will see a message saying “Earnings at risk – You need to fix some ads.txt file issues to avoid severe impact to your revenue.” To the right of this message will be two links: “Fix Now” and “Learn More”. Click on Fix Now. A download link button will be available for you not too far down the page with a list of sites you’ve associated with your Google Adsense account. Click the download link and take note of where your Ads.txt file is saved.
2. For WordPress self-hosted sites, I use a cool plugin called File Manager. You could go to cPanel for this step but I opted to do it all from within my WordPress backend. With File Manager installed, I simply navigated to WP File Manager on the left-hand side of my WordPress backend and selected my “public_html” destination which is the root level of my website and simply drag-dropped the Ads.txt file in there.
3. For Blogger hosted-sites, it’s a little different because they have a specific custom ads.txt “tool” which you can edit and save. So first you need to copy the contents of the previously downloaded Ads.txt file which will look something like this “google.com, pub-0000000000000000, DIRECT, f08c47fec0942fa0”. Once this was copied into my clipboard, I logged into my Blogger account and navigated to Settings>Search Preferences and looked for Custom ads.text under Monetization. Enable Custom ads.txt and click edit, then paste in the contents of your Ads.txt file in here and click save. Your set!
4. Test out by navigating to your sites ads.txt location. Sample www.abc.com/ads.txt, if all was done correctly you’ll see something like “google.com, pub-0000000000000000, DIRECT, f08c47fec0942fa0”.

Sources:

• https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/7532444?hl=en&ref_topic=7533328
• https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-file-manager/
• https://support.google.com/blogger/answer/1269077?hl=en