WordPress Tip: Adsense Errors and Problems with Google Plugin

I recently experienced two separate issues with Google Adsense on my WordPress Site that uses the official Google adsense plugin.  If you have problems with any Google product you will find that unlike Apple it is almost impossible to speak with a human being for help. Their human support is nonexistent unless you fall into their premium support tier of customers. I asked my question in their help forum but didn’t receive any useful recommendations.

I was having two separate but possibly interrelated issues. When I was logged into Adsense all the tabs work fine with the exception of “My Ads” tab. For over a week this is the message that I was seeing

“We apologize for the inconvenience, but we are unable to process your request at this time. Our engineers have been notified of this problem and will work to resolve it.”

The screenshot below doesn’t show the error message because my problem has now been resolved but instead of seeing Content>Ad Units I would see the error message above.

The other problem I was experiencing simultaneously happened within the WordPress Adsense plugin. I wasn’t happy with the locations of my ads, so I wanted to move them around.

In the settings you click Ad Manager and the ads are highlighted in green and you can move them around. I moved them to where I wanted, but every time I tried to save the new ad placement I would get an error message saying “Update Failed”

The good news is my old ad placement were still running but it was very frustrating  not to be able to change them around to new locations.

The Solution

This is what worked for me. It seems something got corrupted within somewhere inside WordPress and I still am not sure what it was. I disabled all my plugins with the exception of Google Adsense. That still didn’t fix the issue.

So my next step was to change themes. I used the default WordPress 2014 theme. Any of the default themes that come with WordPress should work. I then opened Adsense and it still was giving me the “Update Failed” message so I did one additional step and disabled all my widgets.

It was still not working so I switched Themes a few more times between 2012 and 2014 themes and then opened Adsense again and it finally worked! Something about switching themes a few times and disabling the widgets fixed the corrupt file that was causing Adsense not to be able to save any changes.

I moved my ads around and when I saved that configuration I no longer saw an error message. I disabled all my ads and saved. I then switched back to my normal theme that you are seeing now and opened Adsense to place the Ads where I wanted them to be located. Then I reinstalled all my widgets and placed them where I wanted. Adsense is now working exactly like it is supposed to without any error messages from the plugin or from the My Ads tabs of the Adsense website.

So remember to change themes, disables widgets, change themes a few times if needed, then open Adsense and try and save ad placement. This should do the trick. After I fixed the error message within the plugin the My Ads tab no longer displayed that error message. Not sure if that was a coincidence or Google’s engineers actually fixed the problem.

Hope this helps some of you that have experienced the same problem.