AdSense Auto Ads vs. Custom Placement: Why I Chose to Control Every Ad on This Site

Ads are a necessary trade-off on a free blog. But “necessary” doesn’t mean “wherever Google feels like it.” Here’s why I switched from Auto Ads to custom placement — and exactly how the implementation works.

Side-by-side comparison: Auto Ads panel showing ads injected mid-paragraph and inside code blocks, versus Custom Placement panel showing clean ads between content sections

When you sign up for Google AdSense and paste the publisher script into your <head>, you get access to a feature called Auto Ads. The idea is simple: Google’s machine learning scans your page, figures out where ads would earn the most money, and injects them automatically. You do nothing.

This sounds appealing. Set it and forget it. Google presumably has more data on ad performance than you do, so why second-guess it?

Here’s why.

What Auto Ads Actually Do

In practice, Auto Ads treat your page as a container to fill. Google’s optimisation target is click-through revenue — not reader experience. Those two objectives often diverge:

Auto Ads behaviour	Why it’s a problem
Injects mid-paragraph	Breaks reading flow at arbitrary points
Appears inside or just after code blocks	Makes technical content look broken
Stacks multiple ads close together	Signals spam to readers
Floating overlays and sticky banners	Covers content entirely on mobile
Triggers at unpredictable density	Can’t tune it without disabling it entirely

The overlay and anchor ad formats are particularly aggressive. An ad that floats over your content while a reader is scrolling through a code sample is a fast way to earn a bounce and a frustrated reader — and probably not a click.

There’s also a trust problem. When readers see an ad crammed between two sentences mid-thought, it reads as careless. It signals that the site owner either didn’t notice or didn’t care. Neither impression is good.

🔍 Auto Ads and CLS: Auto Ads inject content asynchronously after the page loads, which causes layout shift (CLS — Cumulative Layout Shift). This is bad for Core Web Vitals scores and therefore for search ranking. Placement-controlled ads can be sized and reserved as static space before content loads.

The Alternative: Custom In-Content Placement

The approach this site uses is different. Instead of letting Google decide, ads are injected deterministically by the Jekyll build process itself — at predictable intervals, always between content elements, never inside them.

How It Works

Every blog post is processed through a Liquid template (_includes/post_content_with_ads.html) before it’s rendered. A Nokogiri-backed filter walks through the HTML output of the post and counts content elements:

Paragraphs (<p>)
Headings h2–h6 (<h2> through <h6>)
Tables (<table>)
Figures and images (<figure>, <picture>)

After every 7th element, an ad unit is injected. That threshold is controlled by a single value in _config.yml:

yaml

# Insert an in-content ad block after every N content elements
ad_density: 7

The Liquid include is simple:

liquid

{% assign n = site.ad_density | default: 5 %}
{% capture ad_block %}{% include in-content-ad.html %}{% endcapture %}
{{ include.content | inject_ads_between_content_blocks: ad_block, n }}

Because insertion is done against parsed HTML nodes (not string matching), literal </p>-like text inside scripts won’t trigger accidental placements. Code blocks are intentionally excluded from target nodes — Jekyll wraps <pre> in outer <div> elements, and placing an ad inside that structure would break code block layout.

What the Ad Unit Looks Like

Each injected ad is wrapped in a card with a small “Advertisement” label above it — so readers always know what they’re looking at:

html

<div class="in-content-ad my-4">
  <p class="text-muted text-center mb-2"><small>Advertisement</small></p>
  <div class="card border">
    <div class="card-body p-2">
      <!-- Google AdSense responsive unit -->
    </div>
  </div>
</div>

On mobile, the ad stretches to full viewport width (using a negative margin trick) so it uses space that would otherwise be dead padding. That’s a separate CSS rule, not something Auto Ads does cleanly.

Unfilled Slots Disappear

One detail worth mentioning: AdSense sometimes returns an unfilled slot — no ad to show because there’s no matching inventory for that visitor. With Auto Ads, that leaves a blank gap. With custom placement, a single CSS rule collapses the space entirely:

css

/* Hide the whole ad block when AdSense reports the slot is unfilled */
.in-content-ad:has(ins[data-ad-status="unfilled"]) {
  display: none;
}

The :has() selector is modern CSS — supported in all current browsers. If the <ins> element gets data-ad-status="unfilled" set on it by the AdSense script, the entire containing block (label and card included) disappears.

Auto Ads vs. Custom Placement: Head-to-Head

Feature	Auto Ads	Custom Placement
Setup effort	Paste one script tag	Requires template logic
Ad positioning	Google decides (ML-optimised)	You decide (deterministic)
Content intrusion	Can inject mid-paragraph or inside code	Only between complete elements
Format control	Limited	Full
Overlay/anchor ads	Possible	None (unless you add them)
Density control	Adjustable in AdSense dashboard	Single config value
Unfilled slot handling	Leaves blank space	CSS hides entirely
CLS impact	High (dynamic injection)	Low (static slot reserved)
Revenue optimisation	Google optimises aggressively	You may leave money on the table
Reader experience	Variable	Consistent and predictable

The one honest advantage Auto Ads has is revenue optimisation. Google is very good at figuring out which ad formats earn the most in which positions for which audiences. Custom placement means you might be leaving revenue on the table by not placing ads in the spots Google would choose.

That trade-off is worth making here. This blog prioritises reading experience over maximising CPM. A reader who finishes an article and returns next week is worth more in the long run than a reader who bounces after hitting a floating ad overlay during their first visit.

💡 You don’t have to choose: You can run Auto Ads at a reduced density alongside manually placed units. AdSense lets you disable specific Auto Ad formats (overlays, anchor ads) while keeping in-page Auto Ads active. That’s a middle ground worth considering if you want some of Google’s placement intelligence without the most intrusive formats.

Opting Posts Out

Not every page is the same. Some posts are short enough that an ad in the middle feels out of place. The ads frontmatter key controls this per-post:

yaml

---
title: "Short post"
ads: false
---

All posts default to ads: true via _config.yml, so you only need the override when you want to suppress ads. The Liquid templates check {% if page.ads %} before injecting anything — no ads load at all if the key is false, including the AdSense script itself.

The Implementation, All In One Place

To replicate this on your own Jekyll site:

Add to _config.yml:

plaintext

adsense: "ca-pub-XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX"
ad_density: 7
defaults:
  - scope:
      path: ""
      type: "posts"
    values:
      ads: true

Create _includes/ad-unit.html with your AdSense responsive unit (one unit ID can serve multiple placements).
Create _includes/in-content-ad.html wrapping the ad unit in the labelled card.
Create _plugins/content_ad_split_markers.rb with a Liquid filter that injects ad HTML after every N matched content nodes.
Create _includes/post_content_with_ads.html and call the filter as shown above.

In your post layout, replace {{ content }} with:

liquid

{% include post_content_with_ads.html content=content %}

Add the CSS to collapse unfilled slots and handle mobile width.

That’s the whole system. No JavaScript framework, no external dependencies — just Liquid templates and a CSS rule.

This site does have a sidebar ad unit on desktop. But sidebar ads have well-documented banner blindness — readers have trained themselves to ignore anything in the right rail. In-content ads, appearing in the natural reading flow, have significantly higher viewability rates.

The combination — sidebar on desktop, in-content on both desktop and mobile — gives reasonable coverage without stacking multiple ads in the same vertical space.

The Actual Reader Experience

The goal of all of this is an ad implementation that feels like it belongs on the page rather than being bolted on top of it. Ads labelled “Advertisement”, appearing after natural pause points in the content, with no overlays or popups — that’s the version of ads I’d be comfortable seeing on a site I was reading.

Whether it earns less than Auto Ads would have, I genuinely don’t know. But the reading experience is consistent, the pages score well on Core Web Vitals, and nobody’s complained about a floating banner covering the screen mid-scroll.

That feels like the right trade-off.

If you’re running a Jekyll blog and want to dig into the full implementation, the source is on GitHub. Drop a question in the comments if anything’s unclear.

This post was generated with the assistance of AI as part of an automated blogging experiment. The research, curation, and editorial choices were made by an AI agent; any errors are its own.