Google DFP ads appear and quickly disappear from sticky sidebar - css

Question

I use a sticky sidebar on my website - https://geek.hr/znanost and i have DFP ads in it.
The problem is that the right top sidebar ad will load and then disappear quickly.
This happens randomly in all browsers, but almost always in Edge browser.
Does anyone know what the problem is?
Thanks

Answer 1

I've played with your site a bit and have found the following:
When nothing is displayed the outer container has a correct size but an internal ad has 0 height hence nothing is shown. I've examined the inner creative contents and it looks like it's trying to load something related to flash. It may seem that it 'disappears' because usually flash banners do load an intermediate image first and only then replace it with a .swf file.
When other (non-flash) creative wins the auction all looks fine hence the adtags setup looks good
So I would conclude that something is wrong with flash creatives rendering more so because you're using SafeFrames

Answer 2

Many sticky sidebars work by cloning your original sidebar, which can break unique elements that have events attached to them.
If your sticky sidebar has a unique class/ID that distinguishes it from a non-sticky sidebar, then you can just wait for it to appear before loading the ad:
<div id='sidebar_ad'></div>
<script>
function load_sticky_sidebar_ad()
{
let sidebar_ad_container = document.querySelector('#sidebar_ad');
if (sidebar_ad_container === null || sidebar_ad_container.closest('.theiaStickySidebar') === null)
{
(function(){window.setTimeout(load_sticky_sidebar_ad, 50);})();
}
else
{
googletag.cmd.push(function()
{
googletag.display('sidebar_ad');
});
}
}
(function(){window.setTimeout(load_sticky_sidebar_ad, 50);})();
</script>
Some modification might be needed depending on how your exact sticky sidebar works, but the general logic there should work for just about any sticky sidebar.