Keeping up with AdSense, August Edition

The Inside AdSense blog is full of great tips and expert advice on topics of great interest to a modern web publisher such as content, ad viewability, mobile optimization, analytics, and more.

In Keeping up with AdSense, we compile the top insights in one handy little list. We know your time’s better spent reading one post instead of 10, and sometimes you just feel lazy — which is fine, too.

Either way, you’re welcome.

1. Optimize Mobile Ad Sizes

AdSense stresses the importance of optimizing your mobile ad sizes for maximum revenue. Statistically speaking:

• RPM increase could be possible if you swap 320×50 ad unit with 320×100 (and place it slightly above the fold).


• Mix 300×250 unit with content below the fold for a potential increase in CPM.


• Keep a minimum 150 px whitespace between (enhanced-features-enabled) text ads and content to prevent accidental clicks and ruined UX.

Then again, these are guidelines, what worked for others may not work for you. Use your own good judgement and optimize to find ad placements and sizes that bring you the most revenue.

2. Matched Content

Matched content mixes relevant content from your own site and sponsored content (from around the web), this is AdSense’s foray into the native ad segment.

Put this unit where it matters — in an area where it will be highly viewable (more on that in a moment) and will look enticing enough to engage your audience.

Here are some matched content placement best practices.

Also, make sure you’re constantly monitoring their performance. Here are  some matched content metrics to monitor.

3. Improve Ad Viewability

This is the bar for viewability — at  least half of your ad unit’s pixels should be visible in the viewport for minimum 1 second. This is the next ad currency in a UX-conscious web.

Think with Google had some great insights on ad viewability. According to the report, what works best are relatively small (120×240 and 240×400 px) vertical ad units placed near the fold.

It is also stated that:

While viewability varies across industry verticals, content that holds user’s attention works best everywhere.

Bottom line: You want more viewability for ad units? Create awesome, engaging content, regardless of your niche.

4. Be Social With Google

There’s content with ‘long shelf-life’—the evergreen, helpful information that users just keep coming back to without fail. Then there’s viral content.

Adsense assigns significance on social media and the need to duly cover topical themes and events to make an impact with your social marketing. Find the latest topics with Google Trends, give it all you got with other Research Tools and create covetable content that’ll be instant hits with your audience.

Incorporate this in bite-sized, social-media-friendly formats in manners that will resonate with your audience in your strategy and you will get noticed like never before.

Here are some tips from AdSense blog on how to amplify content with social media.

5. Audience Engagement Tools

AdSense shared some UX and brand-building tips from its well-known Guide to Audience Engagement to help you create and nurture a fantastic image online.

• Maintain a consistent voice and image across all touchpoints that your brand has with the audience. This includes the website, blogs, and just…all of the social media channels.


• Know your audience. Know what motivates them to share content. According to NYT, 68% people share content.


• Don’t just share and leave ’em hanging. Engage and involve your audience to create relationships that last with a brand that’s human.

There’s also a nice little list of tools to help you kick start your social media strategy. Go ahead and check it out here.

6. Get AMPed Up

AMP Project was born in an attempt to make mobile web browsing faster for every Joe who tried and failed to find information online on their phone in the time-limit of 3 seconds.

In February this year, Google started giving out positions in “Top Stories” section (for relevant mobile searches) to pages created with AMP, which immediately led to widespread adoption of AMP amongst publishers (for obvious SERP-centric reasons with a bare-bones, superfast mobile-UX benefits thrown in for good measure).

Emboldened by this success, Google launched an early preview of expanded AMP support earlier this month.

The purpose is to gain feedback from users, web developers, and site owners to “create a better mobile search experience” and to test the waters before making AMP more universally available later this year.

This gives enough time for publishers to get their act together and begin implementing AMP on their site pages.

We recently published a publisher’s guide to AMP which should come in handy if you’re still confused about the basics.

Seriously though, no matter which side you fall on, this is good news.

8. Better Content With Google Analytics

Jay Castro (of Google’s Mobile Content marketing team ) put out a brilliant post compiling ways to improve your content strategy with Google Analytics.

Here’s our take on it (with step-wise guides and hypothetical instances thrown in for laughs).

Key Takeaway

AdSense wants you (yes you!) to focus on creating content your audience wants and loves. To do that, you’ll need to know who your audience is and what exactly they expect from you.

Optimize content and ad units for mobile. Get up and AMP up your mobile experience.  Tell some stories, be funny (or radical or silly… just find your own voice), and establish a presence.

The revenue will come. Your content just has to be worth it.

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Big AdSense Policy Update: Ad Limits Per Page Lifted, Valuable Inventory Introduced

Google just made a policy change that is bound to make web publishers happy — they often don’t make announcements about product and policy changes and users are left to their own devices to eventually figure it out.

This is the reason why there are hundreds of web publications dedicated to documenting changes and updates to Google search and ad products. Most of these publications depend on lucky breaks — accidental discoveries, word sent in by insiders, and tips by users.

We recently found out about an important policy update in Google AdSense via one of the aforementioned means; these are important changes, and as far as we can tell, no one has or is covering them.

Visual Proof of Policy Change

You can view the exact changes that have been made to the ad serving policies by clicking on the two images below; the older image is a screenshot from 10/08/2016 and the other image contains the new policy.

Old AdSense policy

New AdSense policies

Detailed Account of Policy Change

Here are the text excerpts of the old policy, which has now been removed, and the new policy that has been introduced in its place.

> Old (obsolete) policy: Ad limit per page

Currently, on each page AdSense publishers may place:

Publishers may not place more than one “large” ad unit per page. We define a “large” ad unit as any unit similar in size to our 300×600 format.

Go here to read the full text on Wayback Machine.

> New policy: Valuable inventory

Advertising and other paid promotional material added to your pages should not exceed your content.

Furthermore, the content you provide should add value and be the focal point for users visiting your page.

For this reason, we may limit or disable ad serving on pages with little to no value and/or excessive advertising until changes are made. Examples of unacceptable pages include but are not limited to:

• Mirroring, framing, scraping or rewriting of content from other sources without adding value;


• Pages with more advertising than publisher-provided content;


• Automatically generated content without manual review or curation;


• Hosted ad pages or pages without content;


• Pages that don’t follow our Webmaster Quality Guidelines.

Source page for new policy.

Summary of Policy Changes

1. You can now place more than 3 ad units on a web page.


2. You can now place more than one large (> 300×600) ad unit on a web page.


3. Policies still only allows one 320×100 ad unit above the fold on mobile. Below the fold, however,  there is no limit now.

What This Means for You

Generally speaking, this is a relaxation of policies. If you’ve ever used AdX, you’d know that one of the selling points for its use tends to be about how you can place more than 3 ad units on a page — well, now you can do it with AdSense as well.

The new policy seems to be more about subjective evaluation of content dubbed “valuable inventory” and its usefulness to users instead of a having rigid set of rules to abide by.

It’s not hard to speculate why Google would make such a move — publishers have been having a hard enough time as it is dealing with ad blockers and falling revenues, and these particular set of policies were at the top of the list of reasons that led to account suspensions.

Our Advice

Just because there are no limits on ad placements now does not mean you should go crazy about it and litter your page with ads.

First, that would in principle violate the “valuable inventory” policy, so you need to use your good judgement.

Second, the most effective way to improve ad revenue still remains experimenting with ad layouts and A/B testing ad units instead of blindly adding more units.

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