Google Data

Cross-posted from The Keyword 
A free and open web is a vital resource for people and businesses around the world. And ads play a key role in ensuring you have access to accurate, quality information online. But bad ads can ruin the online experience for everyone. They promote illegal products and unrealistic offers. They can trick people into sharing personal information and infect devices with harmful software. Ultimately, bad ads pose a threat to users, Google’s partners, and the sustainability of the open web itself.
We have a strict set of policies that govern the types of ads we do and don’t allow on Google in order to protect people from misleading, inappropriate, or harmful ads. And we have a team of engineers, policy experts, product managers and others who are waging a daily fight against bad actors. Over the years, this commitment has made the web a better place for you—and a worse place for those who seek to abuse advertising systems for their own gain.
In 2016, we took down 1.7 billion ads that violated our advertising policies, more than double the amount of bad ads we took down in 2015. If you spent one second taking down each of those bad ads, it’d take you more than 50 years to finish. But our technology is built to work much faster.
Last year, we did two key things to take down more bad ads. First, we expanded our policies to better protect users from misleading and predatory offers. For example, in July we introduced a policy to ban ads for payday loans, which often result in unaffordable payments and high default rates for users. In the six months since launching this policy, we disabled more than 5 million payday loan ads. Second, we beefed up our technology so we can spot and disable bad ads even faster. For example, “trick to click” ads often appear as system warnings to deceive users into clicking on them, not realizing they are often downloading harmful software or malware. In 2016, our systems detected and disabled a total of 112 million ads for “trick to click,” 6X more than in 2015.
Here are a few more examples of bad ads we took action against in 2016:
Ads for illegal products 
Some of the most common bad ads we find online are ads promoting illegal activities or products. Although we’ve long had a policy against bad ads for pharmaceuticals, last year our systems detected an increase online. We disabled more than 68 million bad ads for healthcare violations, up from 12.5 million in 2015.
Similarly, we saw more attempts to advertise gambling-related promotions without proper authorization from regulators in the countries they operate. We took down more than 17 million bad ads for illegal gambling violations in 2016.

17M ads removed for illegal gambling violations

Misleading ads
We don’t want you to feel misled by ads that we deliver, so we require our advertisers to provide upfront information for people to make informed decisions. Some ads try to drive clicks and views by intentionally misleading people with false information like asking, “Are you at risk for this rare, skin-eating disease?” or offering miracle cures like a pill that will help you lose 50 pounds in three days without lifting a finger. In 2016, we took down nearly 80 million bad ads for deceiving, misleading and shocking users.
Bad ads on mobile
If you’ve ever been on your phone and suddenly, without warning, ended up in the app store downloading an app you’ve never heard of, a “self-clicking ad” could be to blame. In 2015, we disabled only a few thousand of these bad ads, but in 2016, our systems detected and disabled more than 23,000 self-clicking ads on our platforms, a huge increase year over year.
Ads trying to game the system
Bad actors know that ads for certain products—like weight-loss supplements or payday loans—aren’t allowed by Google’s policies, so they try to trick our systems into letting them through. Last year, we took down almost 7 million bad ads for intentionally attempting to trick our detection systems.
In 2016, we saw the rise of tabloid cloakers, a new type of scammer that tries to game our system by pretending to be news. Cloakers often take advantage of timely topics—a government election, a trending news story or a popular celebrity—and their ads can look like headlines on a news website. But when people click on that story about Ellen DeGeneres and aliens, they go to a site selling weight-loss products, not a news story.
To fight cloakers, we take down the scammers themselves, and prevent them from advertising with us again. In 2016, we suspended more than 1,300 accounts for tabloid cloaking. Unfortunately, this type of bad ad is gaining in popularity because people are clicking on them. And a handful of scammers can pump out a lot of bad ads: During a single sweep for tabloid cloaking in December 2016, we took down 22 cloakers that were responsible for ads seen more than 20 million times by people online in a single week.

1,300+ accounts suspended for tabloid cloaking

Promoting and profiting from bad sites
When we find ads that violate our policies, we block the ad or the advertiser, depending on the violation. But sometimes we also need to suspend the website promoted in the ad (the site people see after they click on it). So, for example, while we disabled more than 5 million payday loan ads last year, we also took action on 8,000 sites promoting payday loans.

Here are some examples of common policy violations we saw among bad sites in 2016:

• We took action on 47,000 sites for promoting content and products related to weight-loss scams. 
• We took action on more than 15,000 sites for unwanted software and disabled 900,000 ads for containing malware.
• And we suspended around 6,000 sites and 6,000 accounts for attempting to advertise counterfeit goods, like imitation designer watches. 

Publishers and website owners use our AdSense platform to make money by running ads on their sites and content, so we have strict policies in place to keep Google’s content and search networks safe and clean for our advertisers, users and publishers. When a publisher violates our policies, we may stop showing ads on their site, or even terminate their account.
We’ve had long-standing policies prohibiting AdSense publishers from running ads on sites that help people deceive others, like a site where you buy fake diplomas or plagiarized term papers. In November, we expanded on these policies, introducing a new AdSense misrepresentative content policy, that helps us to take action against website owners misrepresenting who they are and that deceive people with their content. From November to December 2016, we reviewed 550 sites that were suspected of misrepresenting content to users, including impersonating news organizations.  We took action against 340 of them for violating our policies, both misrepresentation and other offenses, and nearly 200 publishers were kicked out of our network permanently.
In addition to all the above, we support industry efforts like the Coalition for Better Ads to protect people from bad experiences across the web. While we took down more bad ads in 2016 than ever before, the battle doesn’t end here. As we invest in better detection, the scammers invest in more elaborate attempts to trick our systems. Continuing to find and fight them is essential to protecting people online and ensuring you get the very best from the open web.
Posted by Scott Spencer, Director of Product Management, Sustainable Ads

Every year more people are using their phones and devices to browse web pages. In 2013, mobile made up only 17% of web traffic. In 2016, this number has risen to over 38%. Within the next couple of years, mobile traffic will easily surpass 50%.

This is why you need to take time to optimize your AdSense ads for mobile traffic. Although you can easily grab a responsive AdSense ad unit, there are more ways to optimize your ad units for mobile. It may be the easiest way, but I’ve found that the easy way usually does not always produce the best results. I’ve tested the responsive ad units on my blogs against manual optimization, and the results were staggering.

The manual optimization of my ads produced a 54% increase in my AdSense revenue.

Here’s what I learned from the tests I ran:

#1 A large mobile banner at the top of the page earned the most money on my site

The highest producing location was below the title of a post and above the first paragraph. It’s important to know that  AdSense amended their policy on ads above the fold on mobile devices, and you can no longer use the 300×250 ad above the fold on mobile.

#2 Hide the sidebar ads in tablets and mobile

The sidebar is going to be pushed down to the bottom of the post when it is viewed in mobile. This is essentially banishing any ads in the sidebar to no man’s land. Most premium WordPress themes will allow you to turn off ad spots in the sidebar. This will allow you to drop in an additional AdSense ad into the post to get maximum monetization from mobile.

#3 The best ad grouping was top, middle, and bottom

Out of all the mobile ad groupings, this one easily produced the most revenue for me. The grouping was made up of one 320×100 ad and two 250×250 ads. The first ad was below the title and above the first paragraph. The second ad was placed after the 6th paragraph of the post. The final ad was placed at the end of the post.

In addition to mobile optimization, I applied four AdSense optimization strategies, which resulted in an overall revenue increase of close to 300%.  Whether you are making $500/month or $5000/month, a 300% increase can make a huge impact on your yearly earnings.

Go here to read all of my “5 AdSense Optimization Strategies that Will Increase Your Earnings.”

Posted By
Brandon Gaille

Brandon Gaille is an AdSense publisher. You can learn more about Brandon at BrandonGaille.com and listen to his popular blogging podcast, The Blog Millionaire.

If you’re new to AdSense, be sure to sign up for AdSense and start turning your #PassionIntoProfit. 

What is programmatic?
Originally, digital ad sales required you to go out and sell your ad space direct to advertisers. If they liked the price they agreed to the sale. If not, they may have negotiated with you. All this took time, required advanced bookings, and necessitated a lot of leg work on both sides.

Programmatic advertising takes your digital ad inventory and matches it to buyers looking for the ad space you offer, doing the selling for you. It uses software and algorithms as a go between, increasing ad revenues through a bidding system where the highest paying buyer’s ad is chosen for each space.

The easy way to try programmatic

Posted by Jay Castro, from the AdSense team

Google Analytics defines bounce rate as the percentage of single-page sessions, which essentially means the people that left your site after seeing only a single page. When your bounce rate is high, it also means that your AdSense ads may not be seen by a large percentage of your audience.

Over the years, I’ve researched this topic many times over in an effort to constantly decrease the bounce rate of my sites and my clients’ sites. Through countless hours of A/B testing and deep analytics research, I was able to identify 25 tactics that consistently reduced the bounce rate.

The great thing about most of these tactics is that they usually only take a matter of minutes to incorporate, and you can start seeing results the next day.

#1 Do not use more than 7 sentences per paragraph

You never want to block too much text together. One really long paragraph can easily overwhelm your visitors and lead them to hitting the back button.

Most bloggers write their posts on a desktop or laptop computer. From a computer, the occasional 12 to 15 sentence paragraph does not look too intimidating. However, over 50% of my blog visitors are using their phones to read the posts on my site. On a phone, these long paragraphs will fill up the entire screen and add to your bounce rate.

I like to break up my paragraphs into different sizes. This can make the text of a post visually stimulating, which can turn scanners into readers.

Using an occasional single sentence paragraph will speed up the flow of article and add some nice white space.

#2 Keep your column width between 700 and 800 pixels

There have been many big name bloggers that have been considering ditching the sidebar. Although the sidebar does not get as many clicks as it once did, this is largely due to the increase in mobile traffic.

A post without a sidebar will have a column width well beyond 800 pixels. This is going to make your content look very long on a desktop computer. The ideal width for engagement is 700 pixels, which will allow between 80 and 90 characters per line.

Smashing Magazine did a study on the typographic design patterns in websites. When they looked at a segment of websites with the highest engagement, they found the majority of these sites had between 75 and 90 characters per line.

Source of image: Smashing Magazine

#3 Organize your content with headers and sub-headers

Based on reviewing heat maps of million and millions of page views, I’ve found that visitors of blog posts are made up of a mix of readers and scanners. To be precise, the results showed that 40% are readers and 60% are scanners. The readers start by reading the introduction paragraph, and the scanners scroll through the entire post. The scanners consistently stop scrolling to read each header and sub-header.

For the readers, most bloggers are pulling them into the post with a great introduction. However, the vast majority fail to create compelling headers. The easiest type of post to break into headers is the list post. For example, “13 Habits that Lead to Success.”

Each habit should be turned into a bold header and be able to stand alone as its own title. The goal here is to create thirteen compelling titles. Each title is designed to grab the reader’s attention and drive them into reading that section.

If you’ve enjoyed these three tips to decrease your bounce rate, go here to read all of the “25 Proven Ways to Decrease Your Bounce Rate.”

Posted By
Brandon Gaille

Brandon Gaille is an AdSense publisher. You can learn more about Brandon at BrandonGaille.com and listen to his popular blogging podcast, The Blog Millionaire.

 If you’re new to AdSense, be sure to sign up for AdSense and start turning your #PassionIntoProfit. 

• Access Google’s large network of advertisers 
• Grow your publishing business 
• Earn more from the ads on your site

This first article can help you choose the right tools to sell and manage the ads on your site.

AdSense: Get started with easy access to Google’s network of advertisers
Who it’s for: Publishers looking for a smart and easy-to-use tool to optimize their ad space and revenue.

What it does: AdSense makes it easy for you to place, manage and earn revenue from ads on your site. With AdSense, Google is your advertising sales team, bringing you ads from millions of advertisers using AdWords and other Google advertising programs.

AdSense includes simple and easy controls to help you get started with earning money from ads, but it also does a lot of work behind the scenes to help you make more money. It’s a bit like an automatic car — it removes some of the manual adjustment, allowing you to cruise along with less effort. You still need regular “tune ups” to get optimal performance, but you won’t need to shift gears all the time.

DoubleClick Ad Exchange: Control who gets programmatic access to the ads on your site with advanced features
Who it’s for: Publishers who require a more granular control over their inventory and who have the resources and expertise to manage ongoing optimizations. This product is suited to publishers with yield management expertise and those who have need for advanced features like Programmatic Direct.

What it does: DoubleClick Ad Exchange gives you real-time access to the largest pool of advertisers. This means that in addition to AdWords advertisers, you can also access major ad networks and agencies.

A major difference between DoubleClick Ad Exchange and AdSense is that AdSense does a lot of the technical settings and optimization work for you, such as automating the sale of all your ad space to the highest bidder. With DoubleClick Ad Exchange, you can control these adjustments yourself and control exactly how your inventory is sold. As an example, DoubleClick Ad Exchange allows you to choose which ad space is for public sale and which is reserved for private auctions. This increased amount of user input is necessary for you to get the best results from DoubleClick Ad Exchange. Another important distinction is that the AdSense demand is majority AdWords advertisers, whereas DoubleClick Ad Exchange pulls demand from multiple sources. You can see the full list of differences at our help center.

DoubleClick For Publishers: Scale your advertising business
Who it’s for: Publishers who are looking for a tool that has AdSense or Ad Exchange built in, along with lots of useful features to help them, schedule, deliver and measure their ad inventory regardless of how they sell it, to networks, programmatically or through their own direct sales teams.

What it does: DoubleClick for Publishers is a single platform that allows you to manage and deliver all of your web, mobile, and video advertising across all your sales channels. It doesn’t come with it’s own ads, but rather helps you scale your ads business by managing your ad sales across a variety of ad networks such as AdSense, ad exchanges like DoubleClick and direct advertising partners. You can get started with the small business version right away for free, or talk to us about integrating with the premium, paid version that is built for large organizations with sophisticated ad sales teams.

Both versions have a simple interface, lots of great tools, built-in revenue optimization, and Google powered ad delivery to provide a simple, worry-free way to potentially increase the value of your ad impressions.

Ready to get started?
You can arrange a consultation with one of our experts who can help you to choose the right solution for your business, and setup AdSense, DoubleClick Ad Exchange or DoubleClick for Publishers.

Posted by Jay Castro, from the AdSense team.

Over the past three years, I’ve crafted titles for over 5,000 blog posts and have received over 58 million unique visitors to date. With that many titles and that much traffic, it’s allowed me to identify what types of titles get the most traffic.

The title of your page or blog post will play one of the largest roles in how much traffic you receive. From my extensive experience, a really great title can move your blog post dis and increase the number of social shares by over 300%.

The bottom line is… If you fail to write a compelling title that gets people to click, then your post is doomed to wallow in mediocrity.

Here are a few title optimization tactics that have proven to drive the most traffic.

#1 Place a number at the beginning of your title

If you have a list formatted post, then you need to be using numbered titles every single time. Titles that begin with numbers are proving to drive traffic. This is largely due to the increased consumption of users reading list posts more than any other type of blog post. A list post typically has anywhere from seven to forty key points, which are listed out numerically.
This makes it really easy for anyone to scan through the big takeaways and decide whether to dive deeper into the article. When people see the number 13 at the beginning of the title, they know they can scan through all 13 key points in a matter of seconds.

A numbered title paired with a list post will drive more clicks to your post and list style posts have one of the highest engagement rates. Posts with more clicks and higher engagement often are rewarded by becoming more discoverable to users.

Here are a couple of examples of numbered blog titles:

• 11 Tools to Create Share-Worthy Content
• 17 Incredible Social Media Statistics

I recommend crafting numbered blog post titles for more than half of your posts.

A Conductor study on headline preferences also backs up what I’ve found to be true on my blog.

#2 The odd number gets 20% more clicks than the even number

Although no one has figured out exactly why this happens, the odd numbered titles get more clicks than the even numbered titles. Here’s an example.
Odd Numbered Title: 11 Keys to Earning More Money on Adsense
Even Numbered Title: 12 Types of Ads that Convert

Before you hit publish on the blog post titled, “8 Crazy Ways to Double Your Ad Revenue,” take a moment to either add one more tip or remove the least valuable tip. This will allow you to capitalize on the extra twenty percent of clicks by having an odd numbered title.

Learn more about creating better blog titles from my blog and read all of the “17 Ways to Create Catchy Blog Titles That Drive Traffic.”

Posted By
Brandon Gaille

Brandon Gaille is an AdSense publisher. You can learn more about Brandon at BrandonGaille.com and listen to his popular blogging podcast, The Blog Millionaire.

If you’re new to AdSense, be sure to sign up for AdSense and start turning your #PassionIntoProfit. 

 If you’re new to AdSense, be sure to sign up today and start turning your #PassionIntoProfit. 

1. Speed 

We all know how frustrating it is when a page takes forever to load. We twiddle our thumbs and look from side to side. And after just three seconds, we bounce.

But somehow publishers aren’t responding to this primal need that we all know as users.

According to Google’s research from the Mobile Speed Matters report, the average load time for mobile sites across the web is 19 seconds. This is a LONG time. Usain Bolt can run 200m in 19.9s – think of what your users can do with a tap and a swipe.

But how does this impact me? Well, the report also states that…

• 53% of mobile site visits are abandoned if pages take longer than 3 seconds to load.
• Publishers whose mobile sites load in 5 seconds earn up to 2x more mobile ad revenue than those whose sites load in 19 seconds. 

By now we think you’re sold on speed. So what’s next?

• Understand your site’s speed with these resources
• • PageSpeed Insights 
  • Web Developer Kit 
• Consider one of the following quick fixes
• • Asynchronous loading
  • Lazy Loading
  • AMP 
• Get our mobile web speed toolkit and…
• • Measure your site’s performance
  • Assess the different components impacting speed
  • Prioritize the order your site loads
  • Test, remeasure and repeat to improve your site speed

Infinite scroll is great for …

• UGC publishers with constantly evolving content – think Tumblr, Facebook, Pinterest.
• Sites with lengthy articles or tutorials. No one wants to click ‘more’ or ‘page 2’ anymore. It’s just too dang hard. 
• Publishers using a slideshow with pagination. Consider a lazy loaded infinite scroll instead. Users love it. 
• Publishers considering mobile first (aren’t we all?!).

Watch out for … 

• Crawler errors & SEO impact and check out this article for creating a search friendly infinite scroll. 

3. Style 

Style should never be an afterthought. You and your users want to interact with something that looks good and feels good. 

There are two primary components to style: content style & ad style. 

First: Content Style 

Great websites are able to maintain a consistent style  across pages and platforms. Consistency gives users a sense of familiarity when interacting with your content. 

• Choose a color scheme and stick to it 
• Choose a layout and stick to it 
• Choose a theme and stick to it 

We can’t stress this enough – stick to it. 

As the industry continues to migrate towards a mobile first perspective, consistency across device types and platforms becomes increasingly important. Responsive web design enables your site to adapt to various device sizes without changing the overall look and feel or compromising user experience. 

When it comes to consuming digital content, we’re a generation of hungry hippos. We want headlines, snippets, concise and clear information. We want minimalist design with streamlined content and easy navigation.

Tips on keeping it simple

• Make it touch friendly. What’s easier than that?
• Bullet points make your content easily consumable 
• Be brief in sign-ups. If your site requires users to sign-up or sign-in, keep input requirements to a minimum or consider adding a Google sign-in option to speed up the process 

So there you have it; the four S’ of user experience: speed, scroll, style, simple. If you’re new to AdSense, be sure to sign up today and start turning your #PassionIntoProfit.

Posted by: Sarah Hornsey, from the AdSense team

Blogging is one of the easiest ways to build a residual income with Google AdSense. However, most bloggers are doing it the wrong way, and that’s keeping them from growing their earnings to a whole new level. Today, I’m going to share with you the four pillars that helped me build my blog traffic to over 1 million monthly visitors in less than 18 months after my first blog post.

My blogging success story is rather unique. For most of my thirties, I was mentally and physically disabled because of damage done by a small pituitary brain tumor. I was fortunate enough to find a doctor that identified the right combination of medicine to bring me back from the depths of nowhere. My mental cognition was regained a mere months before my pregnant wife was diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer. I was able to be there for my wife. Our first son was born healthy, and my wife officially beat cancer two months later.

The fear of our health problems returning led me down the road of creating a blog. One of my top skills is reverse engineering successful systems and rebuilding them into a more productive system. Before my health was ravaged, I had built several multi-million dollar companies on the back of this unique skillset.

Before I made my first blog post, I spent six months researching the blogs that received the most traffic from Google organic search. I identified the specific tactics from over 70 high traffic blogs. Then I ranked the tactics by the most productive, and I eliminated the bottom 80%. This is what I built my blogging system upon. Within four months of launching the blog, I had surpassed 100,000 monthly visitors. Today, my blog receives over 2 million monthly visitors.

Here are the four pillars that my system was built upon:

Pillar #1 – Keyword research

Most amateur bloggers fail miserably at keyword research. The reason for this is because they are overwhelmed by all of the data, and they are usually using the wrong tools. I will be breaking down my simple system for identifying keyword phrases that serves as the topic and title for future blog posts. This will allow you to blog with a purpose. And that purpose is to create blog posts that consistently produce organic traffic.

Pillar #2 – Compelling blog titles

You can write an epic 4000 word post, and it can doomed for failure because of a poorly chosen title. The post title is a very important part of the post, and often overlooked. I’ll be revealing my Perfect Title Formula, which will allow you to craft blog headlines that drive a ridiculous amount of traffic and social shares.

Pillar #3 – Engaging content 

Over the last three years, I’ve perfected my blog’s ability to engage new visitors. The average visitor spends 5 minutes reading one of my blog posts. I will be sharing the eleven techniques that I apply to my blog posts to achieve absolute engagement.

Pillar #4 – Getting High Quality Links

The key to remember here is quality over quantity. Do not waste your time chasing low quality links or adding your blog to a directory. There are two strategies that work better than everything else, and I will show you exactly how to execute them.

Over the next four weeks I’ll be sharing tips on how to increase your AdSense earnings right here on the Inside AdSense blog. In the meantime, go here to keep reading “How to Build a Blog to Over 1 Million Monthly Visitors” and find out how to apply the four pillars to your blog.

Posted By
Brandon Gaille

Brandon Gaille is an AdSense publisher. You can learn more about Brandon at BrandonGaille.com and listen to his popular blogging podcast, The Blog Millionaire.

If you’re new to AdSense, be sure to sign up for AdSense and start turning your #PassionIntoProfit. 

Friendly shout outs boost your online image, and encourage the rest of the community to also view and engage with your site.

Link up

If you have an idea for a piece of content from another author or are sharing someone else’s article on your site, it’s important to link back to the original owner. Basically, make sure to give credit where credit’s due. By including a backlink (or inbound link), the original owner’s analytics will track what portion of their online traffic came from your site. Chances are, they may even return the favor later on by linking to your shareworthy content.

Promote Yourself Indirectly

The best way to encourage other publishers to direct their readers to your site is to provide high-quality, unique content. Inbound links such as these are valuable to you because they send out organic signals to search engines about the naturally derived credibility of your site. Establishing a reputation for inspiring, timely content is your best tool for continued success and traffic.

To learn more about familiarizing your audience with your brand, check out the AdSense Guide to Audience Engagement.