Google Adsense Auto Ads in Beta - Auto-Optimization like Ezoic?

Ryuzaki

Ryuzaki

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Not much is known about this right now. The only information that's officially and publicly available is the Adsense Help page to tell you how to implement the ads and track performance.

If you've been approved for the beta, you'll find "Auto Ads" tucked under "My Ads' in the sidebar of your Adsense dashboard.

According to that page, all you have to do is paste their ad code in your <head> tag and you're good to go.

Speculation Time:

Google is trying to stop the growth of Ezoic and Media.net.

Ezoic had 2 huge benefits for publishers. They could allow you to publish one extra Adsense block beyond the normal limit due like most huge publishers eventually were allowed to. So Google removed the limit altogether and made up a vague rule about "ad to text ratios."

The other huge benefit Ezoic offered was the automatic split testing and optimization, which Media.net kind of offers in terms of ad design, but not placement. But Media.net is gaining serious ground and pays out pretty decently. I suppose, even though the growth of Ezoic gave Google more ad revenue, you can't let them get too big or they'll roll out their own inventory.

Reminds me of AMP kind of. "Just let us take care of it for you and send you money." Pretty appealing to non-techies who just want to type content.

_______

  • What do you guys think about these auto ads?
  • What are all of Google's incentives for creating them?
  • What are the implications of dumbing it down to the lowest common denominator?
  • Do you think it'll be good enough to convince even the bossiest of publishers to use it?

AI-assisted ad placement makes sense and could drive revenue up drastically (or could keep it the same while driving higher quality traffic for advertisers by getting rid of some of the tricks being employed by shady publishers). It's also another step towards catering to the lowest-effort people online who can't be bothered to learn how to place an ad on their site or to optimize.
 
I saw some discussion about this where a few people had tested it and said that it wasn't as smart as it should be. It's not taking the human appeal aspect into account and is breaking some of Adsense's own rules.

They said it will stack 2 and 3 ad blocks on top of each other vertically, have no margin between them and text and images, and will add up to 7-10 blocks on the page, not counting the other ad networks you might be displaying. They'll even stack them up above the fold.

Some people said they got a lift in revenue by 10%, some said they're down 20%.

I'd guess this is more about Google trying to monetize mobile traffic better. I noticed they switched their responsive ads to ignore any containers on mobile and expand to the full width of the phone.

I think this is like the disavow tool. They want enough people using it to feed them data, and with the auto split testing that's going to hone their skills quite a bit. They can roll those changes that are guaranteed lifters of revenue across to everyone, and as the trends of the majority of people change they can catch on to that and keep pushing these suggestions out and changing their default ads.
 
^ Sounds like the AI figured out to place ads as back in the good old MFA days :D

Hilarious.

I can't wait for AI to take over. I think I will like the AI world.
 
Google Adsense Auto Ads comes out of Beta:
https://adsense.googleblog.com/2018/02/introducing-adsense-auto-ads.html

All you do is put one tag in your site and then you can enable which type of ads you want from the Adsense dashboard. These include:
  • Text & display ads
  • In-feed ads
  • In-article ads
  • Matched content
  • Anchor ads
  • Vignette ads
It automatically places the ads where it thinks you'll make the most money and only shows the other types to specific viewers they think will convert or whatever. Probably country dependent and all that.

If anyone gives this a try, please let us know how it goes. I'm far too anal-retentive to let this mess with my design on that level of "could be different on each page load" versus something like Ezoic.
 
I'm testing out Auto Ads now, after being pretty happy with the results I got from Ezoic this year. Going from a couple manual AdSense placements on each post, to Ezoic, made a big difference. Mind you, my original placements weren't tested or optimized, so there was a ton of room for improvement for Ezoic to capitalize on.

I have some minor concerns with Ezoic (Even though they've been solid, overall), so it'll be interesting to see how auto ads end up shaping out.

After a few hours, my RPM's have tripled with Auto Ads, but obviously that's a tiny sample size and doesn't mean much yet.

I'm hoping it works out to being pretty close, if not better, because I'm more confidant in Auto Ads always being compliant as opposed to really having to keep an eye on the placements with Ezoic to make sure they aren't getting too aggressive for my taste. I'd rather use Auto Ads, but if Ezoic is unquestionably performing better, I'll turn it back on and spend the time going over every possible placement and making sure it's not too much.

In order to switch back to Ezoic, they would have to perform a fair bit better than Auto Ads, because:

  1. Ezoic charges a 5% fee, and
  2. Requests when loading a page have dropped by HUNDREDS. If Ezoic is here to optimize my Adsense placements, I'm not sure what all of those extra requests are for, but I'm thrilled to get rid of them regardless.
Anywoo, I'll let this run for a couple more weeks and report back.
 
I'm in the same situation as you, @Potatoe. Ezoic inproved RPM a lot, but they added so many request and slowed down the site. So I'm going to test Auto ads quite soon.

I was wondering if it is possible to use Google DFP and Auto ads at the same time. Say I have certain places on site served by DFP, and then all the rest and all unfilled positions left for Auto ads. This is from googleblog:

Have you manually placed ads on your page? There’s no need to remove them if you don’t want to. Auto ads will take into account all existing Google ads on your pages.​

According to this, it should be possible to still use Auto ads & DFP together. Does anyone have any experience with former Page level ads or current Auto ads working with DFP?
 
I heard about this a while back and completely forgot about it. I'm testing it out now, I've installed it and removed all the manual ads that were in my posts. I'll give it a few weeks and will report back if things improve.
 
I've had Auto Ads installed for 12 days now. I've had a huge increase in revenue in this time. March earnings are already up 287% over February, and if I compare the 12 days to the previous 12 days it's a >500% increase.

Now this all sounds good, but my Adsense earnings were so low anyway that even a 500% increase isn't that impressive. Plus the ads are inserted into every page, not just informational pages, meaning that sometimes there is an ad right before an important CTA on a money page. There may be a way to only show the ads on specific pages but I haven't looked into it yet.

So I have to decide if it's worth the risk of someone clicking on an ad instead of a CTA, and in most cases, it is definitely not. I remember reading in the DSCC that it's important to only have one type of monetization on each page, so I definitely don't want ads on my main money page.

I'll have a look today and see if there is a way to only display ads on posts and not pages, but if not I'll be removing the Auto ads.

Plus there is a huge full-length ad in the header of most pages, under the logo and right above the navigation. It doesn't fit in with my design and looks out of place.

Edit: Turns out there is a way. It involves manually adding all of the URLs that I don't want Auto ads to display on, and then deselecting all ad types for this group of URLs.

I suspect this will drastically reduce earnings, but once I get more traffic to the site and add more informational content it may be worth keeping.
 
Last edited:
Cash Builder said:
Edit: Turns out there is a way. It involves manually adding all of the URLs that I don't want Auto ads to display on, and then deselecting all ad types for this group of URLs.
Click to expand...

You could add your Auto Ads code to a plugin like WP QUADS for an easier way to achieve more control over which pages your Auto Ads show up on, if you're not averse to an extra plugin.

You'd add your code into the plugin and tell it to load that code in the first ad slot, and then you can tell the widget to only display that code on certain types of posts.

Also, it gives you the option to disable it from within the post editor for any individual posts (If you don't want Auto Ads showing up on landing pages, and so on...) "Turn off ads for this post", in case you want more control than just assigning ads based on post/page type.

You can also only have it show up on pages that meet a threshold of a certain wordcount, set it not to show up on your homepage, not to show up on category pages, etc.
 
I'm testing this now...

Do you delete the old ads on your sites or combine them with the auto ads? I've deleted the rest of the ads and have only implemented the Auto Ads. I don't know if I'll be doing well or I should leave the old ads too.
 
Apex said:
I'm testing this now...

Do you delete the old ads on your sites or combine them with the auto ads? I've deleted the rest of the ads and have only implemented the Auto Ads. I don't know if I'll be doing well or I should leave the old ads too.
Click to expand...

I deleted all of the old adds, I didn't want a situation where the auto ads were placed right above or below the existing ads, so I just removed them.

I removed the auto ads from my money pages, and I am still seeing a 200% increase in earnings from using them.

@Potatoe thanks, I decided to not go with a plugin and just do it manually, only takes 30 seconds to log in to Adsense and add a URL to my list of pages where I don't want the ads displaying.
 
Cash Builder said:
I deleted all of the old adds, I didn't want a situation where the auto ads were placed right above or below the existing ads, so I just removed them.
Click to expand...

I heard that Auto Ads won't do this (Show up directly above or below a manually placed adsense unit), and that if you have existing placements that they'll respect them, so it might be worth looking into. I could be wrong on this, I haven't dug too deep, just going off of what somebody told me.

I need to test that out, since there are a few spots I'd like to always have an ad show up, and sometimes I'd rather have 1-2 units more than auto ads seems to place. My Ezoic would show a TON of units, way too many, and Auto Ads doesn't quite show enough sometimes lol.

Nice results so far!
 
I've been running these on a new project with about 200 visitors a day for a week now.

I used my intuition and manually added 2 ads per page.

So far the ads I manually placed are crushing the auto ads. I'm not impressed so far but I'm going to let them run and hopefully optimize a lot longer.

I will eventually report back once I have definitely decided if auto ads are worth using.
 
Calamari said:
I will eventually report back once I have definitely decided if auto ads are worth using.
Click to expand...

Not worth using on my site. I left on the mobile vignette ads because they were getting a good RPM even if they weren't showing terribly often.

I also left on the matched content ads. Nobody has clicked a single ad in the matched content block but they are using it to find more content they are interested in on my site. Eventually I'll be coming up with my own related content solution and I'll ditch matched content too.

My initial manual placements outperformed adsense auto ads about 2:1.

They did insert quite a few ads and now that I turned them off my manual placements may perform better. I'm going to leave my manual placements "as is" for a couple/few weeks to see.
 
Bit of an old thread, but I've got the same question: Are Adsense auto-ads worth it? I know that Google has updated it quite a bit late last year, so things might have changed.

Is it worth it? And how much does it affect user experience (if it starts plastering ads everywhere, although I think you can tune it a bit).

Will start testing it myself, but curious if anyone has had any significant results with it.
 
Auto ads are the only thing you can use now, right?
 
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