Huge adjustments to Google AdSense, together with the elimination of plain textual content advertisements
Google sent an email to AdSense publishers, including myself, yesterday announcing big changes to Google AdSense in the coming weeks. That includes six changes, including removing ads for text-only ads, responding to all ad sizes, changing ad styles, and more.
Here is the email, you can see the full email with all the details by clicking here or the picture below:
Google does without pure text ads. So Google AdSense was launched to only serve text ads on the web and to change the way banner advertising works on the web. Well, that’s changing and now Google is ditching all of these text ad formats.
Google wrote, “We’re moving towards bigger ad formats, phasing out text-only and ad-only ad units to further improve the user experience and fully reflect the ad pool in the marketplace. As a result, the text becomes” ads only “and “Display Ads Only” ad units in your account have been renamed “Display Ads” and updated for all ad types in early 2019. “
One WebmasterWorld thread has publishers who aren’t too happy about it. Here are the changes:
- Ad sizes
We made it easier to create and manage ad units. By default, all ad units are made responsive to accommodate different screen sizes on mobile devices and desktops for increased performance and flexibility. If you need more customization, you can still create custom sized ad units.
- Ad types
We’re moving towards bigger ad formats by phasing out text-only and ad-only ad units to further improve the user experience and fully reflect the ad pool in the market. As a result, the “Text Only” and “Display Only” ad units in your account have been renamed to “Display Ads” and will be updated for all ad types in early 2019.
- Text ad styles
We are opposed to text ad styles for “Text and Display Ads” ad units. From now on, you will no longer be able to create ad styles for your new ad units. Your new ad units will have text ad styling optimized by Google. As this feature is no longer supported, your existing ad styles will also be optimized by Google in the following months. You can use native ads on your website to customize and improve the user experience.
- Simplification “When no ads are available”
We are continuously working to improve the quality and security of our advertising network and to reduce the number of malicious ads that enter the AdSense network. As a result, we’re removing the “When no ads are available” option and by default, we’re reducing the ad area or showing a blank area instead. If your current setting is a color or some other url, it will be updated in the near future. Your current settings will no longer be provided in the near future.
- Experiments
Due to the changes above, we’re also removing outdated ad unit discontinuation experiments. All active advertising experiments will be discontinued in the following weeks. In conjunction with this, we are removing the trial report from the Reports tab. For the remaining trial types, aggregated metrics are still available on the trial details page.
- Synchronous code
Changing your ad code type to “In sync” in your AdSense account is no longer available. If you need your ad code to be in sync, you can still manually update your ad code using this guide.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.