Google AdSense announced that they are now following the Coalition For Better Ads best practices for ad placement in 2022. We don’t know what that means yet.
I think the Google AdSense update is an opportunity to test out adding ads to a website whether it’s your business website or a blog that is dedicated to earning revenue through ads to start creating content and displaying ads in an ethical way. In this podcast episode, I’m going to review what this update is and give you my thoughts on what this will mean over the next 12 months.
Links Mentioned In This Episode
Products We Recommend
Links to Previous Episodes & articles
Episode 73- SEO For Ecommerce: Google Merchant Center
Episode 76- Google Search Helpful Content Update: Impact Of Seo For A Blog
Episode 49 – Ethical Marketing Practices
Website marketing analytics article
Google’s Helpful Content Update
Google’s How To Write A high-quality Product Review
Google Destination Requirments
Google Following Better Ad Standards for Google served Ads
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What we discussed:
- What is Google AdSense
- Ads =additional source of revenue
- Opportunity for Ethical Marketers
Google AdSense Update 2022 Transcript
*Not ready to give this episode a listen or watch just yet? Below is a rough transcript of today’s episode.*
Well, do you have ads on your website or you’re thinking about starting to put ads on your website? How do you know if you are actually gonna repel consumers and clients, or add value to the experience that they’re having on your website? Google announced it’s new AE policy in August of 2022. And it will affect not only add placement on websites, but also.
Digital advertisers who are advertising with Google. So today I’m going to walk you through the changes and help you navigate Google ads a bit. So you can feel comfortable with putting ads on your website. So before we get into the meats and potatoes of the episode, little bit of housekeeping stuff, there are a lot of links in the show notes because I’m referencing back to other episodes about Google and their search and some other things, and I might mention products and that kind of thing.
So definitely go. And take a look at the links that are in the show notes. It’s a lot easier to find them with the, the information with these links than trying to Google them because they don’t come up easy. we are partners with many, many technology and software companies related to marketing. So when we put links out there for certain products and talk about them, for many of them, yes, we do get a commission on the sale, a very small one.
but it just helps. Keep creating all this great content for you so that you can keep growing your business. So we would love it if you would use our links, if you don’t mind. Okay. So now let’s talk about, what Google ad sense is. So if you’ve gone to a blog, a website played a game on your phone, used a weather app, all those free apps, many of them you’re gonna see ads in the majority of them are using the platform.
And the platforms called Google ad sense that allows website owners, game and app developers to put those ads onto the site, so that you see them and hopefully perhaps click on them. That’s what they’re hoping for. There are other platforms out there other than Google ads sense, that allow people to display ads on these, platforms.
But in 2021, 38.3 million websites use Google’s ad sense. So the majority out there are probably that. Okay. So let’s talk about why you would wanna do this, right? you don’t have to just use this if you’re creating a blog and you’re trying to create a sole revenue stream from advertising dollars, displaying ads, I think any business owner, I think it’s a smart idea concept to have multiple streams of revenue coming into your business.
So if you’re a service based company, a lot of service based companies out there will actually resale product. And,take a commission for them, construction guys, do it. interior designers do it, if you buy a couch or something like that, they do make a commission on that couch.
So why not do that with your website, where it makes sense and it’s intuitive. I think the big reason why many of us small business owners shy away from that is that we see it being misused across so many websites. You go to a website, you’re trying to read an article there’s ads, plastered, everywhere videos start playing volume is turned up, popups, come up in the middle.
and it’s just a really bad user experience. I do a lot of searching for recipes. I run into this all the time where I can barely get to the recipe. Sometimes I can’t even move down the page because of how the ads are coming up and displaying. and I’ve abandoned many, many recipes that I thought would be great because I couldn’t get to where I wanted to go.
that’s just one example. another one that is probably more prevalent to a lot of people is, your news sites. And I’m not just talking about small news sites. I’m talking about the really big, I’ve got a channel on TV news sites and they’re, Websites have a lot of ad built into it.
It’s another revenue stream for them. It’s probably their primary revenue stream. and that’s where all the, click bait headlines come from. They want you to click through because they actually make money. When those ads come up and get served, whether you click on them or not. that’s a whole discussion for a whole nother time.
So I’m gonna stay on. And now I’m gonna talk a little bit about what this new update to Google ad sense is, that they’ve just released cuz Google ad sense has been around for a very long time. So as of October of 2022, Google says that they’re going to be following the better ads standard from the coalition of better ads.
The coalition of better ads is a research based company. I don’t know if they are not for profit or not. and what they say that they do is they identify the ad experience or experiences. That fall beneath a threshold of consumer acceptability. I love that. It’s consumer acceptability. they’re looking at sites and they’re seeing what upsets people and makes them click away or more importantly, what makes them stay on the page, but not click on ads and all that other stuff.
So on the site, there’s so, so much information. So you gotta go and take a look at it. I can’t review all of it here. We’ll be here for hours and hours. they talk about popups. They talk about video, and not across just desktop, but mobile across apps across phone, because everything displays differently depending on the type of device that you’re on and how, consumers react to this.
So lots and lots of information there on this. Because I’ve done the research for this. And, I did an whole entire episode on Google’s latest update that went out in September of 20, 22 about organic search. I’m starting to connect some dots here. In the, Google ad sent up update, that’s coming out.
Google says anti quote. You must not place Google served ads on screens that do not conform to the better ads standard. So they’re basically saying whatever those folks at the coalition say, that’s what we’re going to, allow for you to use our ad push. so in August of 2022, Google announced, that.
they have a new, helpful content update for organic search. Meaning if you’re trying to rank in the search engine, they put out a whole new set of guidelines where, they are putting people first content first, meaning it has to be helpful. It has to be useful. It has to be written for humans. they have to have an enjoyable experience with it in order for them to rank your website.
So on the organic search front and now on the. Platform search front. They’re saying we want a better user experience for the average person, and we want these annoying sites to go away. Which means those sites, rankings I think, are gonna tank. And I think it’s gonna happen pretty quick in the next couple of months and into 2023, for sure.
That’s how I’m interpreting all of this. Google’s like, listen, we gotta take some charge. And here’s how we’re doing it. We’re doing it through organic search and then we’re doing it through how people utilize our ad display platform on their website. So those folks, I think, should be very nervous,because these, and I call them unethical, cuz I think anybody.
looked at this site would be like, yeah, I wouldn’t like this either, but I’m gonna do it anyway. these sites are in trouble. I think they’re in real trouble. And so I see this as an opportunity in the marketing field for other people that may have wanted to try something like this, but thought the only way that they could compete is by doing all the things that these people are doing.
So if you’re just wanting to start out with Google ad sense, one, you don’t have to do it the way these other folks are doing. Google is telling us clearly they don’t want this type of content displayed written in this form or fashion any longer. and they want you to follow these new, standards, which means that if you create this today, right I’m recording this in September of 2022, you have a really good chance of ranking above these other sites that are not following the standard, which gives you a leg. to take over some of that traffic, and to do things the right way and to feel confident and comfortable that you’re not going to alienate, consumers or clients, because you had to engage in this, unethical practice.
So I think this is really, really cool. so these sites, of course, they’re gonna read this and they’re gonna go, okay, how do I fix this? I think it’s gonna take a long time for them to fix this because one, they have to undo the content and the ad placement that they have on all of these pages. And some of these sites have thousands, some have tens of thousands of pages that are not gonna get ranked anymore.
And in the. Helpful update content. Google was signaling. Yeah, not only are we not gonna rank your pages, but we’re not gonna rank your entire website. which means it doesn’t matter if they’ve got pages out there that don’t have ads or have actually helpful content. while you can start from scratch doing things the right way and kind of get out ahead of this, before they do, because they’re gonna do a lot of overhauling, which takes a lot of.
Now the other side of the coin that I do want to mention is that for those that are creating and running digital ads, meaning if you’re running advertising for your business, you’re also slightly, affected by this. But I have a feeling most small business owners out there that are running ads are gonna be just fine because the update that Google put out.
Based off of destination pages. So if you’re running an ad and you say, click through here, read more, get more information, sign up, and it goes to a landing page on your website. That’s what they’re talking about. That is a destination page. basically what they want is those destination pages, to do what the ads said they were going to do.
It’s probably the easiest way that I can say it. There is a link in the show notes that talks about all the things you’re not supposed to do on these destination pages. but it’s things like, make it easy to navigate, make the content useful. Don’t send them to something that directly downloads that scares a lot of people cuz they don’t know what’s downloading.
You have to have original content. the content on the page has to accurately reflect what the ad is offering. Meaning. If the ad offers to give something free away, a free consultation, a free set of whatever and you go to the page and there’s a fee for what that is. The two are out of sync. what the offer is, has to be the same and identical across the board.
don’t redirect from the original link to a new link. Google doesn’t like that has to be working properly. And it has to, when I say navigation, I don’t quite know yet how far Google is gonna take this. Cuz sometimes we go to these page. and you click through and it feels like it takes five years to get to the bottom of the page where you actually get to the offer.
I don’t know if they’re gonna limit that. I don’t know if they’re going to ding people for having these extremely long pages that you have to scroll through of information in order to actually get to the offer. but time will tell, right? That’s why I’m watching this. Over the next several months.
and then there’s additional information in there about URL standards. Most of you won’t have to worry about that. It’s just gonna be your page with,a subpage thing. And then they also talk about telephone numbers as well, if you’re using call ads. So that’s a lot of information. What do you do with all this?
So let’s talk about some of the things that you can do next with this information. Are you thinking about putting some ads on your site, to create additional revenue streams, maybe you’re listening to this and going, What can I do? we are definitely here at income out. We are gonna be testing this over the next, year, just to see if this is something that would be viable for any of our clients.
but again, there’s a lot of testing that has to happen before we, we release this on the world. But if you decide, yeah, I wanna try this. think about what pages you wanna do it on your website? Not all pages are gonna lend themselves well to this. It’s gonna feel a little cheesy if it’s on every single pages, but there may be specific subpages in your website.
maybe related to a particular product or service that you offer. And then blog articles,blog articles are a great place for something like this when they’re done correctly. The nice thing is with Google ad senses in the account, you can actually pick the type of categories and types of ads that get to display on your website.
You can’t say, I only want this particular company’s ads, but you can do things like I only want health and beauty. I only want business. I only want. food. And so you pick ads that, align with what you are doing and offering as opposed to allowing everything in their brother onto the site. So you can set up your Google ads account next, right?
And then review the better ad placement practices, policies from the coalition of better ads. So you know where to put everything for a good user experience, because again, Google is saying that if you create Of content, a blog article. They want the person to feel like the information was useful to them.
They want them to leave satisfied. And that also includes how and what type of ads show up on that page. So definitely make sure that you go and review the organic search guidelines in total. and I have a couple of, articles and episodes about search as well. Because you wanna get good organic traffic just to get clients and people to come to the site.
And then once you implement everything you want to actually watch your Google search console data, your Google analytics data, you can do those separately or, In, marketing masterminds, we created a whole article on all the data points that you should track and putting them into a Google data studio report.
So you can look at it all together so you can see how, not just this part of your marketing’s doing, but all part of your marketing is doing so definitely go check out that article. So you know how to set that up and review it. Okay. This episode, it’s a little short, it’s a little sweet. but it’s very specific about what we’re talking about.
My final thoughts for you are,I think you can ethically place ads on a business website. I really, really do. so that one, you have an additional revenue source because that is always good. Just like if you were, reselling products to go along with your services, But just like all your other content pages, it has to be useful and helpful to a human, and it has to give them a good user experience.
So now autoplaying of videos and popping stuff up and, making a nuisance of yourself, So if you’re looking to work with a marketing agency, that’s gonna help you navigate the, ad and the blog waters, definitely reach out. I’d love to have a conversation with you about this. I have been waiting a long time for Google to take some action, some control over these ad spiral and the blog spiral, because it is getting out of hand a little.
And the reason why I was waiting for Google is they’re the ones that are gonna get hit the hardest if,people keep blocking this stuff and, shutting stuff down because that’s where Google makes all of its money is through this ad revenue. so I’m very glad that they’ve put this stuff out there and I’m really excited to see where all of this is gonna go over the next 12 months.
I will probably do an updated episode. whenever it seems necessary as I’m seeing things change, and then tell you about what I’m seeing experiencing, and then if my opinion changes as well. But, I’m hoping this is gonna go the way I think it’s gonna go so that,we can all search and download recipes, without getting, you know, kicked in the face by ads.
so here at INO, we love to give back to the business community. I provide a 45 minute free consultation to talk about whatever you want. We can talk about your website. We can talk about your email marketing campaigns. We can talk about search and digital ads and see if there’s something that we can help you with.
Or if you just needed additional information for yourself, that 45 minutes is just for. if you just have a quick question or you want to,give us some feedback about the podcast, maybe,put in a request for a type of an episode that you’d love us to do. There’s a contact form on pretty much every page.
Just fill it out, send it in. All of that comes directly to me. we also have our marketing masterminds blog, where we write articles about these things, how to like how to create a Google data studio report. We also have videos on,how to use specific products and product recommendations so that you don’t have to go and do all of the legwork that we’ve done over the years to figure out the right products for the.
Type of marketing. So hopefully you found today’s information useful and helpful. If so, please consider sharing this with other business owners. You know,I’m sure as you’re listening to this, you know, other business owners that this could be useful and helpful to as well and sharing it, helps all of us and helps the entire business community grow.
So thanks so much for listening and I hope you have an amazing day.
