How the 6 new changes coming to AdWords will affect AdSense publishers
In case you’ve been living in a hole for the past few years, Google is absolutely in love with mobile traffic. We don’t need to tell you why, you know that’s where the audience is. But mobile is also where the greatest growth potential lies.
Ad networks have yet to completely crack or hack mobile ad campaigns, which means there’s still a long way to go to make advertisers and users happy.
But does Google still love us publishers? Well, the messages we received from the GPS event were somewhat confusing. Most of them have little to do with AdSense directly, but can indirectly affect your earnings. So what direction will your AdSense earnings go with these new updates on the AdWords side of the advertising market?
- It’s all about location, location, location – Local Search on Google Maps
The new Google Maps will offer attractive advertising capabilities for small businesses and local chain branches based on the user’s location, as well as other data.
Sounds pretty good for AdWords advertisers, but what does this mean for AdSense publishers?
More inventory = less competition
The laws of supply and demand tell us that if we increase the supply of a certain product to satisfy a greater demand, we will prevent prices from rising.
Or in digital advertising terms: more ad inventory means less demand for each ad unit and lower CPCs and CPMs. Unless, with more inventory, larger advertising budgets are obtained, especially if the new inventory is effective for advertisers. This can be a blessing in disguise for AdSense publishers.
search vs. display
Google prefers clicks in its own territory. Of course they do. They don’t have to share their revenue with the publishers there. So offering advertisers region-targeted inventory owned by Google is more likely to take a bite out of that local search traffic.
Who gets paid for the integrated maps?
Will Google add ads to embedded Google Maps, and if so, who gets the revenue from clicks on these local ads?
Another good question is what will happen to those ad units and the publishers who make a good living from AdSense ads on the map?
- Who is bigger better for? – Expanded text ads get double headlines and more characters
Advertisers will now be able to include two lines of 30 characters each in clickable headlines in their text ads and 80 characters for a description line. In general, this promises longer ads that take up more screen real estate on mobile searches.
This is great for search advertisers and Google, but for anyone trying to get organic traffic to monetize, this is bad news. It seems that paid search ads are worth more to Google than the content you invested in.
- The Fear (or Not) of Smart Pricing: Better Measurement of In-Store Conversions
In GPS, Google announced that it will now check users’ mobile location history against the PPC ads they’ve clicked on, and then attribute conversions to AdWords campaigns accordingly.
The goal of higher conversion measurement is to attract more advertisers. If Google is successful at this, it just means more demand for AdSense inventory. And that will make everyone happy.
- Not Just Responsive Ad Units – New Responsive Display Ads
Creating image ads for all ad sizes can be a hassle. Especially for a small business advertiser. Very often, you end up loading image or flash ads in the most common sizes, and that’s it.
Google wants more competition between more advertisers for more inventory. By allowing advertisers to create responsive ads that can fit into more ad units, Google basically does exactly that. And this is great for everyone.
- Targeting Your Device: Changes to Device Offers
Google hopes (and so do we) that this will allow advertisers to spend their budgets more effectively and scale their ad spend quickly. Which would generate more AdSense income for you (and Google).
- Retargeting Gone Open – Increased AdWords Demand Restriction
Other ad networks may show retargeting ads to users instead of AdSense, where AdSense is not implemented.
This could lower CPCs for ad retargeting in AdSense and hurt publishers who rely on AdSense for revenue.
Local, mobile and advertiser-oriented
In general, GPS ads are very much geared towards advertisers, and especially the advertising budgets of SMBs (small and medium-sized businesses) who have started migrating to the big F in ever-increasing numbers.