Tag Archives: AdSense

Understanding account suspensions due to invalid traffic

In today's post, we'll be discussing AdSense account suspensions due to invalid traffic.

We have found that there are two types of publishers who may have invalid traffic issues with their accounts. The first are publishers who may unintentionally send invalid traffic to their accounts, typically by testing on live ads. For those, we hope that increased transparency into our policies and processes can decrease these unintentional violations and help our publishers play by the rules. The second are publishers who intentionally bypass our rules, ending up with a variety of invalid traffic issues in order to artificially inflate their ad revenue. That’s why we work hard to maintain a policy compliant ecosystem for our publishers, advertisers, and users. In short, if you play by the rules, AdSense is here to help you grow your business.

We receive many questions about account suspensions, so let's go through the top questions about this process and what steps you can take to help keep your account in good standing.

What is invalid traffic anyway?
Invalid traffic includes any clicks or impressions that may artificially inflate an advertiser's costs or a publisher's earnings. Invalid traffic covers both intentionally fraudulent traffic as well as accidental clicks.

Please note that clicks on Google ads must result from genuine user interest, and any method that artificially generates clicks or impressions is strictly prohibited by our program policies. If we observe high levels of invalid traffic on your account, we may suspend or disable the account to protect our advertisers and users.

Watch our #AskAdSense video for more information on what invalid traffic is and tips to help prevent invalid traffic on your account.

What is an account suspension?

If your account was suspended due to invalid traffic, ad serving has been turned off on all of your content for a fixed period (most frequently 30 days). This includes any website, YouTube channel, and/or mobile app. Please know that we will deduct revenue from your account and will credit advertisers with the withheld revenue where appropriate and possible. If there are no further compliance issues with your account, it will be automatically re-enabled after the fixed period.

Please note that your account is still active, and an account suspension is not the same as having your account disabled. If your account was disabled due to invalid traffic, your account is no longer serving ads, and you will be unable to monetize with any Google ad solutions. As with account suspensions, please know that we may deduct revenue from your account and may credit advertisers with the withheld revenue where appropriate and possible.

Visit our Help Center for more information about suspended accounts or disabled accounts due to invalid traffic.

Why did my account get suspended?

In addition to monitoring for policy violations, we analyze all clicks and impressions to determine whether they might artificially drive up an advertiser's costs or a publisher's earnings. If we determine that your account has invalid traffic, then we may suspend or disable your account. Please know that we may deduct revenue from your account and may credit advertisers with the withheld revenue where appropriate and possible.

Here are some common reasons for why your account may get suspended:

Clicking ads on your own site and/or YouTube channel: Publishers may not click their own ads or use any means to inflate impressions and/or clicks artificially, including manual methods. Testing your own ads by clicking on them isn't allowed. Additionally, YouTube publishers should skip ads when viewing their own videos to avoid artificially inflating advertiser costs.

For AdSense ad placements on sites, please use the Google Publisher Toolbar if you want to click the ads to check the landing pages or view more details about the ads. The Toolbar will allow you to check the destination of ads on your page without the risk of invalid clicks.

One or more users repeatedly clicking your ads: Don't encourage or ask your friends, family, co-workers, or general users to click on your ads. This includes asking for users to support your site or YouTube channel, offering rewards to users for clicking ads, and promising to raise money for third parties for such behavior.

We also recommend that you check your associated AdSense email for more information regarding your account suspension.

What steps should I take during the suspension period?

Account suspension gives you time to investigate the sources of invalid traffic, identify and block suspicious traffic, and put measures in place to ensure clean traffic. We recommend learning how to segment your traffic to help you best understand, monitor, and evaluate the traffic to your site. This may also help you identify sources of invalid traffic.

Visit our Help Center for more information about suspended accounts due to invalid traffic.

How can I appeal an account suspension?

Account suspensions are currently not appealable. You can use this time to investigate your traffic sources and make adjustments to help prevent invalid traffic in the future. Provided that there are no further compliance issues with your account, it will automatically be reinstated once your suspension period is served.

Please don't fill out the invalid traffic appeal form because that form is reserved for disabled accounts, and you will receive an email that says we can't process this appeal.

If you would like to provide additional feedback to help us improve our processes and communications, you may do so using our suspended publisher feedback form.

When will my account be re-enabled?

If there are no further compliance issues with your account, it will be automatically re-enabled after the fixed period (most frequently 30 days).

What happens if after my account was re-enabled, my account continues to generate invalid traffic?

If, after your account has been re-enabled, invalid traffic persists and continues to contribute low value traffic to our ads ecosystem, then we may need to disable your account.

Visit our Help Center for more information about suspended accounts due to invalid traffic. We look forward to your return to the AdSense network in good standing after the suspension ends.

Posted by: Danielle Chang, Ad Traffic Quality team

Source: Inside AdSense

How to address ‘insufficient content’ disapprovals on your AdSense application

Today, we'd like to demystify one of the most common reasons why AdSense applications get disapproved: the site has insufficient content. What exactly do we mean by this, and how can you fix this issue on your site?

If a site is found to have insufficient content, this means that the site may not have enough text, and/or the site was deemed to be "under construction." To be approved for AdSense and show relevant ads on your site, your pages need to have enough text on them for our specialists to review and for our crawler to be able to determine what your pages are about. Sites that contain mostly images, videos or Flash animations may not be approved. Additionally, sites that consist only of a site template and very little content may not be approved.

Why is it important for your site to have plenty of content? The AdSense program policies are designed to foster a healthy ecosystem that helps protect users, advertisers, and publishers. Our policies prohibit Google ads to be placed on any non-content-based page or placed on pages published specifically for the purpose of showing ads. We use factors such as keyword analysis, word frequency, and font size in order to determine what a webpage is about and precisely match Google ads to each page. Therefore, it's important for sites to have lots of high quality and unique content in order to provide meaningful user experiences and allow Google to serve relevant ads to users.

If your AdSense application wasn't approved due to insufficient content (or for other reasons), you're welcome to make corrections to your application and/or improvements to your site and re-submit your AdSense application for further consideration. Before you re-submit your application, check out our AdSense policies: a beginner's guide and additional tips to help ensure that your site's pages are ready for AdSense.

If you're wondering how to make improvements to your site, remember that there are lots of published sites already, so think about what it is that makes your pages unique. You should aim to create original and relevant content that keeps users engaged and encourages them to visit your site again and again.

Check out our help article for more information about insufficient content and other common AdSense application disapproval reasons. If you're still having issues, check out our troubleshooter for disapproved applications. Hopefully after reading this blog post and our other help articles, you can take steps to get your AdSense application approved. If you have questions, join the #AskAdsense conversation Thursdays at 9:30am PT on Twitter to speak with our support team.

Posted by: Danielle Chang, Ad Traffic Quality team

Source: Inside AdSense

Discover the next generation of programmatic advertising technology

Forget what you think you know about programmatic advertising, these tools are game changers. For the ninth part of the #SuccessStack series, we’re revisiting the topic of programmatic advertising and looking at some of the latest technology that is starting to shape it.

1) Matched content provides a more intelligent user experience
Matched content units allow publishers to suggest further content that might interest the reader, based on what they have looked at already. This means that someone on a sports site reading an article about football can have further football content suggested to them. This can result in an increase in pageviews and time spent on the site.

AdSense users who are eligible to use matched content units for ads have an additional advantage as they are able to synchronize their ads by topic also. This means that someone on a sports site reading an article about football can be shown native-styled ads most likely to appeal to football fans. This in turn can potentially increase ad engagement and quality clicks on the ads.

2) New programmatic deal structures redefine the space
Programmatic Direct is an innovative solution that bridges the gap between traditional ad sales and programmatic selling. It offers three flexible deal structures that bring the best of direct and programmatic together:

Private Auctions: Negotiated minimum price. Invitation only auctions. Non-guaranteed volumes.
Preferred Deals: Fixed price. One-to-one deals. Non-guaranteed volumes.
Guaranteed Deals: Fixed price. One-to-one deals. Guaranteed volumes.

The technology combines the power of real-time bidding (RTB) infrastructure with access to brand safe, reserved publisher inventory. This shortens the time it takes to book and execute high quality reservations type deals.

Using this tool, you can lock in revenue through reservations, forecast against programmatic deals, and enjoy the ease of automated billing and collections. All that without the need to email tags, worry about creative controls, resolve discrepancies, or fax orders back and forth. Check out this story from Televisa and Unilever to see how it could work for your business.

3) Advanced inventory management tools allow greater flexibility
You no longer have to make a choice between selling your inventory programmatically or direct. Modern ad management tools like DoubleClick for Publishers make it very easy to do both at the same time, with less coding and manual work. They also give you a clear picture of your inventory availability in real-time, so you are less likely to make conflicted bookings or leave inventory unsold.

See how German media company G&J doubled their programmatic revenue and increased their mobile revenue 10x with a smart implementation of Doubleclick for Publishers and Doubleclick AdExchange.

Or, if you’re already using DoubleClick for Publishers, watch this video from The Economist who integrated DoubleClick for Publishers with DoubleClick Bid Manager, surpassing all their revenue and growth goals for the campaign.

Next steps

We want to help you get the right tools in place so you’re set up for success and potential ad earnings growth. To check whether your setup that suits your plans for your site/s, have a conversation with one of our experts. They can offer a personalized consultation to help you make smart choices for your business. Book a time to speak with an expert.

Source: Inside AdSense

More control over the ads you serve on your site(s)

We’ve heard the feedback that publishers like you have shared about wanting more ways to control the ads showing on your site(s). Today, we’re excited to share some recent updates to General Category Blocking that give you more controls to opt-in or filter out certain categories of ads -- putting you in charge.

General Category Blocking was introduced in some countries in 2010 to help you scalably prevent competitors’ ads and ads that may not fit your audience from appearing on your site, by letting you opt out of showing ads from certain categories and subcategories such as “Finance,” “Apparel,” and “Tourism.” Over the last few weeks we’ve increased the number of categories and subcategories from 250 to 470. This update lets you be more granular and block more specific categories without overblocking and having an unwanted negative impact on earnings. For example, instead of blocking the category “Apparel,” you can now pick any of the new subcategories “Sunglasses,” “Handbags,” or “Watches.” With this update we’ve also expanded our supported languages to include Chinese (simplified), Dutch, Polish, Russian, and Turkish and made this feature available in every country supported by AdSense.

With more options available it’s important to carefully consider the impact of blocking, or allowing, a category. Blocking a general category could lower your potential earnings as the affected advertisers’ bids are excluded from the auction. On the other hand, with more subcategories available you may have the opportunity to be more granular and pick the subcategory that most closely matches the type of ad you want to prevent -- minimizing the negative impact on your earnings.

We know how important it is to have control over the ads that appear on your site, and this update is adding to a set of controls available in AdSense already. We’d love to hear what you think about these update so please leave your feedback in the comments field below.

Posted by: Konkona Kundu, Product Manager

Source: Inside AdSense

5 steps to improve PageSpeed and boost page performance

The eighth installment of the #SuccessStack takes a second look at PageSpeed, specifically tips you can implement that may improve your metrics.

Last week the #SuccessStack illustrated lots of reasons why mobile PageSpeed is critically important to the ongoing success of your publishing business. Now you can explore what you can do that could improve this metric and boost your overall page performance as a result.

Step 1: See how much more you could earn

Before you put time and effort into improving your mobile speed, you want to see what it’s worth to you. This useful tool will help you make a personal calculation of how much more you could earn with a faster mobile experience. However, this tool does not calculate user experience or user loyalty, both of which are impacted by either a fast, or slow, mobile experience.

Step 2: Look at how you measure up

Using tools to measure different aspects of your site will help you identify areas for improvement more easily than if you were to just estimate. Here are a few of our favorites:

PageSpeed Insights analyzes your site performance, scoring its speed and user experience and identifies issues to fix. The best practice is a score of 85 or above.1
Webpagetest provides a Speed Index that indicates the average time at which visible parts of the page are displayed. Aim for a Speed Index of 3,000 or less and load time of 3 seconds or less — ideally 1-3 seconds.2
Chrome DevTools is a versatile real-time tool for evaluating your website’s performance right in the browser. You can simulate network and CPU speeds, examine network loading details and see how your site’s code is impacting your page.
Mobile-Friendly Test is designed specifically for mobile sites. This tool analyzes exactly how mobile-friendly the site is, and focuses on elements beyond speed as well.

Step 3: Have a clear out - reduce the size of your pages.

Reduce the size of your pages.

Target 50 or fewer requests and 1,000 or fewer bytes to optimize load time.
Compress and select efficient images, and prioritize download of visible content.

Assess the ads and trackers running on your page.

Use a tool to measure the bandwidth and latency impact of pixels and other elements on your pages (e.g., Ghostery). Evaluate if trackers are needed and used, and if they provide enough benefit.
Review latency of your ad partners, especially those delivering video ads, and remove low performing monetization partners.

Step 4: Prioritize the order your page loads in

It sounds obvious, but prioritizing loading of the elements that are visible above the fold will enhance your user experience, even of your net page loading speed doesn’t change.

Prioritize loading elements that are visible above the fold first: Minimize the amount of pieces that show above the fold of visible content. Load styling, javascript logic and images that are only accessed after direct interaction later.
Enable HTTPS and HTTP/2: Support modern HTTPS to provide site integrity, encryption, authentication, and better user experience. More than 1-in-3 of top 100 sites run on modern HTTPS, and a quarter of them use HTTPS by default
Limit server requests where possible: Each mobile page makes an average of 214 server requests,3 some of which happen simultaneously and some that can only happen one after the other. Review each request on your site to understand the benefit it provides.

Step 5: Measure, test, repeat

As the shift to mobile continues to grow, so will users expectations of lighting speed experiences across the web. This means that improving your mobile speed isn’t a one off job, you need to have a process in place to regularly evaluate and improve it. Follow the steps outlined above at regular intervals and record the results of the adjustments you make to refer back to when deciding on new optimization techniques in the future.

Continually assess your ad-related calls to remove low performing monetization partners.
Pick third-party ad-tech partners with lower latency.
Remove or reduce any bulky content.
Consolidate data and analytics tags.
Investigate open-source tools such as Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) and Progressive Web Apps (PWA).

Implementing the strategies outlined in this article could have a serious positive impact on your business. Check out these inspirational stories from Sinclair News and What to Expect to see how significant shifts in mobile speed were achieved with a few technical tweaks.

Next steps

From your interest in PageSpeed, you’re clearly committed to doing all you can to improve the performance of your site and grow your publishing business. With this in mind, you may benefit from a chat with one of our experts. They can offer a personalized consultation to help you make the right technology choices to support your business growth. Book a time.

Post content Posted by Jay Castro, from the AdSense Team

1. Google Developers

2. Google and kissmetrics

3. DoubleClick, “The Need for Mobile Speed”, , September 2016

Source: Inside AdSense

Increasing viewability could boost earnings from video ads

For the seventh installment of the #SuccessStack, we’ll explore the topic of viewability for video ads and take a look at how mastering this could boost your earnings from video ads on your site.

Why is viewability for video important?

On YouTube, over 50% of viewership happens on a mobile device and the number of hours people spend watching videos on mobile is up 100% YoY. So, adding video content represents a huge opportunity for publishers and advertisers alike. But as with display advertising, advertisers are now looking to transact only on viewable video. This means that publishers looking to grow their earnings from this dominant media type will have to ensure they are delivering viewable ads.

How do we classify viewability for video ads?

A video ad is viewable when at least 50% of the ad’s pixels are visible on a screen for at least two consecutive seconds, as defined by the Media Rating Council (MRC), in conjunction with the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB).

What factors affect viewability for video ads?

Device: Video ads are more easily viewed on mobile (73%) or tablet (81%) devices than desktop (64%).¹
Location: 76% of non viewable video ads were never on screen at all, for instance because they are on tabs situated behind the one the user is looking at.² Additionally, videos positioned in the center of the page and towards the top are the most visible locations on the page.³
Player Size: Bigger players deliver better viewability. The most popular player size of 300x250 offers only 20% viewability whereas the 848x477 is the second most popular size but offers a huge improvement of 89% viewability.⁴

What can you do to improve viewability in your video content?

Choose a bigger player: Larger player sizes have been shown to have a positive correlation with viewability and other key metrics that advertisers care about, so advertisers are increasingly targeting them. In Q1 2016 on DBM, growth in spend on large players outpaced all other player sizes combined by 17%.⁵
Spread your content: The average viewability of video ads across the web is 66%, whereas YouTube offers 93%.⁶ Hosting your video content on YouTube as well as on your site could allow you to benefit from this uplift.
Be more mobile: Mobile friendly sites that encourage traffic from mobile devices and tablets can increase viewability for video ads. For example YouTube viewability rises to 95% on mobile devices.⁷
Give video content top billing: As we’ve seen above, placing content at the top of the page in the center and using a larger player size both increase viewability. So give your video content the highest possible profile on the page to increase viewability.

Next steps

Alongside your work on video viewability, you’ll want to make sure you have the right tools in place for managing the video ads you serve. To make sure you’ve got the right tools in place, have a chat with one of our experts. They can offer a personalized consultation to help you make the right choice for your business. Book a slot.

Source: Inside AdSense

The ultimate mobile page speed infographic

In the next edition of the #SuccessStack series, we look at page speed, a metric that became even more important in 2016 and directly impacts the first interaction your site has with its users.

What is page speed?

Page speed measures how quickly the viewable elements of a web page load. In other words, it measures how long it takes before a user can view and interact with a page on the site. It’s a particularly critical metric for the mobile user experience --- recent research from DoubleClick indicates that 53% of mobile site visits are abandoned if pages take longer than 3 seconds to load.

Consider page speed a user-centric measurement since users typically focus on one page at a time and expect fast experiences on every page they interact with. If your page speed isn’t good, you may lose the opportunity to keep users engaged and on your site for longer.

How does page speed impact ad revenue?

The more quickly a user can access your content, the more likely they are to engage with the content on the page and explore more pages on your site. Our study shows that ads on faster mobile pages are likely to be more viewable. The study also projects that mobile sites that load within 5 seconds vs 19 seconds earn up to 2X greater revenue.

While revenue can be impacted by many factors, improving page speed will lead to a better user experience and possibly increased ad revenue.

The ultimate page speed infographic

Our recent page speed studies found many notable learnings that may help paint the picture of the importance of page speed and the impact it can have on your site’s earnings.

Next steps

If you’re wondering which Google tools will be most useful to help grow your business, then you’ll benefit from a chat with one of our experts. They can offer a personalised consultation to help you make the right choice for your site. Book your consultation today.

Source: Inside AdSense

Discover why leading publishers and marketers are using Programmatic Direct

In the next article in our #SuccessStack series, we look at a tool used by leading publishers and marketers that offers your publishing business an opportunity to grow.¹

Programmatic Direct allows advertisers to programmatically execute deals that were once reserved and transacted directly. Advertisers can now use real-time data to reach the right people in the right moments in brand-safe publisher environments. A shift is happening, and more and more advertisers are adopting Programmatic Direct deals to optimize their direct and guaranteed transactions.

What is Programmatic Direct?

Programmatic Direct unites traditional media reservations with the power of real-time bidding. It offers early access to premium inventory, data-driven targeting, a direct relationship between the advertiser and publisher, and automated workflows. Programmatic Direct offers four different deal types and lots of flexibility to meet the needs of advertisers and publishers.

Why are 90+ Ad Age’s top 100 global marketers¹ and 50% of ComScore top 50 US media owners² using it?

Advertisers are empowered: Programmatic Direct offers real-time data, flexible deal structures, efficient workflows and brand safe premium inventory. These benefits can improve user engagement and may translate into greater ad spends with your business.
Publishers grow new relationships: Programmatic Direct creates more opportunities to deepen relationships with existing advertisers and generate new business in a brand-safe environment. Darby Sieben, President at Mediative says, “We see Programmatic Guaranteed as another important step to connect advertisers with premium publishers’ inventory. Google’s technology helps automate the buying and selling of premium inventory, which is important to ensure that we can deliver the best experience for our advertising and publisher partners.”

Is Programmatic Direct right for your business?

Programmatic Direct isn’t for everyone. Publishers who don’t currently use DoubleClick for Publishers or negotiate deals directly with advertisers may not see advantages to adopting programmatic.

Others, though, will find it a great fit for their businesses. Here are a few signs that Programmatic Direct might be the right direction for your publishing business:

You’re looking for operational efficiencies on the traditional direct model: Programmatic Direct reduces the administrative burden of creating and managing direct ad deals with features like automated billing and collections. This usually offers substantial cost savings to the publisher.
You need control: Advertisers and publishers alike benefit from the controls offered by Programmatic Direct. For publishers this means greater control over the ads you show on your sites.
You have the resources to support it: You don’t need hundreds of full time employees, but you will need someone with the time and energy to dedicate to creating and managing your Programmatic Direct deals for optimal earnings.

Next steps

If you’re wondering whether Programmatic Direct might be a good move for your sites, then you’ll benefit from a chat with one of our experts. They can offer a personalized consultation to help you make the right choice for your business. Book a slot.

1 - DoubleClick Ad Exchange data, Oct 2014-Dec 2015. Minimum $1K spend.
2 - DoubleClick Ad Exchange data, Oct 2014 - Dec 2015. Cross references with ComScore 50 US list December 2015.

Source: Inside AdSense

How we fought bad ads, sites and scammers in 2016

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 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.

6,000 sites and 6,000 accounts removed for attempting to sell counterfeit goods

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

Source: Inside AdSense

Viewability is vital for publisher business growth

In the fourth article of the #SuccessStack, we explore viewability and its increasing importance in retaining and growing ad revenues for your publishing business. We’ve recently received a lot of questions on viewability from our AdSense publisher community, so this post should answer the most frequently asked ones.

What is viewability?

Media Rating Council (MRC) and IAB standards state that a display ad is counted as viewable when at least 50% of the ad is within the viewable space on the user’s screen for one second or more.

Why is it important for your ad revenue?

An ad served doesn’t necessarily equal an ad viewed, and digital advertisers and publishers are catching onto this as the industry shifts toward valuing viewable rather than served impressions. This is because ads that are considered viewable have a higher chance of being seen and are more likely to engage an advertiser's target audience.

As a result, more savvy advertisers are paying closer attention to ad viewability and it is increasingly becoming a factor in their decision making around ad spend.

If an ad isn't seen, it can't have an impact, change perception, or build brand trust. That's why measuring viewability matters. For AdSense publishers, this means that increased viewability may encourage greater investments from advertisers.

Let’s get started

Before you get to work on increasing viewability, make sure you choose the right tool to give yourself the best possible potential earnings. To help you with this, be sure to schedule a free consultation with one of our experts who can help you to choose the right solution for your business.

How can you increase the viewable impressions delivered by your site?

1. Put ad units just above the fold.

Interestingly, ads placed just above the fold of a web page produce higher viewability metrics than those at the top of the page. Try horizontal ad unit sizes, e.g. 320x100 for optimal increase in viewability metrics. It’s important to note that it's against the AdSense ad placement policies to place a 300x250 ad unit above the fold on mobile pages, so be sure to place those larger ad sizes below the fold.

Bonus tip: Switch 320x50 for 320x100 ad units.

Replacing your 320x50 ad units with 320x100 on your mobile device can improve viewability and potentially increase earnings. Revenue per thousand impressions (RPMs) tends to increase when you move to the larger mobile banner ad. This is because using the 320x100 ad unit allows both the 320x50 ad and the 320x100 to compete for the same ad space, doubling the fill-rate competition. It’s best practice to put the ad just above the fold as mentioned above, which could further boost your revenues.

2. Use mobile-friendly ad formats.

Mobile is becoming an ever more important part of online ad sales. Here are three mobile friendly ad formats to try:

Use large high impact ad units such as the medium rectangle (300x250), large rectangle (336x280) and large mobile banner (320x100) to get the best results. The first two work well on desktop and mobile (below the fold), with the third being designed specifically for mobile.
AdSense also offers two kinds of page-level mobile ad formats, anchor ads and vignettes. Both are designed to increase mobile viewability.

Once you’ve implemented the tips above, you can find even more advanced best practice viewability tips in this infographic.