Better Ads Standards – Blocking Intrusive Ads

Yes! But not all ads. On Google’s Chromium blog, Google announced that 8 Mobile Types of Ads and 4 Desktop Types will be automatically blocked by Google Chrome. Why? Because, well… they’re annoying. For the average consumer that’s great news. However we have to explain these out for our Mobile customers to make sure our products will still run perfectly.

Why is Google doing this?

As you’ve probably noticed, Google are and have become content obsessed. A great example of this would be the birth and development of Google AMP. But we’re in 2018 running octa-core, faster than WiFi data connections in our pockets, right?. However, Google decided the web is too slow and needed a new development language. But Google AMP came in with some elegant, and non-intrusive ads. We personally love them because they are simply not wrecking the entire design of the page. Therefore, it would have been only fair that they would streamline this into the main consumer world of classic HTML, CSS, JS or WordPress sites. Which are able to still use incredibly annoying ads.

It was about time.

For some time now, in our opinion, spam became a thing of the past. Most modern day inboxes can filter these out without you even knowing it was there in the first place. But ads have become the next best thing. Publishers and marketers plastering huge ads with small close buttons that sometimes don’t even work. All of it just to get you to click on a product you don’t even need. Not to mention the fact that you’d get haunted and harassed by that product afterwards all over the web. This cross-site tracking block as introduced by Apple with the release of MacOS Sierra last year. But Google Chrome is still the king of browsers out there. Consequently, it was only a matter of time until Google had to step up and offer a more relevant solution.

Which ads will be penalized?

If you heavily rely on ads and you find this offensive or a bad idea on Google’s behalf, just think that we heavily rely on ad-blockers and closing your page because it loads. Therefore, most likely you’re generating minimal revenue from what otherwise could be a maximised profit. If only your ad would be designed properly and placed in a high visibility place. As previously mentioned, Google is not hunting down every website out there.

Therefore, if you designed your page right and you’re not stressing your users, you’ll still be able to generate revenue from ads. Google will only target websites that breach a specific pattern.  However, if your page runs any of the following ads, it would be a great idea to update them now since you can be certain. Because if publishers found ways to trick Ad-Blocker software, you’ll most likely get your account revoked if Google catches you trying to game their terms.

Evaluating sites for Violations

Sites are evaluated by examining a sample of pages from the site. Depending on how many violations of the Better Ads Standards are found, the site will be evaluated as having a status of Passing, Warning, or Failing. Site owners can also see more detailed results: such as the specific violations of the Better Ads Standards that were found, via the Ad Experience Report in Google’s Search Console.  From the Report site owners can also request that their site be re-reviewed after they have addressed the non-compliant ad experiences.

Blocking Ads

If a site continues to maintain non-compliant ad experiences 30 days after being notified of violations, Chrome will begin to block ads on that site. This campaign has shown positive results. As with most Google decisions ( emphasize MOST ) this is done to benefit the end user. If you put yourself in the … screen … of your user, you’re not doing anyone a huge favour by causing an epilepsy attack or an anger induced screen crack and exit from your page. These standards are fair for both the publisher and the end user.

What about Enabled Mobile Products?

We’re always up to date with these standards. Moreover, we’re always reading about ways to better the user experience of our customers not destroy it and most certainly not increase their bounce rate. We’re always including relevant elements that can aid our customers to build the fastest, best designed, and up to date with all Google standards website they can. So we’re happy to say, all our products are compatible with Google’s new “Better Ads Standard”. If you’re a customer of ours ( and haven’t added one of this annoying ads yourself ) you don’t have to worry about being penalized or kicked out of the Google Ads program.