Google Adsense is transitioning to per-impression payments for publishers
blog.google
blog.google
The net change here is probably almost nothing, just the smaller sites that never use google ad manager will see the change but any publisher of note will have been operating with this for as long as they can remember.
With click through rates continuing to decrease it's likely they needed to make this change to keep the long tail sites happy and generating some revenue, they would back out the CPC to an effective CPM anyway.
Me:13+ years in digital publishing and advertising.
Because the advertising industry has structurally educated users to try their hardest to ignore the ads, resulting in every more obnoxious ads, which are then even more forcefully ignored. And that in turn gave rise to adblockers, which are now more or less a requirement if you don't want to lose your sanity while browsing the web.
For a long time I wondered why people said this. I don't use ad blockers and didn't feel it was that bad.
Then 2 things made me understand. First, I pay for YouTube. If you don't and don't block their ads, they seriously test your patience as you browse. I tried it for less than an hour before I couldn't take it anymore.
The second was looking for torrents and hacks (it was for a legitimate and unambiguously legal purpose too, no gray area, but long story!). Those sites are literally impossible to use without ad blockers. Same thing for tools related to diagnosing PC issues. It's all ads over ads over scams and trying to get you to install some adware as you navigate the site trying to install the actually legitimate tools.
I very rarely do either of those things (YouTube without subscription, and navigating the "gray" web), so I never realized just how fucking awful it can get.
It's almost like a sort of reverse network effect. The bigger you get, the less desirable your product becomes. And the advertising industry's getting quite large.
If I want to advertise my new Windex(tm) flavored Mountain Dew[1] then all I need is people to see it. They're not likely to buy it from a click, but I want them to remember it next time they are at the grocery store, and I'll pay to shove it in their browser.
[1] Not currently available in retail stores
This certainly wasn’t true 10 years ago. I’d have low traffic pages go without a click but still earn some cents in revenue that day running Adsense (effective CPM would be a rough baseline of ~ 1/10th what a page with clicks that day would earn).
Unless, of course, when you go to cash out you run into their absurd KYC that will arbitrarily get rejected (you only get 1 chance), or they cancel your account for reasons, and there is absolutely no recourse.
They are happy taking your business before that though, of course.
It was so long time ago that most of have not even heard about it today.
Funny how even you don't really remember it
Someone just paraphrased that in the company memo.
“Less prominent position” does not mean “zero prominence”. A mention in the final sentence is not anywhere near as prominent as it was before the change, but that’s still more prominent than something like hiding it in the middle.
Now, their adherence to the phrase has certainly decreased over time and was never perfect. That’s a separate matter.
Disclosure: I used to work for Google, but not since before Alphabet was created (which was some years before this Google code of conduct change). I never had any involvement in the decisions over this motto or the changes to where it shows up, beyond of course trying my best to adhere to it in my own work.
https://web.archive.org/web/20180117100018/https://abc.xyz/i...
https://web.archive.org/web/20181225060308/https://abc.xyz/i...
But organizations change as they grow.
Well the honest answer is that it's harder for clickfraud farms to hyperoptimize against detection algorithms on-the-fly this way. This makes it harder for them to figure out exactly what pattern is flagging the algorithm.
Nowadays I have a side projects with Adsense on it, using another Google account, which I have to use in incognito mode because otherwise it links me to the other account that I'm still using and rejects me.
Also, for a service that processes billions, it still does not offer a developer mode so when your implementing the ad script:
- You're not always getting ads so can't be really be sure your code and UI are OK.
- You risk being penalized / kicked out because you click on an ad n times by mistake
Edit: also there's a semi-scam that has been running on Adsense for years. Those "3 steps to get your video/software/etc click here" ads. There is a lot of variant.
IIRC they trick people into subscribing to a fake service through your phone bill.
They're very hard to block as a publisher as they come from A LOT of accounts.
Also it's funny for them to say "Publishers gets 68%" which sounds huge but actually translates to a staggering 32% fee.
But Adsense was capable of earning so much more than what most could do themselves that I was happy to “pay” them when I ran a semi-popular site.
Though CPM can be gamed as well: put the ad at the bottom instead of the top. At the right instead of the left.
Can be gamed by publishers too: create an ad that users see but don’t click on, but act on anyway. E.g. an ad for a cola and then you drink one from your fridge.
I thought Google basically blended it all together when deciding which ad to present: a poorly clicked ad will need to pay more per click to get displayed.
Media/Display ads were normally CPM. Text ads were nearly all CPC (regardless of adwords, yahoo's search marketting, or y!travel's custom advertising market). Some display ads were CPC. There was a small amount of ads where it was CPA (cost per acquisition, advertiser only paid if the user purchased). CPA seemed like it was growing, but details of sales tracking and trust between parties probably gets in the way. Ocassionally we'd have some deal where we would have to put in links that might look like ads, but were unpaid.
Is there a reason this isn't more popular on its face? Only paying for an ad when it works seems like you could charge more for the when it works part as a service (in this case Yahoo Ads or Google Ads) but it allows businesses to run ads at a higher rate if they're willing to give up more money on impression (where impression = someone buys)
But what if you clicked through the ad, and then close the window, but later come back and book through the advertised site? Now we also need to have come to an agreement about 'lookback window'. Maybe a fair lookback window is different for different markets.
But it gets worse. What if you clicked through the ad on your phone, and then booked on your desktop? No tracking. Or even worse, what if it's a brand ad, and you come into the physical store and buy? Definitely no tracking. (well, some people try to get tracking for that, but it's pretty iffy)
As for %. They're bringing the customer, providing the tool, the payments and the collection of the money. All the publisher is doing is placing some code on their site. So 32% is actually a lot cheaper than a publisher hiring their own sales staff, buying their own ad servers, collecting and sorting the payment.
Just so you know.
There are many things that I could outsource that would be cheaper than doing myself (build/buy a car. Buy a cheeseburger as opposed to producing all the ingredients myself.) I am equally interested in what that 32% fee would look like in a more open market and then say if it is cheap or expensive.
This is splitting up AdSense such that any third-party buy-side operation that wants to use AdSense as the network is on equal footing with Google's own buy-side using AdSense. If anyone else can run that side of the equation better or for cheaper, they can now do so.
In other words: They say it costs $5 per click or $25 CPM, they just make that figure up. There is no real market driving that cost. It's 100% made up to maximize Google's profits.
Source: I was the lead engineer on the first release of AdWords.
I looked to cite this but couldn't find it on Google, so I may be mistaken...
This also means there is a huge opportunity to disrupt google at this pont.
edit to add reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
I also think that disruption will come from something that looks different than google, maybe something like chatgpt, that doesn't appear to be a direct competitor at first but ends up taking a significant bite out of usage of google.
What they actually sell is a B2B SaaS for participating in auctions on those web properties.
We still largely don't know what half of advertising works and what half doesn't. There's just more metrics obfuscating that reality.
Source: worked on market research focused on identifying what advertising worked and what advertising didn't which Google white labeled
I recall a conversation with a CMO who was discussing how all their metrics indicated TV ads were a waste of money, so in a few of their DMAs they pulled TV ads and their sales in those areas dropped by double digits.
The additional metric fidelity is a false sense of security in the data. There's a lot more going on to drive someone to purchase than simply the ad tagging that gets picked up. It can be useful in optimizing spend a bit, but should be considered more like correlation than causation.
So you can add budget to things that are converting and see if that linearly leads to more conversions, just don't assume that it's as clear cut as a dashboard makes it out to be - it generally won't be and after a few low hanging fruit gains you'll hit diminishing returns because it's not actually as simple as "person sees banner ad A and clicks = 4% chance of sale."
For example, you might have 4% of people who clicked through your banner ad end up purchasing. But 80% of those 4% had previously read a CNET review for your product before seeing that ad. How are you getting that data point? And even if you do, it doesn't necessarily mean putting a link to that review on the landing page for the ad will result in much lift, as there may have been a selection bias where most people swayed by a CNET review were the ones who had already read reviews.
One of the most influential touch points is WoM. So certainly offline product recommendations aren't ending up in your dashboard, and exposure to social media positive sentiment isn't either.
Easily half to 2/3rd of the things someone sees that influence their purchasing decision aren't being picked up by an attribution model for conversion tracking.
And "old cable TV ads" . Still an audience of 72 million for those in 2023.
And cross platform attribution really isn't as straightforward as you seem to think.
Now, you run trial campaigns for your product, collect data, and calculate XX base on it, and transfer this XX into your bidding formula. Or trust Google/FB/etc bidding algorithms/ML to do this for you.
I'm glad your confidence in your methodology gives you peace of mind.
And this quote long predates the internet...
On this blog post Google says: "Publishers in our ad network are required to adhere to both our AdSense policies and the Better Ads Standards which do not allow practices like pop-ups or interruptive ads that take up the majority of the screen."
But full page ads which interrupt your flow are a standard on AdSense.
Impressions
https://www.bluewinston.com/dictionary/ppi-pay-per-impressio....
Hide the ad unit in some hidden background layer and you're still gonna get paid for impressions even if no human eyeballs see it...
And you'll get away with it too, because as long as you have millions of web pages and each one only gets a little traffic, there won't be enough statistical power to see that they are underperforming vs just unlucky that none of the first 85 impressions led to a click.
This is already rampant in mobile games.
This is also another step towards unifying/supplanting the 'Google' ad network and DoubleClick.
What this does kill is a small time publisher opening up their own website while waiting at the Apple Store and clicking some ads they know will pay a lot.
Not that I’d ever do such a thing.
You can easily have 100x or 1000x more impressions than clicks.
So detecting fraudulent clicks is much harder than fraudulent impressions, in terms of a proportion of fraud, just because there's so much less of a baseline genuine signal.
E.g. 20 fraudulent clicks out of 40 total clicks per day, who can tell? But 20,000 fraudulent impressions out of 40,000 total, now you can do a lot more pattern recognition to filter them out.
Like. You’re right: it’s easier for a small-time fraudster to do cpc fraud, but they should still be able detect suspicious page views, whether there’s a click involved or not. At cpc large scale fraud, there’s a lot of data either way.
The point is that small numbers just don't let you make confident conclusions period.
It is fairly trivial to have 20 unique devices generating 20 clicks, quite a bit more challenging to have 20,000 unique devices generate 20,000 impressions.
I'm probably naive, but I really believe digital media could be cleaned up significantly simplified if we started over. Programmatic media is massively overcomplicated mess compared to solutions from platforms like Meta.
Huh, who sets the industry standard? Google, google, google and google.
You can actually use that as a negotiating point. Let's say a new route is opened causing traffic to bypass a normally high traffic point. The advertiser might still price per potential impression per dollar when the reality is significantly different.
Not to nitpick but it's important for people to do their homework on this and realize that those selling the ad space are going to price on the higher end of potential impressions.
google gets money: per click on publisher website
google is incentivized to maximize click chance per view in this system
Could be that a bunch of people have given up on ad-blocking and are just blindly clicking every single ad then immediately closing the new tab to get to the video.
Result on CPC will be ad payments going through the roof, but actual conversions trending down to zero.
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