Adsense has replaced its page-level feature with Auto Ads, but how beneficial will it be to your blog, will it really improve your earnings?
If you were using page level ads before, then you’ll automatically be migrated to auto ads, meaning you don’t need to do anything again.
It worth trying if you haven’t, we’ve tested it out on my blogspot blog (which we use as our own lab) and we’ll tell you what we found so far, which we believe will assist you in making your own decision whether to implement it or not.
But first…
What is Auto Ads?
“Auto ads are a family of ad formats that offer a simple and innovative way for you to monetize your content. With Auto ads, you place the same piece of ad code once on each page. After you’ve added the code, Google automatically shows ads at optimal times when they’re likely to perform well for you and provide a good experience for your users.”
When this auto ad code is pasted in <head> section of your theme, it means Google takes care of the rest by showing ad when it believes that it’ll perform and give you the best result.
From what we can observe so far, auto ads is an improvement on Page-level ads at the same time building on other opportunities page level had, something like:
- New ad formats (e.g., text and display, In-article, etc. ) in addition to existing formats such as anchor ads and vignettes
- Advanced URL settings which let you show different Auto ads on different pages of your sites
Benefits of auto ads
The benefits of Auto ads include:
“They let you focus on creating great content. Auto ads automatically place and optimize your ads for you so you don’t have to spend time doing it yourself.”
The ads placed are intuitive, fetching the keywords in your article. Try as much as possible to target a particular keyword or keywords when you activate auto ads. It may have its shortcomings, but we’ve not found one at the moment.
“They potentially increase your revenue. Auto ads analyze your pages and find new places to show ads based on your layout, content, and existing Google ads.”
Right keywords with ad in a website can potentially increase revenue. We found out that the ones we tested are placed at the strategic positions which could increase click through rate, but CPC plays a key role here at the long run.
“They’re easy to use. You place the same piece of code just once on each page that you want to show Auto ads. Google takes care of the rest.”
Very easy to use, if you are on blogspot head straight to your dashboard, click your theme, then “Edit HTML” and paste the auto ads code right below the <head> (depending on your theme)
Auto ads gives you the power to show different ad formats using auto ads on some of your pages by creating a URL group.
Ad formats supported by Auto ads
1. In-page ads
2. Text & display
3. In-article ads
4. In-feed ads (mobile only)
5. Matched content (mobile only)
6. Overlay ads
7. Anchor ads (mobile only)
8. Vignette ads (mobile only)
How to set up Auto ads
If you’re just starting off with adsense, then it’s important you first choose which ad formats you’d like to show across your pages, that’s going to be your “global settings” (To change your global settings, visit your Auto ads page and click edit).
- Sign in to your AdSense account.
- In the left navigation panel, click My ads.
- Click Auto ads.
- On the “Choose your global settings” page, use the controls to select the ad formats that you’d like to show.
- Leave Automatically get new formats selected if you want AdSense to automatically add new ad formats to your global settings as they become available.
- Click Save.
- On the “Place code on your page” page, click Copy code.
- Paste the ad code between the <head> and </head> tags of each page where you want to show Auto ads.
Note that you only need to do this once per page. The ad code is the same for every page on every site where you want to show Auto ads. After you’ve pasted the ad code, you can still make changes to your Auto ads settings at any time without having to change the ad code.
- Click Done.
For WordPress site:
Get your code and login to your wordpress site and paste the code in the <head> tag (or at the top of the body)
Note: You can only use one of the methods below to paste your code in the <head> tag
There are two methods you can use to paste the code in the <head> tag 1) Theme header, 2) Install “Insert headers and footers”
1) Theme header
To use the first method: In the left navigation dashboard of your blog, click on Appearance>Editor>and look through options by your right handside and click on ‘Theme header’ you can press Ctrl+F (<head>) and paste your code and save.
2) “Insert headers and footers”
If you can’t figure out the No.1 method, another simple method is by installing Insert Headers and Footers plugin.
In case you don’t have the plugin, click on Plugins>Add New, and search for the plugin, then activate it.
After activating the plugin, go to Settings, click “Insert Headers and Footers” and paste the code into the header section.
Click on save button to store your changes
Auto ads will start to appear on your pages in about 10-20 minutes.
How to track the performance of your Auto ads
You can track the performance of your Auto ads by viewing the Ad formats report on your Performance reports page. Auto ads are shown under ad format labels (“Anchor”, “Vignettes”, etc.) in the report.
Final verdict:
Auto ads is a new feature on the AdSense dashboard which we are still monitoring, so far it doing well on the mobile devices, but seems to be unstable on the laptop/desktop, we now have more tablet/mobile device users than laptop/desktop, though. So why not concentrate more on where your users are?
Again, we are still monitoring, so we can’t say for now if auto ads will improve revenue. We hope to check the result after two days and see what we’ve got.
Note that Google keeps rolling out different features on the adsense tab for publishers in order to improve user experience at the same time make its publishers get the best out of their efforts.