In case you’ve lived in a well for the past couple of years, Google is absolutely in-love with mobile traffic. We don’t need to tell you why – you already know that’s where the audience is. But mobile is also where the largest potential for growth lies.
Ad networks have yet to fully crack or hack mobile advertising campaigns, which means there’s still a ways to go to make advertisers and users happy.
But does Google still love us, publishers? Well, the messages we got from the GPS event were somewhat mixed. Most of them had little to do with AdSense directly, but can indirectly affect your earnings. So which direction will your AdSense revenues go, with these new updates on the AdWords side of the ad marketplace?
- It’s all about location, location, location – Local Search on Google Maps
The new Google Maps are going to offer attractive advertising capabilities for small businesses and local chain branches based on user 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 supply of a certain product to satisfy increased demand we’ll effectively stop prices from going up.
Or in digital advertising terms – more ad inventory means diminished demand for every ad unit and diminished CPCs and CPMs. Unless, with more inventory come greater ad budgets, especially if the new inventory is effective for advertisers. So this can actually be a blessing in disguise for AdSense publishers.
Search vs. Display
Google prefers clicks on their own turf. Of course they do. They don’t have to share their revenues with publishers there. So offering a Google-owned locale-targeted inventory to advertisers is more than likely to take a bite out of that local search traffic.
Who Gets Paid for Embedded Maps?
will Google be adding ads to embedded Google Maps, and if so – who gets the revenue from the clicks in these local ads?
Another good question is what will happen to said ad units and publishers making a good living from in-map AdSense ads?
- Who is bigger better for? – Expanded Text Ads Get Double Headlines & More Characters
Advertisers will now be able to include a two lines of 30 character each in clickable titles on their text ads, and 80 characters for a description line. Overall, this promises longer ads taking up more screen space in mobile searches.
This is great for search advertisers and Google, but for anyone trying to get organic traffic to monetize this is bad news. Looks like paid search ads are worth more to Google than the content you invested in making.
- The Dread (or not) of Smart Pricing – Better Measurement of In-Store Conversions
At GPS, Google announced they will now be cross-checking users’ mobile location history with PPC ads they’ve clicked and then attributing conversions to AdWords campaigns accordingly.
The goal of increased conversion measurement is to attract more advertisers. If Google is successful in this, it just means higher 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 pain. Especially for a small business advertiser. So often, you end up uploading image or flash ads in the most common sizes, and that’s about it.
Google wants more competition between more advertisers over more inventory. By letting advertisers create responsive ads that can fit in more ad units, Google basically does just that. And this is great for everyone.
- Targeting Your Device – Changes to device bidding
Google hopes (and we do too) that this will allow advertisers to spend their budgets more effectively and scale their ad spend quickly. Which would lead to more AdSense revenue for you (and Google).
- Retargeting Gone Open – Lift on AdWords Demand Restriction
Other ad networks can display retargeting ads to users instead of AdSense, where AdSense is not implemented.
This might reduce CPCs for retargeting ads on AdSense, and hurt publishers relying on AdSense for revenues.
Local, Mobile, and Advertiser Oriented
Overall, the announcements at GPS are very advertiser oriented, and especially SMB (small to medium business) advertising budgets that have started to migrate over to the big F in increasing numbers.
