Does AdSense Page Level Ads Increase AdSense Revenue
If you are excited about the new upcoming AdSense Page Level ads, let's find out if they are truly beneficial to you.
No matter whether you are a casual blogger or a news website or an internet hobbyist since 2003 Google Adsense program has always been the holy grail for all website owners.
Overall these years AdSense has provided a chance to put food in many of the webmasters' table, a chance to make your passion to profession.
No matter what, the AdSense ad types were almost the same for all these years besides some minor changes, but last year Google has launched a special Ads type named AdSense Page Level Ads.
Now, these page-level ads are still in beta and not available publicly for everyone even after testing it for more than one and a half years. If you follow me on Twitter, then you must have seen that I’ve teased recently, I got the AdSense Page Level Ads beta access earlier this month.
Since that day I’ve been testing this new ad format by Google and today in this article I’m going to share my thoughts and findings of this new AdSense Page Level Ads.
Also as per my research and experience, I think each account at least needs to be 1-year-old and withdrawal money from Google AdSense at least 6 times or more.
The reason I mentioned these requirements because I haven’t seen any account to get access to this AdSense page level ads beta program which does not fall into that category.
Though, please note these requirements are not officially declared by Google, these are my personal predictions depending upon various variables.
What is AdSense Page Level Ads?
If you are not already familiar with what AdSense Page Level Ads are and what are the benefits of having them, let me explain it to you briefly.As per normal AdSense policy, any general users are allowed to put 3 normal AdSense ad units, 3 AdSense link ads, and two custom Google search.
If you add more than the mentioned ad units in your site, firstly the extra ad units will not work and the Google will block your account for violating the AdSense policy.
Update: Google has removed ads restrictions and Now General publishers are allowed to add unlimited ads on their blog.
As per the AdSense policy, No users are also allowed to have fixed sticky AdSense ads on their website.
If you put any kind of ad like this on your website and if someone files a complaint against you to Google for violating the policy, all your earned income and account will be gone forever.
Google also has some special bots to check these kinds of critical violations.
AdSense Page-Level Ads Dashboard
This is where AdSense Page Level ads come in. After getting access to AdSense Page-Level Ads Beta program, you will see two new ad types, called Anchor/ Overlay ads & Vignette ads in your account, besides the ad units you are used to seeing inside your AdSense dashboard.
The only catch about AdSense page level ads is that they are designed to work on smartphones only so you won’t get any extra benefits with these from your desktop users.
Here is a brief explanation about how each of them works
1. Anchor/ Overlay Ads
Even though no one is allowed to have sticky fixed ads on their site as mentioned above, but if you enable Anchor/ overlay ads on your site, it will show you a sticky Ad at the bottom of your mobile screen.If any user does not want to see these Ads they can just easily slide down to hide these ads on any website.
This is really great as theoretically sticky ads have much more impression and cost-per-click value than normal scrollable ads (thoroughly explained below).
2. Vignette ads:
This is a unique kind of ad format which is also not allowed to implement as per general AdSense policy. What this ad type does is, it converts any link to an ad overlay page.So if someone clicks on any link inside your article to go the mentioned page, it will first show a full-screen ad which users have to manually close by clicking on the close button if they are not interested before redirecting you to your destination page.
It is really great but the main downside of this is, you cannot choose, clicking on which link this type of ad will show up, instead Google bot will scan each and every page of your site that has page level ad code implemented, then Google itself will decide when to show up this type of ads and on which links.
So, in theory, they are completely random and may or may not show up when users clicked on any particular link on your website while visiting it from a smartphone.
As Google said, the reason they do this is because the user experience is the first priority to Google. So they do not want to clutter any website with tons and tons of ads buried into the links.
Instead Google will scan each page and if they think any link on your webpage actually makes sense to have Vignette ads buried into it, then only it will show up, otherwise, it won’t.
If you are still confused about these ad types, I really don’t blame you because of both of this ad format strictly violet Google AdSense general usage policy.
So, as Google said it, these types of ads are only legal if they are served by AdSense page-level ads, but if you try to implement them using the general AdSense ad code and some fancy coding in your site, it will become invalid and your account will be prone to a policy violation.
Here is a small video made by Google itself which might help you to understand the new AdSense Page-Level Ads even further, take a look at it.
Why sticky ads are theoretically more beneficial?
A few months back I had run a simple experiment on my website after taking proper approval from Google.The reason I needed the approval to run this experiment is that it was a direct AdSense policy violation, but Google allowed me to run this experiment for 24 hours only.
So that it will remain in the footer even if someone scrolls the posts and the only way to hide these ad units were by using the close button I placed on the top of the ad unit.
Also in this experiment, I showed this specific ad, just to the smartphone and tablet users, for desktop users there was no change.
After 24 hours of experimentation when I received my report on the next day I was completely blown away by the results of it.
Just in 1 day, my daily income for that day had increased by almost 700% comparing my daily earning average.
On that day I also realize why Google doesn’t allow users to keep sticky ads on their site.
If you have normal AdSense ad unit code added to your site, every time someone lands on your website, they see the ad and then scroll down.
So if you have a site with daily good visitors (assuming none of them has enabled adblocker), you may get a good amount of impression on each of your ad units but the average time people actually viewed that ad will be much lesser as people will scroll fast as soon as they see any ads.
So, the overall CPC of your AdSense account will remain low, as the CPC depends on both impression and ad viewing time.
Now, if you have a sticky ad on your site and if you do not provide any way to close them, it will not get a good impression but a good average view time also, which will in term lead to having a higher CPC rate.
So, even if a few people clicked on that ad, you are still going to earn a lot.
But Google doesn’t allow this is because as per AdSense policy and moto no one should be forced to lured to click on an ad.
One should click on any Google ads if and only if they are truly interested to click on those ads.
An AdSense publisher should not put any ads on their website such a way people click on ads mistakenly or without understand it is ad. Otherwise, it will be treated as an AdSense policy violation.
So, does having AdSense Page Level Ads increases the earning hugely?
Well, this is where the story started to get changed. I’ve already shared my experience with sticky ad experiment using the normal ad units above, so when I got the invitation for the new AdSense Page Level Ads beta program, I was insanely excited to test it out as this is this will allow me to have sticky Ads on my website officially without violating any terms.But after using it for a few weeks, the results that I’ve received is nowhere near to my theoretical expectation derived from my previous sticky ad experiment.
On Day 1 after installing it, my CPC grew by almost 270%. On the next day, it becomes 275%.
But from the third day, it started to decline and after a week of declination, my overall average CPC increase has become only 50%.
In somedays, my AdSense account has earned exactly it used to earn without the new AdSense page level ads.
Also, one important thing to note is, as per AdSense reporting all of my earning has generated from my usual ad units and not from the new page-level ads, as I had only a hand few clicks on those ad units.
So, as it seems to have the page-level ads on my website has helped to increase my CPC but mostly the revenues are generated by the normal AdSense ad units.
Now here is the complicated part, even though the ads are sticky on mobile, receives so much impression and watch time, why doesn’t it perform like a normal ad unit placed exactly the way AdSense page level Ad does.
It’s not like that people don’t visit my site from mobile devices. Almost 60% of my daily viewers visit my site on a smartphone.
After digging a lot into this, at last, I come to a conclusion that why the new AdSense page level ads do not perform like the normal ad units placed at the same place in the same way.
You see the implementation of page-level ads is very different than normal AdSense ads.
In case of normal AdSense ads, we have to add the ad code for each individual ad places, but for page level ads, you don’t add any ad units at any place.
You just have to put a JavaScript snippet into the head section of your page where you want to have page-level ads enabled and Google will take care of the rest.
So, in this new ad types even though they receive a lot of impressions and watch time and maybe some clicks also, the new bot that has been designed for this type of specific ad type, discard most of them and only allow those views and clicks which has been done intentionally.
You might ask, how Google does this? Well, the simple answer is by tracking the touch input on your device and by the help of extraordinary machine learning and pattern recognition.
Is it truly worth to have the new AdSense Page Level Ads?
I will not say that they don’t worth it, but what I will rather say is the revenue expectations I have from it, it did not meet that standard.But still having page-level ads has increased my CPC but just not as much as I expected.
So, overall I will say it is definitely worth to have the new AdSense Page Level Ads enabled on your website, at least it will increase your earning by somewhat which is always good for anyone.
How to get this new AdSense Page Level ads on my account?
As I mentioned at the beginning of this post that, there is no way to apply for getting approval for AdSense page level ads.If your website is an authority website which a lot of users visits everyday organically and if your AdSense account is in good standing, Google will send you’re the invitation themselves, you don’t have to do anything but wait.
Also if you don’t get an invitation for the beta program, don’t lose hope, I think Google is going to make this new ad type public very soon.
So, What do you think about the new AdSense page level ads? Did you also get an invitation to use them on your account? Do you currently use them on your website?
If you do, let me know if you agree with my findings that I’ve mentioned above. I would love to hear your thoughts on this in the comment section below and continue this conversation there.
