AdSense Per Page Ad Limits

Recent changes to the AdSense ad placement and ad limits policy have the web (and publishers) all abuzz with excitement. Some people appear to be excited for the wrong reasons though. Since the changes, I've come to realize that many publishers don't really understand what AdSense calls "the spirit of AdSense" and seem to read what they want to read into the policies ... and a lot of them are wrong. In a few web articles I've read statements like "AdSense has abolished the 3 ads per page limit", while in fact most experienced publishers have realized that what AdSense has actually done is tightened up the policy, to the point where many pages won't even qualify for 3 ads on a page. And yes, you read that right - some pages will not even have enough text to show 2 ads. A couple of days after publishers discovered the policy changes, I began seeing pages with 8, 10, 16 ads on a page, with more AdSense ads in hovering boxes and popups.  That makes it quite obvious that publishers don't understand the policy. They appear to be reading with $$ signs in their eyes, instead of with understanding in their brains.

The policy now relies on the amount of content on each page that shows AdSense ads. Just because a page exists doesn't mean it's suitable for a big pile of ads ... or any ads for that matter. What the policy actually says is that you now require enough textual content on every page where you place AdSense ads, so a page with just an image means a page with no textual content ... and perhaps that page won't show any AdSense ads on it. Certain types of pages also will not be able to show ads - such as pages that don't follow webmaster quality guidelines (meaning you must actually READ and UNDERSTAND those guidelines), or pages with mostly copied content.

What The Policy Says

Valuable inventory

Advertising and other paid promotional material added to your pages should not exceed your content. Furthermore, the content you provide should add value and be the focal point for users visiting your page. For this reason, we may limit or disable ad serving on pages with little to no value and/or excessive advertising until changes are made.

Examples of unacceptable pages include but are not limited to:

• Mirroring, framing, scraping or rewriting of content from other sources without adding value;
• Pages with more advertising than publisher-provided content;
• Automatically generated content without manual review or curation;
• Hosted ad pages or pages without content;
• Pages that don’t follow our Webmaster Quality Guidelines.

 https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/1346295?hl=en#Ad_limit_per_page

Breaking Down the Policy

"Advertising and other paid promotional material" means not just AdSense ads any more - any other advertising (whether you've sold it yourself, or whether it's from other ad providers) AND affiliate links count towards that value. So if you have a page with one or two paragraphs of text and a lot of ads or affiliate links on the page, your page probably won't qualify for 3 AdSense ads, never mind more of them. It may not qualify for even one ad. The more total ads and promotional materials you have on your site "from all sources" is going to count towards how much value your page has for Adsense. Although that isn't the only thing that counts (actual content counts first and foremost), and it was given some consideration by AdSense in the past, now they are telling you that if your site looks like "ad spam" (too much advertising, no or useless content) ... it's not going to work for AdSense.

"Content you provide should add value and be the focal point" means that if you have more copied content, other people's photos/images or videos than original content you've written yourself, you may not be able to use 3 ads on the page. After all, if your content was taken from other websites, then what are you trying to earn money from? Someone else's work? No, because that doesn't work for AdSense. It never has really, but now, they are determined to ensure that only work you created will be worthy of getting paid for.

Remember that it isn't just the amount of text or number of words you have, it is also whether or not the content on the page is considered "valuable inventory".

Just as an example of pages that often don't have sufficient content, and often don't provide their own work as the focal point of a page would be "viral" type sites. These are less likely to qualify for ads now (or at least multiple ads on a page), particularly those types with an image, and one line of text. On these types of sites, the images are usually not created by the site owner and since the image is "more content" than one line of text ... well, you don't really qualify to earn money on content you didn't create. If you find your pages suddenly showing only one ad, you better check the policy and consider whether or not your pages fulfill that policy now.

Content Value and Amounts

So who gets to decide how much content is enough for 3 ads, or how much content is needed to display any ads, and how much content you really need to display 3 ads along with other advertising? Well ... the answer is simple, but also hard. AdSense hasn't listed content levels, so that means it's a guessing game if you don't understand what the "spirit of AdSense" is. For those who already understand that actual work (ie: writing content, creating your own images, etc.) is what we get paid for, understanding the content requirement won't be that difficult. Lots of useful information on a page, and not a lot of ads - 3 adsense, or 2 if you have other advertising on the page and you should be fine. It doesn't mean slap 5 or 6 Adsense ads on your page. If you write very long articles (more than 1500* words of your own) and have no other advertising on your pages, you might qualify to place one more on your page, but not a bunch. That isn't what the policy means, at all.

Those who don't really understand content levels are going to run into problems with ads displaying on their pages, and those who think they can just copy articles from other places, or paste other people's images (like to plethora of wallpaper sites with scraped images), or just load up their sites with third-party videos are going to find themselves with less ads than they have now. Maybe even no ads from AdSense.

How to Handle the New Policy

For many publishers, doing a quick review of their sites is likely to be enough. Publishers who write their own articles and have a full page of content (hundreds of words) are probably still okay with showing 3 ads on a page, unless they have a bunch of other advertising/affiliate links on their pages as well. Make sure you don't have too many ads on the pages. Review each page for how much content you have versus how many ads you have (that doesn't mean put up more ads, it means take down some if you have too many).

Publishers should also be sure to review the Webmaster Quality Guidelines to ensure all their pages follow them, because following them counts toward the ad limit now (actually it always has, but a lot of folks have forgotten that)!  While following the Webmaster Guidelines has always been part of the policies for AdSense, applying the quality guidelines explicitly to the ad limit policy makes it doubly important that you DO understand and follow them. And if you are uncertain what the quality guidelines mean, or how to apply them, then you can ask for help in the Webmaster Forum - which I expect is soon going to become a busier forum than it already is. The other thing you need to remember when considering the new policy is that ALL other specific and individual policies still apply (how ads are placed, what content is allowed, etc.).

Overall, the policy is engaging publishers to ensure their sites continue to meet the content policy guidelines as well as the ad limit policies, because if the content just "doesn't cut it" in terms of quality and quantity, they won't be seeing the ads on their pages any longer. While they will continue to police publisher sites and pages, they are placing the responsibility to ensure quality content squarely in the laps of the publisher/site owner. If you take ownership of what you create, you should want it to be the focus of the page, and shouldn't want the page overrun with advertising.

Be proactive, be productive, and be positive ... and you shouldn't have any problems.

So, after finally realizing what the ad limit policy requires ... anybody still believe they abolished the ads limit per page policy?  ... let's hope not, because those publishers could find themselves without ads.
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* just as an example of how long a 1500 word article would be, this article has just over 1300 words, NOT including quoted content, titles or headers (don't include those in word counts).

posted by J. Gracey Stinson

Securing an AdSense Account

During the last couple of months we've seen a lot of confused people in the AdSense forum; people that can't login to their AdSense account, or their email address has been removed as a login, or they no longer appear to be an admin on their own account.  Some know their accounts have already been compromised or hacked by someone else, or an invited email address has removed them from their own accounts.

Most of this can be avoided by securing your account. C'mon people, we've talked about this before (more than once in fact), but it's still happening way too often. If you aren't vigilant, you can be locked out of your own AdSense account.

The truth is, this could happen to almost anyone, but using common sense and being aware of what the consequences are of the choices you make can help mitigate these issues.

Inviting Users to Your AdSense Account

This can be one of the easiest ways to jeopardize your account.  When this opportunity was released, it wasn't designed as a tool to put your account in danger, but it has become one of the ways people lose access or administration rights to their own account.

Many people invite other users - friends, family, co-workers, to use their AdSense account by inviting that user's email address and authorizing them to login to the account.

Once an invited user accepts the invitation and can login to YOUR AdSense account, you can change the user access level from a Standard User to an Administration Level User. It might surprise many publishers to know that a Standard user has almost as much access to various parts and functions of your AdSense account as an Administrator does. THIS puts your account at risk. Even a Standard user can change things within the account.

Standard user

Can view, edit, and manage any part of an account.

Can't see the list of users who have access to an account.

Can't see the "User management" page, which displays the users who have access to an account.

Can't give account access or change another user's access level.

Administrator

Can view, edit, and manage any part of an account.

Can see the list of users who have access to an account.

Can give account access or change another user's access level.

Giving both levels of users the ability to edit ANY part of the account doesn't make much sense to me, since any part of the account would include any part of the account an Administrator can access and edit as well, so if you can edit it, a user can edit it too.

The safest option is not to invite any other user to your account. And if you must, then NEVER give anyone else Administrator access to your account. Because if you do, then basically you are handing over your account to that other person. They can remove YOU as an Administrator, and remove you as a user, meaning you will not be able to access your own account.

And AdSense won't be able to help you. Note that right from the beginning when you invite a user AdSense warns you that you (the account owner) are solely responsible for whatever happens after that.

The account holder is solely responsible for the properties in the AdSense program and Administrators should exercise caution in granting users access to an account. All users added to an account must comply with the AdSense program policies.

That means if some user that you made an Admin takes over your account, you could be stuck in a very bad position - not being able to login, and losing access to whatever earnings you had. If a user has access to change anything in your account, they can change where the payment is sent too.

Be a smart publisher. Secure your account and never invite other users unless absolutely necessary. Even people you trust can be swayed by money. Friends you thought you could trust, might not be as trustworthy as you believe.

Only you can keep your account safe. Think long and hard before you decide whether adding users is absolutely necessary. Sometimes, the outcome really isn't worth it.

posted by J. Gracey Stinson

URGENT AdSense Help!

How to get your question answered in the AdSense Help forum is NOT to post things like this:

• URGENT!!!!!!
• Answer me fast!
• I need help NOW.
• AdSense URGENTLY needed.
• etc.

Most of the TCs in the AdSense forum have been answering questions there for five years or more ... we've pretty much seen everything, and almost nothing is considered URGENT when it comes to AdSense.  They're just ads ... how is advertising urgent to anyone? It's not. Yes, for sure, people trying to earn a little with it consider it important, but it still isn't urgent. Urgent would  be if you're bleeding to death, or if you've been in an accident, or your house is on fire, in which case you call the appropriate emergency service. Ads aren't urgent.

While a hacked account is something we consider sort of urgent or needing immediate help, we actually can't help you with that, nor can AdSense staff even help you. You have to recover your account on your own. That's the sad truth. Because of privacy laws, AdSense usually can't step in. They can't tell if you're the account owner, or if you're a hacker trying to get into the account. The actual account owner needs to recover their Google Account and mail account. So while this could be something I too would consider urgent, as much as I'd like to help, I probably can't.

The other thing that we might consider urgent would be a click-bombing. But there are already things set out in the Help Center for you to follow if you think your account is being sabotaged.

The first step would be to de-authorize (or de-verify) your website or blog (or turn off monetization on your channel temporarily). In some cases, you might want to remove the ads on a blog completely, which can be done quickly if you use gadgets/widgets or a plugin to place your ads. Then second step would be to gather the statistics from your stats (whether it's a 3rd party statcounter, or Google Analytics), and lastly, you submit a report to AdSense providing the stats information, the rough time period it occurred, and what you've done to try and stop it. The form and further information can be found on this article in the help center: Keep Your Account in Good Standing

There is another, older article in the forum written by one of the TCs whose website was attacked by a disgruntled publisher (yes, we've all run into this and had to deal with it the same way any publisher does), and his article describes the things he did to stop it, and to recover his account (because yes, his account was disabled once, and heading for a second one.) Please read this useful and helpful thread(Facing & Beating a Click-bombers Attack) and his other thread (The Crash Course Emergency Strategy for Click Bombing Attacks)- bookmark  these for the future in case you run into sabotage. You can also post in the AdSense forum, stating what you've done to try and stop the click-bombing, and asking for any additional steps you might need to take (also see: "How to Prevent Sabotage", and if you use a self-hosted site, see "Blocking IP Addresses")

So beyond that, nothing else are things we consider urgent. We don't consider getting approved urgent; we don't consider ads not showing being urgent; we don't consider not having received a payment urgent (yes, I know ... I'm certain a person who didn't paid get does consider it urgent); we don't consider not understanding your stats urgent.

When you post these things in your thread title (urgent, important, need help fast) and you aren't being click-bombed, your question will get answered no faster than any other question on the forum. There are hundreds of questions posted every day. We answer them as we get to them, we answer the ones we can answer or the people we can help. Some don't get answered at all (because if we can't help and don't have answer, there is nothing to offer help with), but we try to keep the not-answered ones to a minimum. The thing is, we're just other publishers. We're not staff, and there's only so much we can do.

Urgency usually doesn't exist in our world.

posted by J. Gracey Stinson

AdSense Account Cancelled!

UPDATE: According to staff, yes, this is real. Please see this thread in the forum.


Just a quick note to let you know that we seem to be flooded in the forums with publishers that have
received a notice saying their AdSense account was cancelled and they'll receive their payment in the next payment cycle.

Is this for real? At the moment, we aren't sure what's happening. There are differences in some of the notifications and some of the situations.

• Some publishers are still able to login to their AdSense accounts and have no problems within the account.
• Some publishers are unable to login to their accounts at all.
• Some people are not AdSense publishers and have never had an AdSense account, nor signed up for one.

Because this a holiday week in the US, it may take a little while before we have a response from staff. There is an ongoing thread in the forum for publishers to post in if they have received one of these notices (please don't start a new thread - use the open one instead). If you post in the thread please include the following information:

1. The exact wording of the message you received, and if possible, include complete headers.
2. Whether you can or cannot login to your Adsense account.
3. Whether or not there are messages in your account if you can login, and if you can't, what the message on the login page says.
4. If you have ads on a website/blog, include whether or not ads are showing still.
5. If you do not now, and never have had an AdSense account, please state that.

For those of you that have never had (and never applied) for an AdSense account, there are a few things you can check. If you have children or a brother/sister who is under 18 and uses YouTube to upload videos, please ask them if they have ever applied using your email address. People under 18 can't sign up for AdSense, and many youngsters will try to sign up with a parental email address, without permission. Also check with your spouse or partner to make they haven't used your email to sign up. Then there are friends and neighbours - you might ask them as well.

If you haven't ever signed up for AdSense, they wouldn't have your email address to send you a notice.

For now, we're probably as confused as the publishers receiving these notices but just hang-tight. Once we get a response to staff, it will be posted in the forum, and I'll update this topic.

posted by J. Gracey Stinson

The Mystery of AdSense Smart Pricing

Lots of AdSense publishers have probably heard the term "smart pricing", but how many know exactly what it is, or how it's applied to AdSense earnings?  I suppose not very many - me included.  While AdSense provides some information and insight into smart pricing on the publisher side of things, they certainly don't spell out the exact details of how it works, nor are they ever likely to.

Is it applied to entire publisher's account? To all their websites? To all their traffic?

When you look at AdSense's basic explanation to publishers and then look at how they explain smart pricing to the advertiser, there is a very slight difference in those explanations, but that difference can help you form your own opinions on how it might work.

AdSense Publisher

"Google’s smart pricing feature is designed to raise advertiser confidence in the AdSense network, which in turn can lead to higher bids on ads that appear on publisher sites. This then benefits the entire advertising ecosystem of publishers, advertisers, and users in the long run."

AdWords Advertiser

"Smart pricing is a Google feature that may reduce your cost-per-click (CPC) bids on the Google Network."

"We are constantly analysing data across our network against a variety of factors. If our data shows that a click from a Google Network page is less likely to turn into an actionable business result - such as an online sale, registration, phone call or newsletter sign-up - we may reduce the bid for that page."

"Google saves you time and hassle by estimating the value of certain clicks and adjusting bids on an ongoing basis. With no extra effort for you, Google technology helps ensure that you get strong ROI from your AdWords advertising."

Publisher Earnings & Smart Pricing

Because Smart Pricing is really designed to help the advertisers, it can reduce the cost an advertiser pays for a click on an AdSense ad, so that basically means that the AdSense Publisher is going to see a reduced value for a click on an ad. That's just common sense - the advertiser can't pay less per click while the publisher earns more. But does that mean that  if a click is smart priced, the publisher's whole account, or all their websites are being smart priced?

I don't think so. Keep in mind that nobody really knows the finite details of smart pricing, but in my opinion smart pricing isn't always going to result in every click being smart priced. Nor does it mean a website or publisher account is automatically smart priced so that all CPC values are lower.

"Smart pricing is designed to help advertisers confidently bid the maximum they’re willing to pay for their ads, which will increase publisher revenue over time. If a click is determined to be less likely to lead to a business result like a purchase or a newsletter sign-up, an advertiser’s maximum bid may be reduced."

I think it could be possible to see a website or entire account smart priced, but in general, the statement above indicates that AdSense analyzes the click on a site (or clicks) to determine smart pricing.

If your site gets a lot of traffic that clicks ads (which results in you having a reasonably high CTR) but the visitor doesn't seem interested at all in the advertiser, I suppose it could be happen that eventually the traffic from a particular site could be smart priced (there is zero proof of that, since it's really just a hypothesis). After all, would advertisers want to keep paying higher rates for the traffic from a website that consistently provides no return on the advertiser's investment?

I think that every publisher might see some traffic or clicks smart priced, but I also think that for the average publisher who receives traffic from many different sources (search results, social media, shared links, forum signatures, backlinks, etc.) it would be very difficult to determine if smart pricing has been applied or not. As publisher's it's impossible to break it down to individual clicks.

In any given 24 hour period, a publisher could see click values on ads range from high values ($1+) to low values (1¢) and everything in between. How do you determine if any of those have been smart priced? You can't assume that a 1 or 2 cent click is smart priced (please see the information about the ad auction). Keep in mind that many advertisers that use AdWords aren't full-time businesses, or wealthy people. Some are just ordinary "little guys" with not very much to spend in their advertising budget. Some will try to stretch those funds as far as possible. It's a good idea for publishers to understand how the ad auctions really work:

Understanding the Ad Auction (Part 1) 

Understanding the Ad Auction (Part 2) 

If you take five minutes to watch the video on the page above, you will gain a better understanding of how AdSense determines what an advertiser will pay for a click, and it isn't all about the per click cost an advertiser has bid. The advertiser quality score always plays a part in the determining factor too, so while you might think that an advertiser has only bid 1 cent, that may not actually be what the advertiser's actual bid was. This means that you can't determine if advertiser's have bid low or not.

What You Can Do

Instead of running off willy-nilly and assuming your account or site is smart priced, take steps to re-evaluate your ad placements, and the types and formats of ads you've used on your website. Review your traffic streams and and review your own methods of promotion for your sites - the more circumspect you are about how and where you gain your traffic, the more likely it is that more of your traffic will convert well for the advertiser. There is no guarantee that traffic from anywhere, not even direct from Google search results will provide you with higher earnings (but they might), however, doing your best to ensure that the visitors finding your site are doing so out of interest for your contents, the better a publisher you will become.

posted by J. Gracey Stinson