Google announced last night a new initiative to block annoying ads on the internet. That means two things (a) new tools for publishers to improve their ad experience and (b) Chrome can stop showing ads to users automatically.
I wanted to focus on one of the new tools named the Ad Experience Report. The tool is accessible in any of your Google Search Console verified properties by going here.
When you click through, you see the option to pick a profile and you are then taken to this screen that gives you an overview of the report:
It reads:
See if the ad experiences on your site violate the Better Ads Standards or mislead your visitors.The Ad Experience Report is designed to identify ad experiences that violate the Better Ads Standards, a set of ad experiences the industry has identified as being highly annoying to users, and egregious ad experiences, which are ad experiences that are misleading or abusive. If your site presents either type, the Ad Experience Report may identify the issues to fix.
If your site is out of compliance with the Better Ads Standards, or if it has egregious ad experiences, you can fix the issues and then request a review of your site.
To see if your site has been reviewed, click on Desktop or Mobile to review the respective report.
Sadly, all the individual profiles I click through to, all say not reviewed yet. Here is an example from this site:
Google has a large help area on this over here. There are three primary issues your site can have including creative issues, site design issues and egregious ad experiences:
These include:
- Autoplaying Video Ad with Sound
- Autoplaying Video Ad with Sound
- Flashing Animated Ad
- Pop-up ads
- Prestitial ad with countdown
- Large sticky ad at bottom of screen
- Pop-up Ad and Prestitial Ad
- Ad density higher than 30%
- Postitial Ad with Countdown
- Full Screen Scrollover Ad
- Large Sticky Ad
- It promotes, hosts, or links to malware or unwanted software that may be installed on the user’s machine.
- It is “phishing” for users’ information.
- It auto-redirects the page without user action.
- It misleads or tricks the user into interacting with it. Examples include:
- Ads that resemble system or site warnings or error messages.
- Ads that simulate messages, dialog boxes, menus, or request notifications.
- Hosted ads that are indistinguishable from other content.
- Ads depicting features that do not work.
- Ads with a transparent background.
- Ads with an image that is segmented, an image that contains multiple copies of itself within the ad, or images that appear to be more than one ad.
- Ads with moving and clicking arrows.
- Ads with a “close” button that does not close the ad but instead clicks the ad, or clicks through to other content.
- Ads where clicking anywhere outside of the user-visible border of the ad leads to an ad landing page.
So keep an eye on that report.
Update: Here is one site that passes the report:
I've been digging in here across sites -> Google Ad Experience Report Tool Detects Annoying Ads https://t.co/dwjWMm2Hj8 via @rustybrick pic.twitter.com/Vk62ZhNlg1
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) June 2, 2017
Forum discussion at Twitter.
