Simplifying our content policies for publishers

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One of our top priorities is to sustain a healthy digital advertising ecosystem,
one that works for everyone: users, advertisers and publishers. On a daily basis, teams of Google engineers, policy experts, and product managers combat and stop bad actors. Just last year, we removed 734,000 publishers and app developers from our ad network and ads from nearly 28 million pages that violated our publisher policies.


But we’re not just stopping bad actors. Just as critical to our mission is the work we do every day to help good publishers in our network succeed. One consistent piece of feedback we’ve heard from our publishers is that they want us to further simplify our policies, across products, so they are easier to understand and follow. That’s why we'll be simplifying the way our content policies are presented to publishers, and standardizing content policies across our publisher products.

A simplified publisher experience
In September, we’ll update the way our publisher content policies are presented with a clear outline of the types of content where advertising is not allowed or will be restricted.

Our Google Publisher Policies will outline the types of content that are not allowed to show ads through any of our publisher products. This includes policies against illegal content, dangerous or derogatory content, and sexually explicit content, among others.

Our Google Publisher Restrictions will detail the types of content, such as alcohol or tobacco, that don’t violate policy, but that may not be appealing for all advertisers. Publishers will not receive a policy violation for trying to monetize this content, but only some advertisers and advertising products—the ones that choose this kind of content—will bid on it. As a result, Google Ads will not appear on this content and this content will receive less advertising than non-restricted content will.

The Google Publisher Policies and Google Publisher Restrictions will apply to all publishers, regardless of the products they use—AdSense, AdMob or Ad Manager.

These changes are the next step in our ongoing efforts to make it easier for publishers to navigate our policies so their businesses can continue to thrive with the help of our publisher products.


Posted by:

Scott Spencer, Director of Sustainable Ads


Supporting a healthy ads ecosystem that works for publishers, advertisers, and users continues to be a top priority in our effort to sustain a free and open web. As the ecosystem evolves, our ad systems and defenses must adapt as well. Today, we’d like to highlight some of our efforts to protect the quality of our ad network, and the benefits to our publishers and the advertising ecosystem. 


Last year, we introduced a site verification process in AdSense to provide additional safeguards before a publisher can serve ads. This feature allows us to provide more direct feedback to our publishers on the eligibility of their site, while allowing us to communicate issues sooner and lessen the likelihood of future violations. As an added benefit, confirming which websites a publisher intends to monetize allows us to reduce potential misuse of a publisher's ad code, such as when a bad actor tries to claim a website as their own, or when they use a legitimate publisher's ad code to serve ads on bad content in an attempt to demonetize the good website — each day, we now block more than 120 million ad requests with this feature. 


This year, we’re enhancing our defenses even more by improving the systems that identify potentially invalid traffic or high risk activities before ads are served. These defenses allow us to limit ad serving as needed to further protect our advertisers and users, while maximizing revenue opportunities for legitimate publishers. While most publishers will not notice any changes to their ad traffic, we are working on improving the experience for those that may be impacted, by providing more transparency around these actions. Publishers on AdSense and AdMob that are affected will soon be notified of these ad traffic restrictions directly in their Policy Center. This will allow them to understand why they may be experiencing reduced ad serving, and what steps they can take to resolve any issues and continue partnering with us.


We’re excited for what’s to come, and will continue to roll out improvements to these systems with all of our users in mind. Look out for future updates on our ongoing efforts to promote and sustain a healthy ads ecosystem.


Posted by: 
Andres Ferrate - Chief Advocate for Ad Traffic Quality

The web is mobile.

Nearly 70% of AdSense audiences experience the web on mobile devices. With new mobile web technologies such as responsive mobile sites, Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) and Progressive Web Apps (PWA) the mobile web works better and faster than ever.


We understand that using AdSense on the go is important to you. More than a third of our users access AdSense from mobile devices and this is an area where we continue to invest.

Our vision is an AdSense that does more to keep your account healthy, letting you focus on creating great content, and comes to you when issues or opportunities need your attention.

With this in mind, we have reviewed our mobile strategy. As a result, we will be focusing our investment on the AdSense mobile web interface and sunsetting the current iOS and Android apps. By investing in a common web application that supports all platforms, we will be able to deliver AdSense features optimized for mobile much faster than we can today.

Later this year we will announce improvements to the AdSense mobile web interface. The AdSense Android and iOS apps will be deprecated in the coming months, and will be discontinued and removed from the app stores by the end of 2019.

Like our publishers who have built their businesses around the mobile web, we look forward to leveraging great new web technologies to deliver an even better, more automated, and more useful mobile experience. Stay tuned for further announcements throughout the rest of the year.


Posted by: Andrew Gildfind
AdSense Product Manager

This summer, we’re excited to introduce the Women of Publishing Leadership Series, brought to you by the Google Partnerships team. This masterclass is an opportunity to enhance your business’ digital strategy through an exclusive, four-part webinar series.

A strong digital presence is necessary for driving growth in your business. But focusing on the success of women-led businesses is even more critical, as women only generate 37% of GDP, while making up half of the world’s working age population. Substantial strides have been made in growing the ranks of women in leadership and ownership and women are rising fast in the income and managerial ranks, at a rate that’s 1.5x the national average.

What you can expect
The Women of Publishing Leadership Series was created to help women leaders develop their skills in digital strategy to propel their business in the digital economy. The content is designed for small and medium-sized digital businesses ( less than 500 employees) that are women-led, display strong female leadership or have a predominantly-female audience.

Participants will have access to a tailored program focused on improving their digital presence, through a comprehensive monetization and data utilization curriculum. Women from all types of digital backgrounds: news, entertainment, video, app, ecommerce, etc. are encouraged to attend. Sign up now.

Webinar sessions
    Planning for Growth (add to calendar)

  • Date and time: Wednesday, June 19 at 1:30 PM ET 
  • Speaker: Sarah Carpenter, Manager of Scalable Acquisitions, Google 
  • Summary: Setting the stage for the webinar series, learn how to get into the growth mindset and why it matters for your business.



    Content and Audience Strategy (add to calendar)
  • Date and time: Wednesday, July 17 at 1:30 PM ET
  • Speaker: Amy Harding, Director of Analytics, Revenue Optimization, and Google News Consumer Insights
  • Summary: Learn how to better understand and engage your audience with a robust content strategy.



    Using Data to Drive Growth (add to calendar)
  • Date and time: Wednesday, July 31 at 1:30 PM ET
  • Speaker: Madhav Goyal, Publisher Intelligence Analyst
  • Summary: Many acknowledge the value of data-driven decision making - but few are able to use their data effectively. Get actionable insights on how to leverage data to drive growth for your business.



    Monetization Tips and Tricks (add to calendar)
  • Date and time: Wednesday, August 14 at 1:30 PM ET
  • Speaker: Roshni Dutt, Platforms Monetization Lead, Google
  • Summary: Gain pro-tips on recognizing the value of your audience and effectively monetizing your content.
If you’re ready to take your small or medium-sized businesses to the next level, sign up by Monday, June 17th, and gain access to all of the sessions by registering here.

We want to do everything we can to help our publishers succeed.

Beyond providing the AdSense platform to monetize content, we provide various channels through which we communicate policies, best practices and product changes to our publishers.

What resources are available?

We know that one size doesn't fit all for publishers when it comes to preferred methods of transmitting messages and information.  There are several platforms where we provide policy information to publishers.

First, we have our Policy Help Center. Through the Help Center, publishers can view all AdSense program policies, with detailed information on specific areas such as content policies, ad implementation policies, webmaster guidelines and much more.

Next, we have an AdSense Forum, comprised of experienced expert publishers that are passionate about helping other publishers better understand AdSense policies.  Here, you can review previous threads or post questions and receive feedback from the community.

We also have our AdSense YouTube channel, a platform we are investing in going forward to address questions for those publishers who prefer videos over text. We plan to update this resource frequently throughout the next year.

For big policy changes, check out our Inside AdSense blog, where we generally post updates first. We have Googlers from across AdSense posting best practices as well as practical advice to avoid common pitfalls, increase revenue and remain policy compliant. We’ll also provide updates on industry drivers, which may be useful to publishers.

And more recently we’ve also tried to amplify our messaging through the AdSense social channels on Facebook & Twitter.  Generally, these posts reiterate an update that we’ve posted on our AdSense blog, with a link to that posting. 


Lastly, we often speak at conferences and host publisher events at our offices worldwide. At these events, we discuss our program policies and gather in-person feedback from you. This feedback is valuable and has resulted in modifications to products, policies, and policy enforcement to better serve your needs.

Why is it important for Google to provide all of these resources?

We know that your first priority is creating content and growing your business. We want to do our part to help you succeed, so we’ve provided multiple platforms to help you understand our policies in the way that suits you best. To put it simply: we want to provide the right resource information, at the right time, in as many places as possible to help you understand our policies.

We also want to make sure you have a number of paths to provide feedback. Our publisher events at Google offices are a great opportunity for this. Additionally, my entire role representing Publisher Policy Communications places a face to our policies, and a feedback loop from you, to the policy team.

Communication involves listening
Communication is a two way street. We’ve listened to your feedback, and created several ways, on several platforms for publishers to better understand our policies. We will always try to interact with you in ways that work best for you. When you succeed, we succeed. Please let us know how we can better communicate our policies to you.

John Brown
Head of Publisher Policy Communications


We're excited to share with you our infographic with important tips on how to boost and optimize your web site traffic.


You can also download it with clickable links for desktop and mobile.




 

At Google AdSense we’re excited about 2019 and really hope you are too. Thank you for inspiring us every day. Have a great holiday season!

 

As a publisher, there are many challenges you face. One area of interest for any publisher is how can you grow your user base, while maintaining high quality, policy-compliant content and traffic.

At Google, we strive to create policies that are designed to enable a healthy digital advertising ecosystem. We consider the needs of each party - users, advertisers and publishers, and want all players to thrive.

Just as important as creating policy is the enforcement of policy violations. Enforcement is important for the quality of the network, and designed to be fairly administered.  There are steps you can take to safeguard your growth efforts, while maintaining policy compliance:

Understand our policies, and develop your own policies and procedures

The first step is to read and understand our policies. These policies are posted in our Help Center, with specific FAQs called out for ease of reference. For new publishers, we created a beginner’s guide to highlight some of the most commonly violated policies.

Protect against invalid traffic

We want publishers to be proactive about tackling invalid traffic.

We’ve developed an Ad Traffic Quality Resource site designed to help publishers better educate themselves on what invalid traffic is, the risks that invalid traffic poses to their businesses, how to identify invalid traffic, and how to mitigate this type of traffic. The Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) also has a growing library of resources that can provide additional context and best practices on this topic.

Get familiar with your metrics

As part of your daily ritual, you should understand what typical traffic patterns for your website look like. Anomalies, especially on non-business hours’ or holidays, are signs of potential trouble. As part of metrics review, set aside time each month, or where appropriate for your business, to train and review traffic sources and patterns with your team. We provide guidance for linking analytics to AdSense to help facilitate this process.




Ask your partners to provide summary reporting

In addition to reviewing your own traffic on a daily basis, it’s important to regularly audit traffic from your partners. When working with partners, be diligent. Ask for traffic sources, and any optimization plans your partners may have, and educate your team to recognize suspicious behavior.

Investing in good user experiences benefits the entire ecosystem. Work with partners that feel the same way.

Only trust business partners who have earned your trust

Trust, but verify. Only work with partners who adhere to best practices for sourcing traffic and growing their businesses, and require all partners to uphold safe standards when it comes to sourcing traffic and providing great user experiences.  Feel empowered to ask hard questions and demand answers from those you work with, and set up time to review and analyze inventory that you’ve purchased. If you don’t feel like you are getting the responses you need, find other partners that are more responsive.

Understand what’s too good to be true and watch for it. Build bridges with quality inventory sources and partners, and put up barriers between you and those who prove untrustworthy.  Many potential publishers, ad network and programmatic partners can have traffic quality that can vary quite significantly between various providers.

Focus on the User

Lastly, and most importantly, serving your end users needs should be at the heart of what you do, and a top priority.  Your entire business should be focused on your customer - the user.


Websites with great, unique content have lost loyal users due to deceptive navigation, or poor and/or numerous ad placements.  Great content is only part of your job.  Providing a straightforward, safe, easy to navigate, and uncluttered site experience is also important for users to return to your site. 

At conferences and events, I am often asked what is the one piece of advice I can give to help publishers maintain a good relationship with the Google policy team. My response is always “If you truly focus on the user, and do everything you can to help that user in his or her journey on your site, then you will likely have a long and productive relationship with Google.”

We hope these tips have been helpful. As always, please review our Help Center, and keep providing us with feedback.


John Brown
Head of Publisher Policy Communications

We’d like to personally invite you to share your thoughts with us so that we can keep improving your experience with us.


Depending on your email preferences, you may have received a survey by email, if so please take the time to respond to it as we value your input.

In the past, we’ve used your responses to improve how we help you, ways you interact with our product, and what type of features we offer.
The survey should take about 10-15 minutes and can be answered on mobile.

Whether you’ve completed this survey before or you’re providing feedback for the first time, we’d like to thank you for sharing your valuable thoughts. We’re looking forward to feedback!

Thank you!

 

Our new video takes a deeper dive into our User-generated content policy and describes how this policy helps to enable a healthy digital advertising ecosystem for users, advertisers, and publishers.

Click the video below to learn more:
We hope this video helps you to better understand our User-generated content policy. For more information, you can learn more about AdSense policies in our help center.


John Brown
Head of Publisher Policy Communications

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