Check Out the Ad Experience Report for Your Website

Recently updated: January 5th, 2019

When one intends to find the quickest, relevant and reliable answers to any queries that arise in the mind, one opens the web browser on the computer system or the mobile phone, types the query in the search box and waits for the search results. The internet, that has been famous for providing exceptionally high-quality search results, has over the time become cluttered by the advertisements.

Almost all websites display advertisements that may or not be relevant to the visitor. Often it happens that the advertisements block the main content or slow down the loading of the main content. Ads that disrupt the browsing experience or delay access to content can frustrate the visitors and cause them to never visit your site again.

Growing Use of Ad Blockers

The above concern is growing as the visitors have begun using Ad blocking extensions in the web browsers. Most modern Web pages are a mess of third-party analytics, plug-ins, and advertising tags, which together weigh down publishers’ pages and create irritating user experiences. These poor browsing experiences have caused an increase in the inclination to adopt ad blockers. The enabling of vastly improves the Web-browsing experience and vastly adds to the losses of the publisher.

Loss to Web Sites

This is a massive setback for the websites for they generate a lot of revenues through these advertisements via the impressions, clicks, and banners ads. The ads that don’t get served are not eligible for revenue. The bigger picture says that a vast majority of people use ad blockers, which means the vast majority of people have a better web browsing experience and the vast majority of people have added more the losses.

Salvage by Web Sites

While the sites are fighting back by not allowing access to visitors who have ad block enabled on their systems, this is not an effective approach. The better way out is the display ads on your website that are in compliance with the Better Ads Standards. In order to develop data-driven standards for online advertising, that does not hamper the user browsing experience, compelling them to enable ad blockers, the associations and companies in the online media ecosystem have come together.

Better Ads Standards

The Better Ads Standard aims to monitor the least preferred advertisements by the users and to identify the ad experiences that fall below the threshold of user acceptability. There were different surveys conducted for the desktop and mobile advertisements, classifying 4 types of advertisements for the desktop browsing and 8 types of advertisements for the mobile browsing as unacceptable.

These include pop up advertisements, auto playing videos with sound effects, prestitial ads with the countdown, large sticky ads, flashing animated ads and full-screen scroll over ads. These have been the worst browsing experiences for the users and hence, these would devalue the websites. The least preferred ads are a warning for websites to avoid using them.

Ad Experience Report

Google Search Console has recently added the ‘Ad Experience Report’ feature to the web master tool in order to help the websites understand which type of advertisements are being disliked by their visitors for providing poor ad experiences. The Web Master tool that is famous for accessing the website traffic data such as the click through rate, impressions, keywords that are favoring search engine visibility, the crawl rate, etc. shall now be identifying the ad experiences on a particular website that violate the Better Ads Standards and notify them with the help of screenshots.

The ad experiences that are misleading, annoying and/or abusive shall be presented in the Ad Experience Report and may be identified to fix the issues. If your site is out of the Better Ads Standard compliance, you must rectify the flaws and request Google to review your site. This is indeed a great initiative by Google, for publishers can now improve on their advertising strategies without cutting on their traffic. All that is needed is a check on the report generated by the Google web master tool.