2018 will be known as the year Google tried to defeat the Ad Blockers.
The first salvo is fired in 10 days when the Chrome browser starts blocking adverts natively.
Google is particularly targeting the most egregious ad formats, formats they believe drive people to install adblock extensions. The formats were selected by the Coalition of Better Ads after surveying internet users on the formats they found the most frustrating.
This PDF contains a details on what those bad ad formats are.
Google is driving the enforcement of these standards. They have an acceptable threshold for sites (which will tighten over time) and if a site breaches the threshold it will have 30 days to remove the offending adverts before ad blocking begins.
If you’re running just GRV Media ads you won’t be running any of these formats. If you are running these formats, or you’re worried about whether formats you’re running are affected please speak to us. We also have a catalogue of the top performing display ad formats that are compliant so if they interest you please also speak to us.
What can you do?
We are urging all our clients to check the Ad Experience Report for all their websites. This is Google’s feedback system and it will tell you if a website has any warnings or has been flagged.
If you do find any issues we are more than happy to help but we would recommend taking immediate steps to fix the problem creatives and submitting a request for review as soon in advance of 15th February as possible. We believe that there will be a significant backlog of reviews from the 15th, making the review process risky and stressful.
What this means
Our view is that this is a positive move and this first step is the carrot before the stick is introduced. Later in the year Google will be bringing to market tools to enable publishers to monetise or block people using Ad Block extensions.
There is a possibility that this will create some short term pain for publishers but long term the ad market must be viable for everyone to survive and thrive.
As always, let us know if we can be of any help.
