Publisher growth tactics for election season | WEBINAR
Publisher growth tactics for election season | WEBINAR
The purpose of this guide is to help you understand how ads and pop-ups can impact SEO, and the best practices to follow so that content monetization does not hurt either your search engine rankings or your site’s user experience (UX).
Video Duration
12:26
Answer Quiz
Take current module quiz
Materials
Ready-to-use templates
Resources
Reports and Resources
2.10.1 What Are Ad Best Practices?
Ad best practices are certain advertising methods that maximize an advert’s reach without frustrating the audience.
This process is less an art and more a science now thanks to the work of industry bodies such as the Coalition for Better Ads. The coalition was formed by international trade associations and digital media companies to develop data-driven online advertising standards.
For example, the coalition’s research has found that consumers dislike the following three ad strategies more than any other:
There are two immediate upsides to implementing ad best practices.
The first is that ads that minimize their interference with Google’s indexing lower the risk of relevant content being overlooked by Google’s crawlers.
The second advantage is the UX boost your site receives from well implemented advertising. Poorly implemented ads can slow down page load times and disrupt a visitor’s ability to consume the page’s content.
A well structured site will be user friendly, with minimally intrusive ads, that allows both crawlers to index content and users to consume content undisturbed.
As the sole source of revenue for many online publications, effective advertising matters. Publishers that adhere to best practices not only have a better chance of not frustrating their visitors but also reduce the chance of interfering with search engine algorithms.
That’s not to say that there aren’t a number of challenges associated with finding the right advertising strategy.
Hundreds of millions of devices use ad blockers, rendering chunks of ad spending ineffective.
Many recognise that advertising is necessary to keep free content free, but everyone has limits and publishers should remember that if their ads are interfering with the UX, there’s a chance consumers may embrace an ad blocker.
Ad spending is costly, with that cost only rising as intermediaries such as tech companies and advertising agencies become involved.
Tech-based advertising is rife with hidden costs, with less than 50% of ad spending actually going towards publishers.
Search engine algorithms continue to evolve in the pursuit of the best results for searchers, often leaving publishers struggling to keep up.
Google may discuss how their algorithms work from a top-level perspective, but they don’t reveal the inner workings. This can leave publishers struggling to optimize their ad layouts.
Ads impact SEO in two major ways.
Intrusive ads that block content and redirect users will confuse search engine indexing algorithms, whilst ads that make use of best practices minimize negative impacts.
If an interstitial ad is so large it overshadows the page content, Google may struggle to differentiate between the page’s content and the ad, preventing it from properly analyzing and indexing your content.
Such ads also undermine the UX, with the maze of ads and redirects slowing the page’s core web vitals (CWVs).
Slow loading speeds have several issues, the most concerning of which for advertisers being that visitors can scroll past ads that haven’t been rendered. Ads that require a lot of data, such as video ads, can have a negative impact on your page’s loading speed.
For more information on this, refer to our Page Experience module.
We’ve compiled a list of the best practices that publishers should implement on their site to both improve their sites’ SEO but also their UX.
While we have an entire module dedicated to the importance of design and layout, we thought it important to highlight a couple of useful nuggets that relate specifically to ads.
First of all, try to limit the length of your content such that there is only one above the fold ad that needs to be loaded. For the rest, introduce lazy loading (which we’ll touch on later) and reduce infinite scroll.
Understand, however, that infinite scroll carries a number of disadvantages such as Googlebot failing to crawl any pages after the first, the process slowing down page load times and the lack of a footer for important site-related content.
Secondly, be sure to use the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s (IAB) most common sizes for your ad units. The three most common ad sizes, and thus most profitable, are the leaderboard (728×90), the medium rectangle (300×250) and the skyscraper (160×600).
We do have a module on improving page experience, exploring speed and responsiveness optimizations for your site, but here we’ll briefly discuss some fixes that apply to advertising.
Lazy loading is when a website delays loading content, such as ads, until it is needed. This method allows you to call for ads only as the visitor’s scrolling approaches an ad unit.
Lazy loading not only helps reduce a page’s weight, which simply means it loads quicker, it also conserves bandwidth by only delivering content that’s requested.
When it comes to embedding videos, it’s important to understand that they’ll add a lot of page weight. Having a dedicated section on your site for videos, rather than peppering them throughout your content pages, is one way to maximize loading efficiency.
Ideally, video content should be easily accessible yet fast to load. To minimize the impact on loading speeds, keep videos as short as possible on landing pages, with your longer form videos easily accessible via a dedicated section.
When embedding a video, use Google Publisher Tags to notify search engine crawlers of its presence.
Responsive ads make use of information provided by your browser, such as the device type, the browser of choice and the resolution and size of the display to optimize the size of ads.
This means smaller ads are served on smaller devices, while larger ads can be shown to their fullest on larger displays.
Google Publisher Tags (GPTs) allow web developers to specify ad size and placement so the content is not displaced when the ad loads. These tags can be modified to optimize UX across multiple display sizes and formats, keeping content and ads where they need to be for effective targeting and loading efficiency.
A mobile friendly site is crucial in this day and age. Having a mobile friendly site means that your content and your ads will load effectively and optimize the viewing experience for a growing majority of users.
If your website requires users to pinch and scroll around the page to fit the text to the display, it’s not well optimized for mobile, and likely to load slower and receive less total engagement from users.
For more information on mobile friendliness, refer back to our Page Experience module.
Some interstitials are permitted and even mandatory, such as age checks on sites displaying content that isn’t suitable for minors. Another example would be a prompt to allow cookie usage. Then there’s also the case of unindexable content like login information on email sites or sites that have a paywall that prevents Google’s indexing.
However, these interstitials should be kept to an absolute minimum and should be as unobtrusive as possible, only taking up reasonable amounts of space and not covering the whole page.
When possible, alternatives to interstitials should take preference. Display ads, banner ads, popups and pop-unders can be designed to take up reasonable amounts of space that retain visibility without negatively impacting aesthetics and indexing, and this practice generally performs better than making use of interstitials.
A common bad practice is placing interstitial ads on loading pages. Furthermore, placing ads on app loading and app exits is unhelpful for a variety of reasons.
When a device loads an app quickly, the time spent showing the ad may not be enough for it to register as a view, both in terms of metrics and the visitor. They can also cause unwanted redirects, which while not penalized by Google will frustrate your audience.
Avoid placing interstitials if your app is running in the background, as this will waste your views by showing ads on a platform with no-one actively watching them.
Ad placement and prevalence is a balancing act. Too little advertising and you won’t make the most of your monetisation space, too much and it leads to viewer fatigue and frustration.
However, we advise erring to the former if in any doubt. It may take longer to earn the same money, but in the long run you stand less chance of alienating your audience.
Forced interstitials are ads that follow a user as they scroll up or down the page, and are hard to close or exit. They were commonplace on the internet during the early 2000s but most respectable websites have done away with them. If a publisher still uses such ads, they are likely to lose credibility with their user base
Suddenly launching an ad in the middle of your content is sometimes the only way to get the most stubborn ad-blocking users to view ads, but this tactic is rarely received well.
Disrupting engaging content with ads that break your audience’s concentration, makes them more likely to disengage and even harbor conscious and unconscious negative sentiments towards the ads. Generally, the audience will view it as a cheap tactic.
Pagination is when content is spread out across several pages with ads in between. Publishers often use this when displaying content in slides or images. This isn’t a very good strategy as users may stop flipping after the first few pages, and may not return because of the poor page experience.
Don’t try to load too many ads at the top of the page, as this kind of top loading means users have to scroll down to even begin viewing the content. This gives the impression that content is secondary and ads are of primary importance to the page.
Moreover, such ads can even end up blocking crucial information about the content such as the H1, publication/modification date, author name and bio, etc. — all of which are essential for crawling and indexing.
Ads that start playing automatically each time a page loads not only slow down page loading times, they also annoy users. If auto playing ads must be used, it is better to place them in the middle of the page, or between natural breaks in the content, rather than putting users off even before they’ve had a chance to interact with the page’s content.
Indian financial daily The Economic Times implemented a broad range of backend changes to improve its CWVs, including ad best practices.
The publisher opted to lazy load ads that were below the fold, thereby helping to cut down on the main thread blocking time.
This step contributed to a more than four-fold reduction in The Economic Times’ first input delay, which fell from 200 ms to 44 ms.
Modern algorithms and changes in consumer mentalities have revolutionized the way advertising is done. Ad blocking software, search engine indexing algorithms and formatting issues are a few of the problems publishers face when looking to boost their ad revenue.
It’s essential that you consider how your ad strategy will affect your site’s SEO and its UX. Ads with loud volume, slow loading speeds and redirects are far more intrusive than most. Interstitials should be avoided when possible, and implemented only when necessary/mandated.
Consider using display banners or advertorials instead, which deliver less intrusive ways of reaching your audience.
