On February 20th 2018, AdSense officially launched a new(-ish) way to monetize content on the web with ads. Whilst the beta program, and some earlier iterations of the feature have been around for a while, it all has now come under one roof under the My ads tab where the power behind Google’s magic ad experience optimization technology is now called Auto ads.

Where it all began

Auto ads has had a few different incarnations in the past, but going back to where it all started, the first time Google offered ad placement technology was as part of the Google Publisher Plugin on WordPress in early 2014. Although it’s no longer a thing, the plugin used to allow for custom ad placements at the click of a few buttons, with a very nice visual UI:

Whilst this was great, it did suffer from a few problems:

1. It didn’t scale to all the sites on the internet
2. It wasn’t very smart
3. There was no way to configure this in AdSense (where all other ad configuration settings are)

So the next incarnation of Auto ads was born, by the name of Page Level Ads, and the page-level tag that came along with it. This launched in April 2016, over 2 years since the WordPress plugin became a reality. AdSense was now offering two specific ad formats to serve on mobile traffic, where it automatically figured out when, where and how to show the ads. The formats were anchors and vignettes (or as the rest of the ads world knows it, interstitials).

Whilst these work great, they were only launched for mobile traffic. There were still two big gaps to fill before full on automated ads monetization could become a real thing – desktop traffic and display formats needed to both be supported.

AdSense Auto ads

Fast forward a year and a half from when the page level ads were launched, and here we are. Automated monetization works! You may notice that the page level ads formats are still available as “overlay” formats in the configuration settings, but in addition to that there are now several “in-page” formats such as Display and Native ads.

Whilst I haven’t really heard much about how all this performs, I’m quite optimistic. Letting Google handle ads experiences based on all the experience and information from all other sites in the AdSense network seems like a no brainer if the machine learning behind it works properly.

What’s next?

Judging by the rate at which Auto ads has gotten to where it is, it may seem like we can expect the next set of features to become available towards the end of 2019. However it seems that there have been reports of some people testing out ad aggressiveness type controls where the density of the ads vs content on the page can be specified.

In terms of other features, it’s quite hard to say at this point. But I really like the general direction that AdSense seems to have been going in the past 4 years, and I would love it if AdSense started working on not only helping publishers automate the ads experience on their sites, but also help suggest what content to write about. Provide better insights about users and what engages them, etc. For instance, if I knew what type of content the readers on this blog mostly like, then I’d definitely focus more on that.