Internet technology can change quickly, and it’s vital for firms to continually update their online offerings to reflect changing consumer expectations. Whether it’s a small company or a giant like Google, a business that doesn’t adapt is setting itself up for failure in the future. Google announced several upcoming changes that will remove outdated bidding strategies and ad formats from the available options.
Late last year, Google introduced the new Target Impression Share smart bidding strategy. This strategy automatically sets bids according to where the ad will show up. Thanks to this option, advertisers set bids to have their ads show up at the absolute top of the page, anywhere in the top section of the page, or anywhere on the search results page.
Target Impression Share bidding is extremely useful for businesses that want their ads to show in a particular area of the search results. However, the feature also makes two older bidding strategies, Target Search Page Location and Target Outranking Share, redundant. Last week, Google announced that these options would be removed later in June.
As Google explained in a post announcing the planned change, “Starting in late June, advertisers will no longer be able to add new Target Search Page Location or Target Outranking Share bid strategies. Later this year, existing campaigns still using these strategies will automatically be migrated to the Target Impression Share strategy based on previous target locations and historical impression share.”
Another recently announced change will affect display ad options that advertisers will have. Since most consumers have access to smartphones and faster internet speeds than in the past, specific ad formats have become less useful. Google is retiring its Text-Only Display Ads for AdSense.
Last week, Google AdSense users received an email informing them of the upcoming changes. According to media reports, part of the email read, “We’re moving towards richer ad formats, phasing out text-only and display-only ad units to further improve user experience, and to fully reflect the pool of ads we have in the market.”
Besides the removal of the text-only display ads, Google announced some other changes that will affect AdSense in the near future. For example, all ad units will be created Responsive by default, although publishers can still create custom-sized ad units if needed. Publishers will not be able to create ad styles for new ad units. All new ad units will have Google-optimized text ad styling.
Google is also removing the “If no ads available” option and will instead collapse the ad space or show a blank space. Google is eliminating obsolete ad unit setting experiments, and any active ad unit experiments will stop in the coming weeks. And logically, the Experiments Report in the Reports tab will also be removed.
These changes will affect advertisers and website owners alike. If things go according to plan, the changes to AdSense will get more people to click on the ads they see on websites. More clicks benefit the advertiser by finding more potential customers, and website owners benefit by gaining more revenue from ads shown on their site.
For more news about recent changes and updates to Google, read this article on new options related to the Optimization Score on Google Ads.
