Google making the web safe for ads
Back when I still listened to the radio in the car, I occasionally wondered if radio advertisers and radio stations cared that an insulting or just annoying ad often caused me to turn my radio off and listen to a cassette tape. For an advertiser, it must suck that the ad in front of them made someone miss their ad.
Google apparently does care: they've got quality guidelines for AdWords landing pages, and they enforce those guidelines with ranking penalties. Choose a user-friendly ad format, and your ad will show up for less money and better targeting. Why do they do this?
Users develop a trust in the positive experience provided after clicking on AdWords ads.
In other words, Google doesn’t want a few crappily designed, misleading pages lowering Google’s ad revenue overall. The more people who trust AdWords, the more money Google can charge for it.
What makes for a positive experience?
Users should be able to easily find what your ad promises.
Seems like a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised. Sites that end up costing you more for poorer placement include:
Malware sites that knowingly or unknowingly install software on a visitor's computer
This beats the hell out of television which, when faced with people actively avoiding annoying ads will instead call Congress asking them to force customers to watch the ads. That’s the attitude that, on the web, has me regularly turning javascript and plugins off whenever web pages start talking to me, opening up extra windows, and resizing the browser window. After I turn them off, it takes me a long time to turn them back on. (And seeing a page that says “you can’t view this site unless you turn Javascript or Flash on” only reminds me that I had a good reason for turning them off.)
- July 29, 2026: Google is wasting your ad money
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Google has come a long way from when I wrote my last post about Google and ads back in 2007. At that time Google had only recently acquired YouTube. Nearly twenty years on, I now watch a lot of YouTube videos. Three days a week I spend an hour and a half on the treadmill, watching nothing but videos on an Apple TV. I start with my YouTube watchlist and only move on to what I’ve recorded on my DVR after my watchlist is empty. Given all of the wonderful vintage cooking, history, and science shows on YouTube, this rarely happens.
I’ve been doing this now for over half a decade, which means that Google has massive amounts of information about what videos I watch, how I watch them, what ads I watch, what ads I skip, and when I skip them.
And yet they still can’t tell what I might be interested in, whether to buy or to learn more about. At best, they seem to be completely ignoring the very obvious data that they have on me. But more and more it seems as if they are deliberately showing me ads that they know I’m not going to watch—and that they know are going to convince me not to watch any subsequent ads in that ad block, too.
They know what videos I watch. They know I watch physics videos, space videos, vintage cooking videos, Apple videos, old movie videos, the making of movies, roleplaying games, unique firearms and medieval weapons, Italian news, history, music, vintage computers, and various combinations of the above.
You could probably sweep my very limited demographic by starting a channel focused on the history, food, and culture of the American west as depicted in spaghetti westerns. Especially if you made it on an iPhone and also talked about fiddly tech bits and illustrated your points with an old west roleplaying game managed by a TRS-80 Model I.
They have never seen me watch a video about dogs, cats, children, cleaning up messes, incontinence (it only now occurs to me to wonder if those two are related), or new cars.
They do, however, know that I often watch low-information-density videos—mainly videos by people who talk slowly—at +25% or even +50%. And yet they still show me ads that literally provide no information at all for the first five to ten seconds—or sometimes ever.
I have no idea what those ads are selling: I skip them when given the opportunity, and, when not given the opportunity, I turn my attention elsewhere.
- Websites that may merit a low landing page quality score
- “Our landing page quality guidelines have always stressed the importance of directing users to easily navigable landing pages that are transparent about the advertiser's business and that contain relevant and original content.”
- Landing Page and Site Quality Guidelines
- “As part of our commitment to making AdWords as effective an advertising program as possible, we've outlined some site-building guidelines to better serve our users, advertisers, and publishers.”
More advertising
- Google is wasting your ad money
- From this viewer’s perspective, it certainly looks as though Google is deliberately wasting the money of their advertising customers. Google and YouTube have massive information on every viewer, and seem to delight in targeting ads in a way that is guaranteed to fail to sell the product.
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- It looks like Google Maps is providing location-sensitive ads.
More Google
- Google is wasting your ad money
- From this viewer’s perspective, it certainly looks as though Google is deliberately wasting the money of their advertising customers. Google and YouTube have massive information on every viewer, and seem to delight in targeting ads in a way that is guaranteed to fail to sell the product.
- What app keeps stealing focus?
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- Climategate crashes Google?
- Google is claiming that, in order to provide the most relevant, objective results in Google News, they need to toss ones that people want to read and comment on. What?
- Google responds to Climategate-gate
- I’m guessing Google got a lot of questions about this; their response didn’t answer my question.
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