Forum Moderators: martinibuster

Message Too Old, No Replies

How does auto-ad placement work?

         

JorgeV

8:15 am on Oct 10, 2019 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 5+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



Hello-

Since Adsense is pushing toward auto-ad placement, I thought it might be interesting to brainstorm about it, and see if there are ways to take advantage of it.

Personally I would be curious to know, how they do, (as well as other services of this kind) to know where to inject the code. I know, it can only be speculations, but, may be, by observing the results, we can guess the method.

Is the parsing of the HTML/CSS achieved server side? Or on the client side?

In all events, the page needs to be rendered to find out, where ads can be placed. This is time and resources consuming, and since a page layout can be changed anytime, this is something which needs to be achieved for each request.

So, I guess this is done client side, once the page is loaded and rendered, a piece of javascript is parsing the DOM hierarchy, to find all elements of the page, their positions, and guess where ads can be inserted?

May be there are ways to help / give hints to the parser? I mean, for example, using particular class / id names, or things that the parse might be looking for.

Indirectly related, did you ever observe auto-ad placements which were messing the page layout? I don't mean hurting the UX, but really breaking the page layout?

How do auto-ads work with infinite scroll pages?

Questions like that :)

engine

7:26 am on Oct 11, 2019 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Administrator 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



I've never thought of that, but yes, it'd be interesting to know.

JorgeV

2:51 pm on Oct 22, 2019 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 5+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



Hello-

Now that I have the preview feature available at my Adsense account, i can guess that the auto ads are placing ads after <p></p> blocks. (may be they also consider some <div></div> blocks the same way). At my sites, it's clear, because, as a result, the preview is adding ads in the middle my footer tiny prints. Also, on desktop, some of my <p> tags are styled to appear as cells of a two column table, and Adsense injects ads inside this "table" too, with the mess you can imagine.

I'll rework my page layout in order to avoid these cases, and see if it can be good after all.

skaterpunk

4:19 pm on Oct 22, 2019 (gmt 0)

5+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



Yes, I believe auto placement by Adsense, or any third party ad plugin or script, is reliant on <p> tags. An ad is placed after X paragraph.

This is why news sites, or any site, with mainly paragraphs of text work well with auto ads. My informational site is very image and graphic heavy, and I struggle to manually find a decent spot to fit ads in the content. So, for me, I like the idea of vignette ads, but they never created much revenue for me, so ads in general are a constant struggle for a site like mine and I lean more towards affiliate text links.

Some people use the trick of wrapping images, etc. in <p> tags to get more ads with auto ads, but it's a hack and improper schema.

JorgeV

4:33 pm on Oct 22, 2019 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 5+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



Hello -again

In fact, it's not as sophisticated as I thought!

I've been experimenting more, and, in order to have ads in my side column (on desktop), I need to use <p></p> tags too, within it.