Anchor ads coming to Desktops

[Dimitri]

Anchor ads now support a larger range of screen sizes. For sites that have anchors turned on, anchor ads will soon start to appear on wider screens such as desktop. Our experiments show that anchor ads perform well on wider screens.
[support.google.com...]

Previous mention :
[webmasterworld.com...]

Also, there is a new option, for anchor ads and vignette ads , to choose to display them , or not, on wide screens.

[yaashul]

Enabling it increase 90kb of compressed javascript (that too on loading of website). Is it worth it?

[Dimitri]

Enabling

Enabling what? The wide screen options? the anchor ads? the vignettes?

90kb

90kb? kB ? Considering that Adsense is resulting in more than 1+ MB of stuff, this is insignificant ... also you can load the Adsense code, once everything else is loaded, like that it has no impact on the loading and interaction of the page.

[cyberfyber]

I've got them enabled for widescreen and yet I've not seen anything yet.
Admittedly, I've forced it to show on the bottom and not the top. No clue if that's had an impact.
Anyone else?

[Dimitri]

I didn't not set an option for the positioning, but it looks like they show at the bottom of the screen.

[cyberfyber]

Dang. Still not seeing anything. Removed that code and still the same.
Everything else is running as expected.
Anchors ads on mobile- No problem.
Other ads-No problem

[Dimitri]

What about your stats? Do they show impression of anchor ads on desktops?

[cyberfyber]

Apologies in advance: I list below my approach in case it helps someone else with the same problem.

Took me a little while to figure out how to break that down to 'content platform' and then filtered by 'ad format: anchor'
but I got it now. :-)

For custom dates I then see that earnings came in as of yesterday, July 20.

Trying different browsers and erasing the cache everywhere did nothing.

Using 'Desktop View' on my smartphone allowed me to see a hint of something wanting to show up on the bottom of the screen. Then realized it might be a menu plugin I've got on the side.

Deactivated the plugin and now, after clearing cache again, see the ad at the bottom of my 'Desktop View' on mobile
and, I see the ad at top on Desktop Chrome. I like, I like. Despite my having that directive code to show only on the bottom. Guess that's working for mobile but not for desktop. Hmmmmmm.

Thanks Dimitri for the suggestion.

[No5needinput]

Using Google Chrome (I will test with other browsers/mobile soon). I notice if my bottom cookie banner at the bottom of the page is active, the desktop anchor ad will show at the top. If the cookie banner is not displayed (i.e. accepted) then the ad will be at the bottom.

[Dimitri]

Considering that the consent of EU users has to be collected BEFORE dropping Adsense cookies (even if you disabled personalized ads), there should never be a conflict between the cookie banner, and the anchor ads, since the adsense code needs to be executed AFTER, the approval by the visitor.

Now, I know that some countries are less strict about it, but I always follow those with the hardest rules, to be sure to be okay. (meaning, France and Germany).

[SweetPotato]

I never enable them.
Even on mobile.
They are annoying and earnings are bad.

[AlexB134]

We disabled Anchor everywhere (I manage AdSense for multiple sites), it was the last straw.
Anchor never worked well for us even on mobile (in terms of RPM), and once it was enabled on desktop (1000+ pix wide viewports) we immediately saw its detrimental effect to the traffic.
It clearly affects "Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)" metric.
I guess it's just not ready for prime time.

[NickMNS]

It clearly affects "Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)" metric.

It really shouldn't, but I see why it does. When shown at the top of the page it inserts padding equal to the height of the ad, this pushes everything down. But I don't see it appearing in "Page Speed Insights" (PSI), that is those ads are not showing, thus cannot be tested. The site I am testing is also running a sticky ad from another ad-network that appears at the bottom of the page, that appears in PSI and it doesn't impact CLS, no padding is added this case. I'm not sure if the padding is only for ads appearing at the top of the page, or specific to AdSense.

As for RPM, I can't really say, I don't run these ads on my own site, only vignettes. Those perform well for me.

[yaashul]

CLS causes clawbacks. Anything which increase CLS like auto ads or Anchor ads all those earning mostly returned in clawback every month. Plus it has very negative impact on webpage.

[Dimitri]

From my observations, anchor ads , at top of the page, on mobile, is not causing CLS.

I am not sure how the code is working, but, the ad shows only when the page has been scrolled by
the height of the ad, at this moment, the ad shows, with a position sticky, and indeed, a padding space is added at the top of the page. But, this padding , doesn't look like to causing a CLS.

May be it depends how the page layout itself is coded, I don't know.

On my sites, anchors ads, on desktop, seem to exclusively show at the bottom, so, not impacting the work flow of the page.