Remember my post yesterday about auditing Google AdSense ads? Well, today the ads aren’t showing up but there is a space being taken up as if they want to display but can’t display because they are blocked.
Now this is interesting. I also restricted the kind of categories that would be shown in advertisements. The reason I got some of those ads may be that there weren’t ads that wanted to target my demographic. Great!
I have to admit that many of the ad designs themselves were terrible. Some of them implied illegal activity, and others were just horrible. No thought was given to their design. I said yesterday that the companies that were advertising these products had terrible reviews. Is this the future of marketing? Fooling people who don’t know better until you change your name and try again?
People apply some common sense. If companies are cheap and compete on price it’s going to be junk. Amazon has taught us that. If you have never heard of the company go look them up before you order from them at Trustpilot or some site you trust for reviews. Ask friends. Huge brands are scams and cheat people. I know that I won’t ever support certain companies that abuse me as a customer. You don’t have to learn from painful experiences, you can learn from other’s painful experiences.
AdSense is deceptive in many ways. In its ad review center, it doesn’t tell you all of the ads that it is running. I tried to block an ad from a company yesterday but it didn’t show in Ad Review it existed and doesn’t show today. Ad Review should show every ad that it is advertising or what is the point? Why give people control if you are only sampling a random assortment of data? It is purposely deceptive.
Now I know some of you might say Well Google can’t give that kind of data to every small publisher. Why not? Google makes a big deal about things for SEO and then changes its mind. When Google is in control it calls the shots, but times are changing and Google won’t have this market forever. According to this study, 82% are searching on social media first. Google, Meta, MS, and Apple are not going to be FAANG forever.