This post is the third in a series exploring several of Ad Manager’s key features and how they help our publisher partners maximize their ad revenue. To learn more, see posts one and two which were published in March.

Protecting users from bad ads and malicious actors is key to a healthy revenue stream. Things like inappropriate creative, counterfeit inventory, and malware not only divert revenue from you, but also alienate your users, and degrade the online experience in general.

Some people respond by installing ad blockers, which prevent ads—all ads, good and bad—from appearing. When this happens, every publisher pays the price, as it means they earn less money from the free content we all enjoy. For advertisers who create good ads, these obstacles make it tougher to connect with customers. And for consumers, it means they’ll see less useful ads.

Google Ad Manager helps power our partners’ digital advertising businesses, including helping to combat ad fraud and bad ads. Here are three ways we're working to protect your business and the broader ecosystem from bad ads and invalid activity:

We continuously invest in our defenses against ad fraud

By using a combination of people, policies, and technology, our global team of subject matter experts, PhDs, and engineers have fine-tuned our ad systems policies to provide clear guidance on what is and is not acceptable. To date the team has launched over 200 automated filters that help defend our ad systems from invalid activity in a lasting way. 

One of the ways we did this in 2019 was by investing in new technology to better identify policy-violating behavior at the account level, as opposed to the ad level. Our efforts resulted in 2.7 billion bad ads being taken down in 2019—more than 5,000 bad ads per minute—and the termination of 1.5 million advertiser accounts for violations, 3x more than in 2018.

We develop tools to help you manage which ads are shown on your properties 

We provide and develop new tools to help you manage and control which ads are shown across your sites and apps. Pricing rules and blocking options provide granular control over your inventory before the auction process. Features like the Ad review center help you review individual ads after they've been shown to decide whether you continue to show them, block them, or report them in real-time.

We also understand that sometimes people make honest mistakes when setting up their ads businesses, so we’ve developed solutions like the App Policy Center to help you easily review and monitor policy violations or appeals you may have. The App Policy Center was designed to provide greater insight into our policy enforcement process and help reduce the risk of potential revenue loss.

We support industry initiatives

We invest in industry initiatives to help tackle bad ads for everyone in the ads ecosystem. Here are three key initiatives that we invested in and continue to support to help prevent bad ads.

• Ads.txt and app-ads.txt: These projects are aimed at preventing counterfeit inventory, which diverts revenue from publishers. They allow Ad tech companies to identify unauthorized and domain-spoofed inventory being sold across the industry by letting website owners publicly declare who is allowed to sell their ad space. We scan more than 30 million domains a day and are proud to say that nearly 90 percent of our publisher partners have adopted ads.txt.
• The Better Ads Standards: These standards are based on extensive user research conducted by the Coalition for Better Ads about which ad formats and ad experiences consumers think are the most annoying and disruptive. They’ve identified 4 desktop and 8 mobile web display ad experiences that companies should avoid in order to maintain a good user experience, and help create a better online environment for everyone.
• Open Measurement: This software development kit (SDK) is an industry-wide solution to the challenge of measuring viewability of ads in apps. We offer our partners access to the Open Measurement Initiative by integrating the SDK into our mobile ads products. This preserves your revenue stream by ensuring your inventory is considered for purchase.

The Ad Manager team is constantly working to develop and improve ad policies and protective solutions like those mentioned above. When we protect our publishers, we help ensure the entire advertising ecosystem is as healthy as possible, and everyone benefits.

To learn more about how Ad Manager can help you manage, protect, and grow your advertising business, visit our new feature brief archive in the resources section of our website. And keep an eye out for our next post, "Deliver the best ad experience every time".

Online content and media consumption behaviors are continuously evolving. If you'd like to optimize your online business and help improve your AdSense performance, it's important to follow and adapt to the trends. We'd like to provide some resources to help you successfully navigate in an ever-changing digital environment.

Adapt your content to changing trends

It’s important to understand what’s top of mind for the people you’re aiming to reach in order to make your content interesting and useful to wide audiences. Below are some tools you can use to optimize your content:

Use Google Trends to analyze the popularity of top search queries in Google Search across regions and languages. If you need help with understanding, using and visualizing the data better, you can get Google Trends lessons.  

Stay on top of market trends in a dynamic environment and reflect it on your content to keep it up to date. While doing so, please be mindful of our content policies.

Use Question Hub to create richer content by leveraging unanswered questions online. Review these questions to get inspired and create deeper, more comprehensive content.

Track how your content performs 

Get to know your audience and how they engage with your site through Google Analytics. The earlier you spot changes in your user behavior, the quicker you can address them. You can review the below reports to get the insights: 

• Realtime Content Insights to identify the most popular articles amongst your audience
• Behavior Reports to understand the overall page and content performance of your site
• Acquisition Reports to review the shift in your site traffic and traffic sources. If you see unusual spikes from certain sources, you might want to monitor them. 
• AdSense Overview to see your revenue information once you link your AdSense account to Analytics. 

As an addition to your current content strategy, experiment with different content formats such as video or infographics and track the engagement on your site. If you see an improvement, you can double down on those content formats. Diversifying your content could help you expand your audience, and also improve the engagement of your current ones. 

Optimize your revenue stream

When your content is ready, appealing and easy to reach, you can optimize your AdSense account to maximize your revenue from the content you created. We know that creating content takes time, so we’d like to remind you of some solutions that you can use to get the most out of your content.

You may consider using Auto ads to help you increase your ads revenue. Auto ads are optimized to deliver better performing ads, so that you can spend more time creating the content your audience is searching for. As they work through any AdSense ad code, you can start using Auto ads byturning them on in your account. 

As time spent on mobile increases, it becomes even more important to have a mobile-friendly site with goodpage speed. This will help people to access your content without problems. Make sure your ad units are responsive in order to provide a positive ad experience regardless of which device people use to visit your site. 

Lastly, make sure that your site complies with the AdSense Program policies so that your business can grow sustainably. 

We’re here to support you through the AdSense forums, email and troubleshooters. Learn more about the support options available. 

Since COVID-19 began, we’ve heard from our retail and brand manufacturing partners that they’re hungry for more insights on how consumer interests are changing, given fluctuations in consumer demand. We see these changes reflected in how people are searching on Google. Last month, there were spikes in search interest for household supplies and jigsaw puzzles as people spent more time at home. This month we’ve seen surging interest for sewing machines and baking materials in the U.S., and tetherball sets and chalk in the United Kingdom and Australia. 

Businesses are using a variety of resources to understand changing consumer interests—including Google Trends, social listening, surveys, and their own data—in order to help make decisions on the fly. But if they don’t know what to look for, there isn’t an easy way to understand which product categories are gaining in popularity, and might pose an opportunity.

That’s why we’re launching a rising retail categories tool on Think with Google. It surfaces fast-growing, product-related categories in Google Search, the locations where they’re growing, and the queries associated with them. This is the first time we’ve provided this type of insight on the product categories that people are searching for. 

When we previewed the data with a group of businesses, they had lots of creative ideas for how they might apply it—whether for content creation, promotional efforts, or even new products and services. Here were some of their ideas for how it could help:

• Content creation: A cookware company noticed that “flour” was a growing category in the United States. The team was inspired to explore partnering with a famous local chef to create engaging content about recipes that incorporate flour. 

• Promotion: A jewelry and accessories company noted rising interest in products in the “free weights” category, so the team thought they might partner with fitness influencers who could help promote their products. Similarly, an online business said it would regularly reference the data to inform which products to feature on its homepage throughout the pandemic. 

• Product ideas: An apparel company with a fast and flexible production model said its team would use this data to inspire new product line ideas.

For the next few months, we’ll update the tool with fresh data every day and hope this will help businesses of all sizes find new pockets of consumer interest. For additional resources and insights, sign up for the Think with Google newsletter.