Are You Ready For New and Upcoming Changes in Google AdSense Platform?

Currently, Google is sending emails to some publishers about new changes in Google AdSense platform and announced that “ your Ads tab will be updated in the coming weeks to reflect the Ad types, Text ad styles and Simplifying “If no ads available”.

Personally I am not using Google AdSense but in future I am planning to implement on my blog, but there are some publisher complaining about it on WebmasterWorld. Here is the screenshot:

Here is the email from Google AdSense:

We’re committed to continuously investing in the modernization of our advertising products. As a result, there are some important changes we’re making to some Google AdSense features that you have used or configured in the past. Your Ads tab will be updated in the coming weeks to reflect the following changes:

Ad Types:

We’re moving towards richer ad formats, phasing out text-only and display-only ad units to further improve user experience, and to fully reflect the pool of ads we have in the market. As a result, the “Text ads only” and “Display ads only” ad units in your account have been renamed to “Display ads” and from early 2019 will be updated to serve all ad types.

Text Ad Styles:

We’re deprecating text ad styles for “Text & display ads” ad units. From now on, you won’t be able to create ad styles for your new ad units. Your new ad units will have Google-optimized text ad styling. As this feature is being deprecated, your existing ad styles will also be optimized by Google in the following months. For customization and improved user experience, you can use native ads on your site.

Simplifying “If no ads available”

We’re continuously working to increase the quality and safety of our ad network and reduce the number of malicious ads that enter the AdSense network. As a result, we’re removing the “If no ads available” option and we’ll be defaulting to collapsing the ad space or showing a blank space instead. If your current setting is a color or another URL, it will be updated in the near future your current settings will stop serving in the near future.

I will recommend to publishers that keep monitor your Google AdSense Console and actively participate in the forum and highlighted the issues.

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Google AdSense Notification: Payment Amount Higher Than Your Chosen Form of Payment

Happy Earth Day 2019!

As the world celebrates Earth Day each year on April 22, so today Google is celebrating Earth Day 2019 by highlighting the few oldest living creatures, takes us around the planet that we call home to discover some of the awe-inspiring organisms which inhabit it. Specifically, the interactive slideshow of Google Earth Day 2019 explores six organisms across elevations—along with their earthly superlative!

Google Earth Day 2019 Featured Creatures:

This year’s Earth Day doodle help viewers discover six awe-inspiring organisms including Wandering Albatross, Coastal Redwood, Paedophryne Amauensis, Amazon Water Lily, Coelacanth and Deep Cave Springtail. 

Wandering Albatross

The widest wingspan of any living bird, is known to have the widest wingspan of any living bird which enables to fly miles without a flap.

Coastal Redwood

The tallest tree in the world, is known to be the tallest tree in the world at 377 feet which makes it equivalent to the height of 75 humans. 

Paedophryne Amauensis

The world’s smallest frog barely the size of a coin and also the smallest vertebrate

Amazon Water Lily

Among the world’s biggest aquatic plants, which is capable of bearing the weight of a small person.

>Coelacanth

At 407-million-years old, it’s one of the world’s oldest living species, is one of the world’s oldest living species and was also around the time dinosaurs were alive.

Deep Cave Springtail

Among the deepest-dwelling terrestrial creatures, which is among the deepest-dwelling terrestrial creatures whom apparently scientists had to coax with a bit of cheese.

Today’s Doodle was created by Doodler Kevin Laughlin. Below, he shares some thoughts on Earth Day and the inspiration for his Doodle:

Q: What does Earth Day mean to you personally?

A: It’s very easy for us humans to think of ourselves as something apart or separate from nature. If you pick just one day a year to remember that we’re all of this earth as much as a worm, mountain, or tree, Earth Day can be that day.

Q: How did you choose which species to feature?

A: This was the most difficult part of the process! The last thing I wanted to do was feature animals based on their cuteness or how they might appeal in some way to my mammalian sensibilities. We tried to focus on having a good range of organisms from around the globe that all had an extra special unique quality or earthly superlative. (Tallest, smallest, oldest, etc.)

Q: Did you learn any cool random facts while working on this Doodle?

A: Apparently scientists were able to coax deep cave springtails with a bit of cheese. So we’re not so different from these little hexapods, after all!

Q: What do you hope people will take away from this interactive Doodle?

A: If I can inspire the smallest bit of curiosity or wonder in someone, that would make me very happy. How often does one take a moment to contemplate a tiny critter that lives in the bowels of a cave in Georgia? All life is incredible and worth celebrating.

Furthermore, watch The Animated Video of Google Earth Day 2019, and enjoy the new heights and depths to celebrate Earth Day.

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Earth Day 2019 Logos From Google, Bing, Yahoo and Baidu

Google’s AI/Machine Learning Tool Demonstrates How Algorithm Understand An Image

Google published a new tool to analyze your images, which tells you what it thinks about the image is relevant for, by using machine learning/artificial intelligence algorithm. This tool is called Google Cloud Vision Image Analysis Tool, indicates AI and Machine Learning algorithms for understanding images.

What is Google Cloud Vision Image Analysis Tool?

Google’s Cloud Vision API is a cloud service that allows you to add image analysis features to apps and websites. The tool offers two computer vision products that use Google’s AI and Machine Learning algorithms, help you understand your images with industry-leading prediction accuracy.

This tool use advanced machine learning models, allows you to upload an image, and quickly classify them into millions of pre-defined categories. This new Google’s Cloud Vision Image Analysis Tool can detect objects, faces, read printed and handwritten text, and build valuable metadata into your image catalog.

Google’s Image Analysis Tools Classifications:

• Faces
• Objects
• Labels
• Web Entities
• Properties
• Safe Search

Faces:

The “faces” tab detects the facial attributes such as emotional state or wearing head-wear, but facial Recognition is not supported. As you can see when I uploaded my picture, which is clearly smiling but Google’s image analysis tool didn’t detect it correctly.

Objects:

Yes, the “objects” tab works perfectly and detect what objects are using in the image, like ears, nose, mouth, but also detects like portrait and photography.

Labels:

The “labels” tab extract information about entities within an image that Google recognizes, like jacket, material, smile, hairs and etc. It works very well.

Web Entities:

This ‘Web’ tab detects web references to an image, which means it shows how much images are related on the web. Google’s Cloud Vision Image Analysis Tool uses multiple criteria for understanding an image.

Properties

The Image Properties tab detects general attributes of the image, such as dominant color.

Safe Search:

Safe Search tab detects how the image explicit content such as adult content or violent content within an image. This feature uses five categories (“adult”, “spoof”, “medical”, “violence”, and “racy”), and returns the likelihood that each is present in a given image.

Summary:

This is an amazing Image Analysis Tool for getting an idea that how Google understand your images. It may also helpful for you to optimize the images in the better ways.

Want to know what Google thinks about your image? Find out here at https://cloud.google.com/vision/docs/drag-and-drop

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Google AdSense Notification: Payment Amount Higher Than Your Chosen Form of Payment

A New Twitter Feature Which Allows Users To Hide Replies To Their Tweets.

Twitter announced ‘Hide Replies’ feature is going to roll out in coming June 2019. Twitter is working on this new feature since February, which help users to hide replies to their tweets. Jane M. Wong, an expert on reverse engineering apps, found this new Twitter Hide Replies Feature and shared some screenshots.

Here is a wording in the app’s code that suggest this “Hide Tweet” is about moderation.

Michelle Yasmeen Haq who is a Senior Product Manager at Twitter, also confirmed that it will be roll out publicly very soon.

On Tuesday, 16 April 2019 – Twitter published a blog post and wrote that – the ‘hide replies’ feature will be available in June. “Starting in June, we’ll be experimenting with ways to give people more control over their conversations by giving them an option to hide replies to their Tweets.”

Twitter want people to feel safe, free of abuse, no spam content and other things that distract from the public conversations. Currently this new Hide Replies feature is an experiment, so it may be tweaked or scrapped altogether based on how users react to it.

What is Twitter Hide Replies Means?

If a user hides a tweet reply so it will be automatically hide for all other users, which is a complete different feature if compare to block or mute functions. Twitter plans to allow users to hide replies to their own tweets in order to keep conversations “non-abuse.”

A debate has been started on this new Twitter Hidden Replies feature, some users are saying it’s a form of censorship and some users saying it can help keep trolls at bay.

I think it should be better to delete those replies rather than hiding, because Facebook, Instagram and other social network platform also offered this type of solutions.

Right now people are criticizing on upcoming new feature and want a better solution to fix abuse problem. So let’s wait and see what will happen after this Twitter Hide Replies featured roll out.

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Last day, there are so many Google AdSense publishers got noticed and received notifications in the AdSense console that “Your payment amount is higher than your chosen form of payment.” Those publishers are now confused and don’t know what to do with that. I personally checked that there are tons of complaints from publishers.

I can’t mention all those complaints here in the blog post, but few of them here:

“Your payout amount is more than your chosen form of payment can accept in your country. I have selected Western Union as my primary payment method. I’m getting payment from last 5 years through Western Union. Pending payment of previous month is just $350 but suddenly i got this error message at my google adsense account that “Your payout amount is more than your chosen form of payment can accept in your country. To continue getting paid please choose a new payment method.”

“I got an email saying: Your payment method details for Google AdSense were changed on 17 Apr 2019. For your security, please review this change and contact us if you have any questions. I didn’t change anything and when I logged things look normal so I am not sure what they’re talking about? Can someone please explain since i am worried for security of my account.”

Screenshots of Google AdSense Payment Notification

Here are some replies:

I am seeing that mostly issues are coming from Pakistan and India, especially those who are using Western Union as primary payment method. I will advise to publishers that keep monitor your bank account, payment modes, Google Adsense Console and actively participate in the AdSense forum and highlighted the issues. For more details check the Google AdSense Community (Payment).

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Google Supports AMP Pages for Publishers

Google announced in official blog post for support AMP pages in web search results also known as “blue links” powered by signed exchanges, which means publishers can use their own domain when content is fully loaded in Google search. Currently Google Support AMP Pages for Publishers only in chrome browser, but they are planning to expand availability for other browsers that support the necessary web platform features.

Here is how it looks like:

What Is Signed Exchange?

Google explained that signed exchange is a file format, defined in the web packaging specifications that allows the browser to trust on a document, if it is belongs to your origin. This allows you to use first-party cookies and storage to customize content and simplify analytics integration.

Your page appears under your URL instead of the google.com/amp URL. Google links to signed exchanges when the publisher, browser, and the Search experience context all support it. As a publisher, you will need to publish both the signed exchange version of the content in addition to the non-signed exchange version.

Why Google Supports AMP Pages for Publishers?

AMP stands for “Accelerated Mobile Pages” and you can find that AMP pages load more faster and look simpler rather than regular web pages. For end users it very confusing when they see https://google.com/amp/ instead of an real publisher URLs, due to Google’s cache AMP pages served like that. But now Google is trying to split the difference between the openness of the web and the safe, controlled nature of those other standards.

As a content publisher, it seems like when you register an SSL certificate, you register your signed exchange with a provider, CloudFlare partnered with Google to provide some serious benefits to sites which use AMP. The more modern browsers can then look up the AMP cache URLs to see if they have a match in the registry and then show the defined URL by the publisher.

To find out more about AMP, check out ampproject.org.

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Google Search Console Indexing Bug

Google Search Console is still working on the de-indexing issue which was reported on last week. Due to this indexing bug, enhancement and coverage reports, as well as the URL Inspection tool, still impacted according to Google. It seems like this Search Console Indexing Bug is spreading like a virus to other parts of Google.

Google confirmed in a tweet that they are working on it, if you discover a URL is not included, so you can also use the URL Inspector tool to resubmit that page. As you can see, in the reply I said that Old Search Console was better than this new one.

Many SEOs and site owners noticed their index coverage and enhancement reports have not been updated in the Search Console. Last weekend, I saw huge drops in my client’s website indexed pages in the coverage report.

Here is a screen shot:

According to Google, they are recovering on this Search Console Indexing Bug issue but no time frame because it is taking a lot of time. It means that index coverage and enhancement reports were not updated recently and URL Inspector might not reflect live status. Google said that “they will officially update us when it will resolve, if you need to check the status of a URL in the Google index, use the site: command”.

If you find the pages are still missing from Google’s index after used ‘site search’ command, then it is possible the issue is specifically to your site. You can submit that site-specific issues by submitting a thread to Google’s webmaster community message board.

Google Search Console Indexing Bug Quick Review:

Here’s a quick review on what has happened and what is going on with the Google’s Search Console indexing bug:

• On April 4, SEOs and site owners started reporting that a huge amount of their site’s pages were missing from Google’s index.
• On April 6, Google’s John Mueller confirmed there’s a technical issue affecting the search index which will be resolved.
• Google posted updates on Twitter in the last week and keep everyone informed as to what was going on.
• On April 10, Google tweet that the issue was resolved in search results.

But last day, April 15, Google confirmed that the Search Console reports and tools are having issues. I think after indexing bug issue resolved, it should be the biggest Google indexing problem of 2019.

Forum discussion on Twitter and WebmasterWorld.

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Google Published New Guide for Linking Google Analytics and Google Ads

Akshaya Pragadeeshram is Program Manager at Microsoft, said in a blog post that Bing Ads launched new Action Extensions for desktop and mobile devices, which helps advertisers to utilize call-to-action buttons with text ads. According to Bing Ads, this new Extension allows advertisers to achieve an average of 20% increase in CTR (click-through rate), when they served Actionable Extensions in their ads.

This new ads extension is now released globally on both PC and mobile devices. There are up to 70 pre-defined Action Extensions are available in all Bing Ads platform’s with supported languages.

PC Layout:

Mobile Layout:

Mobile Layout Action Extension With Sitelinks:

Bing Ads Highlighted Key Details About Action Extensions:

• Clicks on Action Extensions will be charged the same cost-per-click (CPC) as clicks on the ad headline.
• Action Extensions can be shown with other ad extensions, including sitelinks.
• Action Extensions can be associated at the account, campaign, or ad group level, where the lowest level takes precedence. There is a limit of 20 associations per level.
• The URL fields are all optional. If the URL is not provided for the Action Extension, we will use the ad’s URLs (or the URL at the keyword level, if provided) as the landing page when the call-to-action button is clicked.

You can create Action Extensions via Bing Ads online, using the bulk account management tool, through the Bing Ads campaign management service API, or the bulk API. Action Extensions are available in all Bing Ads markets on both desktop and mobile devices.

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Bing Update: Text-to-Speech, Intelligent Answers, Visual Search

In this Google Guide for Winning Ramadan in Pakistan with Digital Marketing, you can learn how to build effective digital campaigns during Ramadan. For online marketers and advertisers, this is a great opportunity to leverage billions of Google’s user to effectively engage during Ramadan. Successful brands will take the opportunity to innovate and craft content that is not just relevant, but helpful to audiences during this holy month, paving the way to success, no matter your marketing objectives.

Ramadan in Pakistan

Ramadan is a holy month for Muslims which culminates with Eid-ul-Fitr celebrations. The month of Ramadan is the largest festivity in Pakistan, celebrated by millions all over the country. The holy month of Ramadan inspires Pakistani Muslims to practice Islamic values including self-improvement, spiritual development, and community.

A large part of the Ramzan experience is the shift of daily routine—from fasting from dawn to dusk, to preparations for the day’s iftar and the Eid ul-Fitr festivities. This in effect causes major shifts in consumer behaviour and intent, impacting how Pakistanis do shopping online.

Winning Ramzan and Eid ul-Fitr with Digital

So how do you grab the attention and cut through the clutter during the holy festive season in Pakistan? In this guide, Google shared step-by-step playbook to ensure the success of your digital marketing campaign in Ramzan across Google’s platforms. How to make your ad stand out from the crowd during Ramadan in Pakistan? Google published the secrets for a successful digital marketing campaign during Ramzan in the following steps.

Google Guide for Winning Ramadan in Pakistan

1. Find Your Audience: Google Understanding the Ramzan Audience

By understanding your audience’s motivations during Ramzan and its impact on their digital habits, you can deliver tailored and effective messaging to an audience that makes sense for your campaign. Based on Google internal data, they have identified four audience types to reach out to during Ramzan.

• The Entertainment Seeker
• The Ramzan Homemaker
• The Festive Groomer
• The Sports Fanatics

2. How To Capture Their Attention:

How do you retain your audience’s attention in a digital world filled with noise? The key of a winning combination is data-driven insights and creative storytelling. Google provided four effective tips, help you to get exceptional results in this Ramzan and Eid ul-Fitr 2019.

2.1 Resonate with your Audience:

2.2 Sequential Storytelling:

2.3 Innovative Display Advertising: 

2.4 Key Ramzan Moments on Search:

3. Success Stories

4. Execute Effectively: Drive Impact This Festive Season

Once you have identified your audience personas, made some engaging creatives, it’s now time to make sure they convert into happy paying customers. Ensure that your campaign achieves a significant impact this festive season of Ramadan 2019.

5. Connect with Pakistanis by Utilizing Google Marketing Solutions

The consumer journey is never confined to a single platform. Therefore, it is crucial to tap into the various Google platforms available to ensure that your campaign reaches your target audience at each step of their consumer journey. Google shared few suggested formats that you can use across platforms, at every stage of the funnel:

For more best practices and insights, download this Google Guide for Winning Ramadan in Pakistan and start digital marketing campaigns during festive season.

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Google Published New Guide for Linking Google Analytics and Google Ads

Google published new guide for linking Google Analytics and Google Ads accounts that can get you deeper insights, smarter campaigns, and enable you to earn better business outcomes. In this new guide you can learn how to link both Google Analytics and Google Ads accounts and see the full customer cycle, from how they interact with your marketing ads and complete the goals that you’ve set for them on your site.

Why Link Google Ads and Analytics Accounts?

When you link Google Ads and Analytics, you can:

• See ad and site performance data in the Google Ads reports in Analytics.
• Import Analytics goals and Ecommerce transactions into your Google Ads account.
• Import cross-device conversions into your Google Ads account when you activate Google signals.
• Import Analytics metrics like Bounce Rate, Avg. Session Duration, and Pages/Session into your Google Ads account.
• Enhance your Google Ads remarketing with Analytics Remarketing and Dynamic Remarketing.
• Get richer data in the Analytics Multi-Channel Funnels reports.

Google published new guide because the rise of mobile devices and new digital technologies has resulted in customer journeys that are more varied than ever. With the help of this guide you can use your Analytics data to make your ad more specific, reach target audience and maximizing ad response based on location, device, browser and page depth insights, among other data points.

According to Google, in this new guide you will find a clear, step-by-step playbook to unlock deeper insights and create smarter campaigns. You can see that how the advanced measurement capabilities in Analytics can offer a clear and specific understanding of campaign performance.

It included that how you can select audiences in Analytics and share with Google Ads, also Import your Google Analytics data into your ads flow, along with improved reporting options based on increased data insights.

There are some other interesting features  if you’re thinking of using Google Ads, it’s definitely worth checking out the guide and considering your options for improved data tracking. The more data the better, and with so many actions can be track, makes sense to dig into them and improve your ad performance.

You can download the full “Linking Analytics and Ads: The Solution to Today’s Marketing Challenges” guide here.

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