Advanced Automatic Ads for articles is a major change in how article ads are treated and a step towards programmatic control of ad placement. These new settings improve ad viewability and increase CPMs for your site.
Our Ad Ops team, working in combination with our Ad Technology team, will continue to monitor the performance of Advance Automatic Ads and optimize the performance of these ads (such as controlling spacing, sizing, and availability).
Advanced Automatic Ads work with Google Ad Manager (GAM). BLOX Ad Manager users should contact customer support for assistance in migrating to GAM.
This new setting (located under "In Story Ads" in the Block Editor -> Page Customizations panel) programmatically adds advertising positions based on the length of the article. This removes the stacked ads on pages with short content or on pages with a subscription paywall. Ads will be placed roughly after 3 "standard" paragraphs based on character counts.
- Desktop - 1st ad after 580 characters, next ad every 1552 characters thereafter.
- Tablet - 1st ad after 580 characters, next ad every 1164 characters thereafter.
- Mobile - 1st ad after 580 characters, next ad every 776 characters thereafter.
These ad positions now have the following properties:
- Lazyloaded
- Refresh on user interaction
- Support the following ad sizes (depending on viewport): [970,250],[970,90],[728,90],[300,250],[320,50],[300,50],[2,1]
There are also a number of cascading effects:
- The old "Ads on Article Pages - Automatic Ad Placement" option is being deprecated. Users with that setting enabled will now find it under "In Story Ads" as "Automatic Ads (deprecated)". We strongly encourage users to migrate to the new ad units.
- The "Article Only" under Fixed Ads option has been relocated to "In Story Ads" but is still called "Fixed Article Only".
- "Fixed Ads Basic" in-article ad positions will increase from 1 to 3 (to match up with "Fixed Ads Advanced").
- "Smart Ads" is also being deprecated in the future. If you set Advanced Automatic Ads for your In Story Ads choice, then Smart Ads will be ignored. It will only apply for Fixed Ads with the setting of Basic or Advanced, or if Fixed Article Only is your option for In Story Ads.
Target ads to the new ad units by specifying the "pos" keyword of "fixed_automatic_ad" or specify "fixed_automatic_ad#" where the # part is replaced by the ordering of the ad positions.
