Google’s Heavy Ad Intervention: What Websites Need To Know

What is Heavy Ad Intervention?

Heavy Ad Intervention is a new feature designed to block ads that use an extreme amount of network bandwidth or battery power.

Google Chrome defines “heavy ads” as ads that consume more than 4MBs of network data or 60 seconds of total CPU.

What happens when an ad is removed due to heavy ad intervention?

Google has said that when an ad is flagged for heavy ad intervention, the user will see an “Ad removed” text in place of the ad that was removed.

Below is an example of a La Mer skincare banner ad that displays properly.

Now take the ad that’s been removed in the same ad space when another user comes to the site. It could have been an interactive game ad that was CPU intensive and was removed by Google.

Note: Google has said that heavy ads that will be removed range from the actively malicious, such as cryptocurrency miners, through to genuine content with inadvertent bugs or performance issues.

Google has also said it will display a “Details” within the removed ad.

If you click the details link, Google will display the message: “This ad uses too many resources for your device, so Chrome removed it.”

What do publishers need to do?

In reality, no action is needed from publishers. But if you use a third-party provider on your website that serves ad, just be aware that users may see ads that have been removed if they exceeded the limits when browsing your website.

If you show first-party ads on your website, or you provide ads for third-party display (which most publishers don’t), you’d want to create and implement the proper monitoring set up through Google’s Reporting API for Heavy Ad Intervention.

If you are a creator of ad content (most publishers aren’t), you’ll want to find a way to test your content for performance and resource usage issues.

Each ad platform you create ad content for, their individual guidelines might provide restrictions or additional specifications. Besides that, ad creators should refer to Google’s Guidelines for display creatives.

Wrapping up heavy ad intervention

When it comes to heavy ad intervention, there is not much that publishers need to worry about.

Additionally, even if you work with a third-party ad platform and you or a visitor sees that an ad has been removed, it’s neither your nor the ad platform’s fault.

Remember: Google’s heavy ad intervention is measuring and removing ad creatives that are either too slow to load or too large. These ad creatives are out of the hands of publishers and most ad platforms.