Privacy regulations like the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) are an important part of privacy-first advertising. But navigating privacy regulations can be complex if you can’t dedicate resources to meet the varying regulatory requirements across the globe.  

The process of consent management often entails:

• Notifying site visitors on how their data is being used

• Enabling site visitors to provide consent or manage their data preferences

• Communicating those preferences to advertising partners, so that they’re respected

To help you gather and manage user consent for GDPR and opt-out requests for CCPA, we’ve launched new consent management features directly in AdSense Auto ads. These features offer an easy way for you to communicate with your site visitors, providing them an opportunity to manage their data and privacy preferences. This also gives you the ability to gather consent for advertising purposes, so you can continue to grow advertising revenue and fund your content. 

Gather and manage consent for GDPR

AdSense’s consent management solution is integrated with the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Europe’s Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF) v2.1, which standardizes the process and offers common language for gathering consent under the GDPR and ePrivacy Directive. When an EEA or U.K. user visits your site from those regions, your GDPR consent message will display to give them options to manage their data, and their choices will be automatically respected by AdSense and communicated to your advertising partners. 

Gather opt out requests for CCPA

AdSense also supports the IAB's CCPA Compliance Framework, which provides you with a standardized approach to manage opt-outs from users in this state. AdSense Auto ads detects when a user from California visits your site, shows them a CCPA opt out message, ensures their choice will be automatically respected by AdSense and makes the user’s choices available to other advertising partners you’ve integrated on the page. 

Grow revenue in a privacy-focused way

AdSense makes the process of gathering and managing consent easy. It allows you to communicate with your users and give them more transparency and control over how their data is being used. This makes it possible for you to continue to fund your content with advertising in a privacy-first way. 

The consent management solutions in AdSense are simple for publishers to use. As they’re already integrated into AdSense Auto ads, simply edit your site’s Auto ads settings, click “More features” and then turn on your consent messages. Of course, this feature is optional to use and you can work with any consent management platform of your choice. 

As new privacy regulations arise, we’ll continue to evolve our consent management solutions to help partners navigate user privacy decisions in a transparent way. We remain committed to helping site owners earn money through their content and grow their digital businesses for the future in a privacy-first ecosystem. Watch this space for further updates in the coming months.

Please visit the AdSense help center to learn more.

If you want to start monetizing your online content with Google AdSense but either got an initial rejection or you’re simply not sure where to start, this series will be a useful resource for you. Throughout the episodes you’ll build on your policy knowledge to get your content ready for approval with AdSense. 

Here’s what the series has in store:

• Episode 1: Overview: In this video, Aurora (yours truly) and Andy — a publisher in the making — welcome you to the series and take you through a high-level look of the AdSense Site Approvals process.

• Episode 2: Site Ownership and Basic Checks: Aurora and Andy go through the steps you’ll need to follow to confirm the ownership of the website you’re planning to monetize.

• Episode 3: Good and Bad Traffic: In this episode, Aurora and Andy define what good and bad traffic look like, to help publishers get their content approved for monetization on Google AdSense.

• Episode 4: Quality Content: Aurora and Andy help you better understand what good content looks like, how it qualifies you for Google AdSense approval and how we define bad content.

• Episode 5: Navigation: In this video, Aurora and Andy talk about Navigation — how easy or difficult is it for your users to get around your content — and how important this is when getting your site approved on Google AdSense.

• Episode 6: Rejections and Next Steps: In the season finale, Andy manages to get his site approved by Google AdSense and himself and Aurora are surprised by a new aspiring AdSense publisher. They provide an overview of what to do to get a site up to standards for monetization with Google AdSense.

Ensuring a healthy digital advertising ecosystem means that we are constantly balancing the needs of users, advertisers and publishers.

Because we’re aware that it’s difficult to run a business while keeping up with policies, restrictions and their updates, my team works very hard meeting content creators where they are. Some might be at the beginning of their journey with AdSense, while others are seasoned industry leads. Our transparency efforts are based on your feedback and requests for educational content; you are the reason why we participate in policy webinars, write blog posts, improve our Help Center articles, collaborate with online media and create video content.

Be sure to keep an eye out for more policy video guides on the Google AdSense YouTube channel. If you have any questions, feel free to visit our Help Center any time, or head over to the Google AdSense Help Community. 

We hope you enjoy the series!

The new series Sustainable Monetized Websites is now available on the Google AdSense YouTube channel. 

If you create, manage or monetize online content, you’ll find these videos a handy resource for latest policies and best practices in areas like navigation, user-generated content, unique and original content and more. 

Keep an eye out for more videos in the coming weeks, as my two alter-ego co hosts and I cover topics like Search Console — and even explain how to use the Publisher Policy center and Site Kit to improve your online presence. 

Although you might think that the organic and monetized worlds are very different, the truth is, no matter who you are, everything can be distilled into this mantra:  Focus on your users: create great content.

During a challenging year, we've been creative in sharing these best practices while staying safe. By turning our homes into film sets, we’ve been able to keep creating content to help you get the most out of the web. 

We're really looking forward to continuing to bring you information and best practices on policy topics this year, and hope you enjoy this series as much as we’ve enjoyed making it from my very own home studio.