In case you’ve been living in a hole for the past few years, Google is absolutely smitten with mobile traffic. We don’t need to tell you why, you know that’s where the audience is. But mobile is also where the greatest growth potential lies.

Ad networks have yet to completely crack or hack mobile advertising campaigns, which means there is still a ways to go to make advertisers and users happy.

But does Google still love us publishers? Well, the messages we received from the GPS event were a bit confusing. Most of them have little to do directly with AdSense, but they can indirectly affect your earnings. So which direction will your AdSense revenue go with these new updates to the AdWords side of the ad marketplace?

1. It’s all about location, location, location – Local Search on Google Maps

The new Google Maps will offer compelling advertising capabilities for small businesses and local chain branches based on the user’s location, as well as other data.

Sounds pretty good for AdWords advertisers, but what does this mean for AdSense publishers?

More inventory = less competition

The laws of supply and demand tell us that if we increase the supply of a certain product to meet increased demand, we will prevent prices from rising.

Or in digital advertising terms: more ad inventory means less demand for each ad unit and lower CPCs and CPMs. Unless, with more inventory, higher advertising budgets are obtained, especially if the new inventory is effective for advertisers. This can be a blessing in disguise for AdSense publishers.

Search vs. show

Google prefers clicks on its own territory. Of course they do. They don’t have to share their revenue with the publishers there. So offering advertisers region-targeted inventory owned by Google is more likely to take a bite out of that local search traffic.

Who gets paid for embedded maps?

Will Google add ads to embedded Google Maps, and if so, who earns revenue from clicks on these local ads?

Another good question is what will happen to such ad units and publishers who make a good living off AdSense ads on the map?

2. For whom is bigger better? – Expanded text ads get double headlines and more characters

Advertisers will now be able to include two lines of 30 characters each in clickable headlines for their text ads and 80 characters for one line of description. In general, this promises longer ads that take up more screen space on mobile searches.

This is great for Google and search advertisers, but for anyone trying to get organic traffic to monetize, this is bad news. It seems that paid search ads are worth more to Google than the content you invested in.

3. The fear (or not) of smart pricing: better measurement of in-store conversions

In GPS, Google announced that it will now check users’ mobile location history with the PPC ads they have clicked on and then attribute conversions to AdWords campaigns accordingly.

The goal of higher conversion measurement is to attract more advertisers. If Google succeeds at this, it just means more demand for AdSense inventory. And that will make everyone happy.

4. Not Just Responsive Ad Units: New Responsive Display Ads

Creating image ads for all ad sizes can be a hassle. Especially for a small business advertiser. Quite often, you end up loading ads with images or flash in the most common sizes, and that’s it.

Google wants more competition among more advertisers for more inventory. By allowing advertisers to create responsive ads that can fit into more ad units, Google basically does exactly that. And this is great for everyone.

5. Targeting Your Device: Bid Changes by Device

Google hopes (and so do we) that this will allow advertisers to spend their budgets more effectively and scale their ad spend quickly. Which would generate more AdSense revenue for you (and Google).

6. Retargeting Gone Open – Increased AdWords Demand Restriction

Other ad networks may show retargeting ads to users instead of AdSense, where AdSense is not implemented.

This could lower CPCs for retargeting in AdSense and hurt publishers who rely on AdSense for revenue.

Local, mobile and advertiser-facing

In general, ads on GPS are highly targeted to advertisers, and especially to SMB (small and medium-sized businesses) ad budgets that have started migrating to the big F in ever-increasing numbers.