Opportunities and experiments

Get ideas to improve your account performance

Guide to using the 'Opportunities' page for ad and site optimization

Next: Run an experiment from an opportunity

This article explains the types of opportunities you might find and outlines the steps for viewing, testing, and applying these suggestions.

About the Opportunities page

The "Opportunities" page is dedicated to helping you improve your account performance. You can think of the page as a personal assistant who customizes opportunities for your account. It can help you to maximize your revenue and performance.

We recommend that you check your "Opportunities" page regularly. Whether you optimize your account daily or monthly, it's constantly working in the background to spot opportunities for you to improve.

Opportunity types

There are several different opportunity types:

Opportunities related to ad settings: You might find opportunities to increase your earnings by changing your ad settings.
Opportunities related to ad placement: You might find opportunities to increase your earnings by moving your ad units to different locations on the page where they'll perform better, for example, moving them below the header.
Opportunities related to ad categories: You might find opportunities to increase your earnings by opting in to showing ads from general or sensitive ad categories that you're currently blocking.
Opportunities related to your site: You might find opportunities to increase revenue and visitor satisfaction by making changes to your site, for example, by optimizing your site for multiple screen sizes.

Verified by experiment

If you've switched on automatic experiments, you might find opportunities with the "Impact verified by experiment" label. These opportunities are backed up by the results of experiments run by Google on your behalf. You can apply their recommended changes with confidence.

Work with opportunities

You can take the following actions on opportunities:

View more details about an opportunity

Click on an opportunity to learn more about it. Each opportunity has a details page where you can view an explanation of the recommended changes, the page or ad unit that the opportunity applies to (if applicable) and the actions that you can take.

If you have multiple opportunities of the same type, then they'll be combined together into one details page, making it easier for you to work on them at the same time.

Apply an opportunity

Many opportunities can be implemented immediately. If you're ready to proceed with the recommended changes, click Apply now (or Apply all if you're applying multiple opportunities). The changes will go into effect immediately.

Note: After you apply the recommended changes, there's no way to automatically revert back to your previous ad settings. However, you can make changes manually to your ad settings at any time.

Mark an opportunity as done

Some opportunities require you to take action, for example, to create a new ad unit or move an existing ad unit on your page. After you complete a recommended action, let us know by clicking I’ve done this.

Run an experiment from an opportunity

Some opportunities give you the option to run an experiment instead of immediately applying the recommended changes. If you're unsure about applying an opportunity you can always choose to first run an A/B experiment on your site to test the performance of your current settings against the recommended settings.

Dismiss an opportunity

If you're not interested in an opportunity, click the X to dismiss it. The opportunity will be removed from your "Opportunities" page.

Why opportunities might not be available

We only show opportunities if we determine that they're applicable to your site and believe they'll have a positive revenue or traffic impact. Even though you might not have any opportunities now, we recommend that you check your "Opportunities" page regularly.