New Clickable Areas For Adsense Ads

Some of you may have heard that Adsense is rolling out a slight change in the way Adsense ads may be clicked. The more nosy of us would have wondered about accidental clicks (that were never meant) near the actual text of the ads. I learnt about this from a thread in Webmasterworld.

Basically what this new change means is that ONLY the URL and the Title of the ad in your Adsense blocks will be live. Clicking any other place (ie white space) will NOT take your visitor to the advertiser’s website. I’ve found that roll out is not complete yet. Some sites will have the old format where white space is still clickable. I expect the roll out to be completed very soon with the Christmas shopping season and holidays nearly upon us.

Most of us are familiar with when accidental clicks happen :

• If you still use one of those old-fashioned mouse with the roller ball, you know accidental clicks happen when you move the mouse and the pointer doesn’t follow.
• You’re sleepy (or bored) at work and you’re surfing a site you’re NOT supposed to. The boss walks in and you click like mad to try and close the window.
• You’re working happily on your computer and your kid suddenly screams coz she slipped and landed in the toilet hole (wait till it happens to you - then you’ll understand).
• You click on an ad, THEN see a more relevant one, but you can’t do anything about it.
• You rush to finish that spanky new look for your web page and your wife walks past you in her very nice nightie asking when you’re coming in to bed (ahem).

So why is Google bothered with such a silly little thing you wonder?

Accidental clicks are STILL clicks and every click registers in their humongous database. Advertisers PAY Google AND publishers for every click, so if a click was accidental, it means that advertisers lose money. Even if each click cost 5 cents, mutiply that by a hundred accidental clicks a day and you get $1850 paid for clicks that were never meant to be.

The new clickable areas are also good for publishers in the long run because :

• There is a lesser chance of you receiving that “nice little email” from Google telling you that they’ve detected invalid clicks and you’re being tossed out of the program. Yes, you will very likely see your CTR and eCPM go down for a while IF you have been blending your ads like mad to try and “fool” your visitors or if your site somehow attracts drunken, sleepy visitors who can’t aim their mouse properly.
• Less accidental clicks may attract more advertisers to the content network which translates to a wider range of ads and more potential for revenue.

In the Webmasterworld thread I mentioned above, AdsenseAdvisor (a Google staff who participates in the forum and acts as a representative for Adsense) has this to say :

So here are a couple of things you can do if you find your Adsense revenue affected by this change :

• Use BLUE for your links. There are the default color for links and your visitors are less likely to make accidental clicks on obvious links.
• Opt for image ads where the whole ad space is clickable or try a combination of text and image ads.
• Make your ads obvious - don’t try to use blending as a way to “confuse” or “fool” your visitors into clicking ads.

Personally, I have not noticed any change in my Adsense revenue, and CTR continues to be the same. I don’t think I WILL see any change because I opted long ago to make it easy for my visitors to distinguish ADs from content on ALL my sites.

Popularity: 26% [?]