No Country for Old Text Ads...

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I don't know why this never sank in. I think it went in one brain cell and out the other. Last year, around November, Google changed the clicking behavior of their text ads for Adsense. It used to be that you could click on the title, link, or the description portion and it would click through. Now you can only click on the title portion.

The net effect of this, according to the pundits, is that clickthrough rates for text ads went down up to 60%. Clickthrough rates go down, revenue goes down.

However, image ads remain 100% clickable. The solution? Change your setup to serve only image ads. Now that the quality of google's image ads has generally improved, it should not be an issue.

If you are using their new Custom Channels, you can actually do this without having to change any of your ad code that's in your pages.

As a general rule, it's a good idea to watch your CTR and eCPM figures carefully after making such a change - it doesn't work the same for every implementation.

Jeesh!

Peter has been active on the C# and other MS newsgroups, has had samples at gotdotnet.com (now codegallery.com) that have been downloaded over 56,000 times, and has written numerous articles for eggheadcafe.com, for which he is a co-founder, and MSDNAA sites. He has also been a technical reviewer on books from Prentice Hall, Manning and other publishers. Peter was a Microsoft MVP for 10 years. Peter was born and raised in New York City, and after a stint as a jazz musician playing contrabass with the Robert Hunt Trio, migrated to sunny Florida, where he was hired as a rookie Financial Consultant at Merrill Lynch in Orlando, specializing in Corporate Services. It was at Merrill that Peter realized computers and technology were his forte. He spent his last few years at Merrill developing real – time computerized trading and and stock charting program using advanced technical analysis indicators, some of which are his own inventions. In 1997, he moved on to architect and serve as lead developer on a number of innovative web-based and middleware solutions for the healthcare and financial services industry.

Comments

  1. Dennis Gorelik10:08 PM

    Peter,
    1) May be this is the reason that change in click-through rates was not widely discussed:

    https://www.google.com/adsense/localized-terms
    =====
    You agree not to disclose ... (b) click-through rates or other statistics relating to Property performance in the Program provided to You by Google;
    =====

    2) What's your experience with image-only ads? Did it bring CTR and Page eCPM back to normal?

    3) I don't like image ads. They are annoying.

    4) There could be another reason why CTR dropped. With time users are getting used to ads, so they click less.
    You may consider changing ads positions a little, though it's tricky play.

    ReplyDelete
  2. peterbromberg7:05 AM

    Dennis,
    your comment in 1) seems a little hair-splitting. The discussion about click-through rates declining after a change by Google was quoted from others ("pundits") and is not specific to an individual account. Further, Googles "confidential information" states that it does not include info that has become publicly known, or independently developed.

    I don't particularly like image ads either, but they have improved in quality, so that's more of an individual choice.

    You should be able to get some people's opinions about CTR etc by searching around.

    ReplyDelete

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