No Country for Old Text Ads...

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!

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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