Webby Thoughts

Google changed the AdSense ads by making less of the AdSense ad area clickable to prevent accidental clicks. Fair enough. In theory if the CTR drops because their are less accidental clicks, then the amount paid per click should go up because the clicks that do happen are more purposeful. Or something like that.

Anyway, some people seem to have seen their CTR drop through the floor. Others haven’t been affected that badly by the change to the AdSense ads. It hasn’t seemed to change my CTR one way or the other on any of my blogs.

After noticing something earlier today, I went on a hunt for people running sidebar ads and was actually surprised by how many blogs that I know used to run AdSense that don’t anymore. But, eventually, I found a post on mommy bytes that had the ads in the right sidebar. The clickable area was indeed the new smaller area. Here is a poor image to show it, but feel free to click over to Angela’s site to check for yourself.

Then I went did a Google search for “cats” and came up with this:

Cool. Fewer accidental clicks all around.

But wait. I said I noticed something that made me start this investigation in the first place. I was in my Gmail account reading a newsletter email from Yaro Starak and had my house hovering over one of the ads that Gmail shows and noticed it has a different clickable area:

So wait a second. Google still gets to use the big clickable email on ads that they display on Gmail. And then they put those ads right next to the scrollbar where people have to click to read the rest of their emails. That can’t possibly be a recipe for accidental clicks.

But I’m sure Google has something in place to determine which of those clicks were accidental and return that money to the advertisers.

I got an email early this morning announcing the launch of Amazon’s Context Links Beta.  I was hoping somebody would do a nice writeup that I could link to but I didn’t notice anything when I went through my feed reader.

Amazon Context Links Beta works by dropping a bit of code into your sites template.  Then whenever a page is displayed, Amazon will read through the page and add some links to the text.  The links will lead to Amazon products that match the context of the phrase in the link.

It is a cool concept that might even actually work pretty well.

From the description, it looks Google would not want it on pages with Google AdSens since it is a contextual program, but I might be wrong.  Since the ads are embedded into text links rather than the common ad blocks server by Google maybe you could double dip.  If anybody knows anything about whether they will be allowed to play on the same page, please let me know.

The only annoying thing about the ads is that when you mouseover the link, it pops up one of those little mini Amazon images that show the picture, name, price, etc. of the product that they are advertising.  I’m not a fan of things popping up when you mouseover them.

One area that the Amazon Context Links Beta program might work for bloggers even if Google doesn’t allow it on pages with AdSense would be to put them on the Amazon Context Links on the front page of the blog.  My front page AdSense ads are worthless.  I might try to remove the Adsense ads on the front page of one of my blogs and try the Amazon Context Links instead and continue using the AdSense ads on the single post pages.

I wrote about a post of mine that was receiving quite a bit more traffic than I normally receive because it got popular on Reddit and StumbleUpon for a couple days. It looked like Google might have been ignoring the AdSense clicks from that post and counting them for any other posts during that hot period.

A couple people commented complaining about similar incidents and how this affecting their income. It is a point that I can’t disagree with as a blogger who uses AdSense on my blogs. If Google is applying any kind of filtering to abnormally hot posts, that is money that I will never see.

The question is whether Google should be filtering clicks from the hot posts.

I’m not sure I whole heartedly agree with the points I’m about to make, but let’s call them the Devil’s Advocate arguments.

What advertisers want

Orders and branding. When people click on an AdSense link it can do two positive things for the company. People can place an order. People can become aware of a company and/or product line that they might someday order or mention to a friend.

What contextual advertising provides

On a normal post on a normal day, the people visiting my blog are interested in the niche of the blog and are either regular readers in that niche or visitors that found an individual post through a search about that niche. These are people advertisers want to reach. If I am blogging about all weather tires, and car fanatics and people searching for “Best all weather tires in Missouri” are the ones clicking on the ads those are pretty legitimate potential customers.

The magic black box at Google will do what it does best and provide ads that are going to be as marketable to these visitors as possible which should lead to the highest click through rates and the highest conversion rates.

What happens when you get Dugg

So a post finally made the front page of Digg, Reddit or blew up on StumbleUpon. Thousands of new visitors land on your post. Who are these people? We all know that the percentage of people that are even going to bother clicking an ad from any of these sources is all but nonexistent. These are casual surfers. They are not looking to delve into the depths of your blog or niche while reading the post. Most of these visitors are one page and done. The best case scenario is that you will get another vote at whatever source is providing the traffic.

Sometimes their are clicks. With an thousand people that stop by, you figure somebody is going to click the ads every once in a while. I have no stats to back this up, but I would imagine that a fair portion of the AdSense clicks from Digg/Reddit/StumbleUpon traffic are either accidental or “tips” that the reader is giving the writer in appreciation for a good story.

Why these clicks are bad for everyone

Let’s assume Google isn’t filtering clicks from hot posts. That means people with virtually no interest in considering the product/company are clicking the ad and probably hitting the back button as quickly as possible. No sale. No real branding opportunity. Advertisers would end up spending money for very poor leads. These advertisers might get frustrated with the lack of return on their investment and abandon the online advertising scene for a while.

That would be bad for everyone.

The best scenario for everyone involved is a post that has relevant content with ads that are properly targeted leading to landing pages for items/services that match the interests of the readers.

While there is a side of me that might believe most of that, there is a wallet that would be pretty angry. My wallet believes that if I write something that sends readers to companies, that I should get paid for that service.

At some point, the companies looking for the sales need to make sure their landing pages are set up for the best conversion rates and their ad campaigns are set up to get the most appropriate customers from my site. I send them. They sell to them.

If they are worried about getting the most qualified leads, then a magic black box that reads my words to determine which ads to display probably isn’t the best advertising vehicle for that company.