Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I feel that when an adlinks horizintal layout is used at a place where there 'could' have been a horizontal navigation menu, many people would click thinkings its the menu .. There are a lot of users you have this habit... Top horizintal does look like navigation links. I hope most of you woudl agree , and i am sure google would not have overlooked this fact.
Now, if i try to believe that google may have actually considered this ( i see great possibility ), then maybe google is now playing in the gray areas of clearly marking the ads from the content. Theory wise, the block says Ads by Google, and Looks wise, it looks like a great horizontal menu ..
Thinking Ahead, I see the posibility of a better vertical Adlinks block, nicely fitting into left navigation spot , but with 10 to 15 links, many be 20 to 25 links. Think of it... Its still in the gray area but it could work miracles for the advertisers as well as publishers.
Brainstorming...
There is a great potential that this will further damage the relationship between your users and you/your website. People will be utterly disappointed to get fooled (THEY thought it's a navigation bar, but realized it's JUST ADS). They will continue to browse your site more carefully -if at all- to avoid further frustration.
That's why I am not even thinking about using this new option. Also I clearly mark the ads on my site as ads. I want satisfied users who click on the ads intentionally. And I want repeat users. EPC has been steady for some time now, and revenue per day is increasing steadily (yet slowly and on a low level), so I must be doing something right.
I know, that from a pure monetization point of view, this may be dumb, of course, so we will see a lot of sites exploiting this new format. Maybe in the future we/the users will just need one look at a site to immediately spot whether it's completely useless to them or not - by looking for the horizontal Google bar. If it's present, forget about the site... ;-)
As I said - I feel it's quite dangerous to toy around with this.
-- Mark
I have seen the new horizontal AdLinks as well, and was also (almost) tricked into clicking it, because I thought it was a navigation bar.
The most spectacular thing about the navigation styles adlinks is that the more you try to show it differnt than the site, the more it looks like a navigation bar. Think of it, horizontal navigations on top of page are supposed to be a little different so that they do not blend in the content. SO even if you mark it separately, it would stand out, not due to its color scheme, but due to click behaviour pattern of most users.
Still toying with the idea of suggesting google to launch a new adlinks vertical format ( 150 X 500 ) with about 15 to 25 link contextual words ...
There is a great potential that this will further damage the relationship between your users and you/your website. People will be utterly disappointed to get fooled (THEY thought it's a navigation bar, but realized it's JUST ADS).
Depends on how you see it. I am both an AdSense user and surfer. When I see a graphical banner advertisement I always hesitate to click. This is because with many banner advertisers you get tricked in some cascade of popups, popunders etc. With Google ads you are quite sure you will land on a decent website, because the ad and landing page have been checked by Google before the ad went life.
So as a surfer I am not affraid to click a Google ad or adlink, because I know there is an easy way back. In fact most of my surf behaviour is click, backspace, click, backspace... I don't expect my visitors to visit my site only. If they click an adlink and are happy with the presented results, they select the appropriate advertisment. If they are not happy, simply backspace and they are back on my site.
As posted in another thread I am experimenting with the horizontal Adlinks format on one site and I am happy with the results, so maybe my view of this is colored.
I would love to try it by replacing my leaderboard but, of course, cannot since only one is allowed.
Surely they thought about that?
On the site I would try it on the 1xleaderboard and 1xAdlink = 80+% of the earnings.
I couldn't change the vertical Adlink, which is bang in the hot spot, for any other ad since it would look awful, therefore to use 1xhorizontal the earnings would need to make more than the current two combined.
Do I use one and hope that more people accidentally click on the links thinking they're my links? Maybe, maybe not, so I shall probably try it on a less frequented site to test it out.
