"Google asked."

[Lyndsay]

Does Google ever ask publishers to try placing ads in specific places on their sites?

On a community forum I'm on, we're now seeing ads in very intrusive places and the admin is giving the line "Google asked me to try it."

Does this really happen?

[briggidere]

yeah, it does happen. some people get calls from adsense optimisers who discuss what they think could work with your site and how to increase revenue from it.
There are a few recentish threads in here that mention it if you have a search.

[Lyndsay]

Thanks for your quick reply. :)

[successlieswithme]

but that happens for very big sites only,
which has page impressions of over 10million, for the best of my knowledge

[timster]

but that happens for very big sites only

Smaller sites sometimes get emails asking them to consider new/different ad layouts. Some (ahem, at least one) of these look automatated.

[Quadrille]

I got an individualised email relating to a small site; it included details of the suggestions, and an image of how it might look. The changes suggested were fairly mild, and certainly not something that would make the site look stupid!

Mind you, my advisor was Pedro; the forum mentioned may have been advised by someone else :)

[SiteChemistry]

Participation in the programme is voluntary. He doesn't have to make the changes (though he may feel that having expressed an interest he owes it to Google to give their recommendations a try).

[John Carpenter]

We were invited, accepted and later received screenshots of proprosed optimizations, which we had to kindly refuse, even though we knew the CTR would go way up. It would just look too spammy.

[mvander]

I got suggestions once with a screen shot from the optimization team for a very small site. I did implement the changes. I gave it my best shot, but the layout didn't work well at all. :(