Google Tests Alternative Fonts

[stuartmcdonald]

Between refreshes on the same page, same adblocks, I'm seeing Times, plain serif, no serif, vanilla arial, big point, small point... what gives?

[Lame_Wolf]

and comic sans <spit>

[Bddmed]

Yep, seeing it too. But my CTR is way up compared to this month average, so it seems to be working.

[stuartmcdonald]

Not comic sans -- surely even G wouldn't sink that low... next thing we'll be seeing ads in Mistral...

[HowYesNo]

i see comic sans font on my ads :(

[zett]

Yep, here as well. Including one very thin font (which genius thought of this?) and the beloved comic sans. Which is not funny.

I sense a certain desperateness at The Plex. Yet they do not offer tools to really beef up the revenues for Google and for publishers. Sad.

[netmeg]

I haven't seen one instance of alternate fonts yet - what size ad blocks are you all seeing these? I am pretty much only using the 160x600 at the moment.

[zett]

netmeg:

I saw it on several of our leaderboards. Maybe 160x600 is not (yet) targeted?

[loudspeaker]

I think it's an effort to overcome ad blindness. They are also using varying margin widths, at least on 300x250.

[Bddmed]

On the leaderboards for me too.

[koan]

I haven't seen one instance of alternate fonts yet

I saw it on a 468*60 ad. I thought I messed it up with a CSS change somewhere for a second. I think it was comic sans too. Didn't look professional at all.

[carguy84]

Wow, I thought I f'd something up. Thanks for the heads up Google! lol.

[londrum]

it will be alright if we can choose the fonts ourselves, to match our site
- but if the ad writers get to choose the fonts then it will mess everything up.

[johnnie]

Been seeing times on the normal rectangle. Looked quite ugly to be honest.

[physics]

I have an idea... let advertisers chose the font for themselves.

[koan]

I have an idea... let advertisers chose the font for themselves.

I think publishers would be in a better place to know what fonts fit best with their sites.

[BaseVinyl]

I heard that after the new font tests we will be seeing "Punch the Monkey" and "Push the Fart Button" type ads in all adsense spaces!

OUCH!

;)

[ken_b]

I wonder what the frequency of this is?

I browsed around my site and didn't see any on a variety of adblock sizes (120x240, 250x250, 728x90, 234x60, 120x600).

[anon123]

Good. Experiment. People are getting so used to the 'normal' Adsense ad's that they're becoming blind to them.

I say that soley as an Adsense publisher, but even if you're an Adwords user: if something helps your ad get better noticed, isn't that the point?

[greatstart]

Hey, it could be worse if they start using the Webdings or Wingdings fonts!

[Januuski]

I think publishers would be in a better place to know what fonts fit best with their sites.

I couldnt agree more.

[edited by: martinibuster at 1:10 am (utc) on June 24, 2008]
[edit reason] Removed off topic comments. [/edit]

[OutdoorWebcams]

To quote ASA from this thread [webmasterworld.com]:

As you have noticed, we are testing new text ad fonts for a limited number of publishers. If we roll out this feature to all publishers, we will be sure to let you know.

[stuartmcdonald]

Since seeing the changing fonts yesterday I've had the lowest CTR of the month, so my vote goes for a rollback...

[wheelie34]

yup rollback agreed, the only days my stats suffer, ctr + ecpm, is maintenance and yesterdays font game.

Luckily maintenance is on a Saturday usually which is always my worst day.

[misterjinx]

we (in italy) I see also another font... maybe georgia.

[andrewshim]

I don't think they will "choose" what font to use for our sites, but rather they are testing fonts to see which gets more clicks. With this info, they will include those fonts in an option set. Then when we set up our ads, we will have a choice of font that matches the font of our sites.

After all, all these years, we've had to deal with Adsense ONLY in one font while our site was in another. I think a good move although I gotta agree with stuartmcdonald that earnings have been really lousy since they started testing.

[Guido]

I saw different fonts yesterday on my 160x600, but no changes in CTR.
No comic on my site, only some serif, and probably 1px bigger size which is good on a full HD monitor.

[wolfadeus]

I see, so that is why I just saw comic font on my site...me no like...

For a while I thought I had used some kind of strange AdSense code for certain pages :)

[garrybetting]

I am glad they have done it.
Ad blindness is huge today.
Anything that changes ads will help.

[rmay]

I've seen some examples where multiple ad blocks on a page (three, to be exact) are showing three different font types. This is really dumb and makes the publisher's site look unprofessional to the non-savvy. Why not at least keep some consistency across the same page?

The comic sans usage is really, really silly. I understand that they need to test a wide range to get as much data as possible, but the type face is going to stand out and look silly on 95% of sites.