Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I am seeing Black borders around some of my ads every now and again. First with the various fonts, now with this. So much for nicely integrated subtle ads - eck so ugly.
I'm using the same ad code on the page and after refreshing about 1 in 20 have this black border.
Anyone else seeing this on their ads?
I tested it by asking a friend to look at the page and the first thing he noticed was the ad, not the content as I'd intended.
Not nice Google!
Well, I DON'T WANT my ads to stand out! I gladly take LESS money than I know I can get because I don't want the focus of my site to be the ads.
If I wanted my ads to stand out, I'd have animated Punch The Monkey ads on my site, and not Adsense.
I noticed the same Adsense black border phenomenon yesterday. I spent 30 minutes trying to track down what I may have done wrong. Unfortunately for me I was working on the site's CSS file when I saw the border - so naturally I thought I was the cause of the problem. My CSS file looked okay so I went back and reloaded a few pages in the browser and - no black border.
Zett and maximillianos - I agree with your thoughts on this. Google (in my opinion) is probably only interested in increasing revenue - thus testing new ad formats. Having said that, fonts changing I can understand - as they don't allow us to control fonts, but the factors google lets us control: font color, ad background and borders should not be over-ridden by them. Just my opinion.
In addition, as ecmedia states a "Testing ad formats" message would've been nice. A message in Adsense manager about the "testing" would've saved me thirty minutes of fretting and panic because I didn't have a clue why a border appeared around ads when we opt out of using borders.
the calculation is potential short term gains from people who further respond to the visual impact of the ads versus long term losses from users who might never come back because of a rubbish browsing experience. could as well plaster my pages full with flashy ads and obscure the content sections. but i don't do that. i'm serious with my business and it's just not worth it.
i chose a specific border color, i neglect poorly designed banners and deliberately chose text ads instead of image ads. i trusted google on that point. as i said, this really is one step too far.
Actually, I'm quite pessimistic about the future of Adsense these days. Since the beginning of August I see the same amount of impressions and a same percentage of clicks but a constantly declinig ecpm. It almost looks like more and more advertisers are leaving Google Adwords, resulting into less competition and less income per click.
Sure it would be nice to be advised in advance, but it's their code, and Google reserves the right to use editorial discretion on borders. It's probably a glitch.
The only poster in this thread who claims a response from Google wrote:
Thank you for your email and the screenshot you supplied. I have reviewed the page #*$!x.com and can see that there is no longer a border around the ad, its is very strange indeed that this
appears randomly. Please ensure that the code that you have on the page does not have borders included on it. If you see this again please reply to this email with the exact URL on
which it appears.
I wouldn't panic at least until Google has confirmed it's not a glitch.
p/g
The glitch that really annoys me, though, is when I get horizontal Ad Links served into a Wide Skyscraper text/image ad slot. Only the first word of the Ad Links line shows up in the Wide Skyscraper window. I figure out what it was by looking at the frame source. Happens about four times a week, that I catch. Usually later in the evening.
I don't like selling out and just letting my site lose integrity - adsense income is very important to me but I strongly believe that it's a result of a quality product and having ghastly looking ads doesn't help.
It's rare for publishers to dictate the design of ads, and it's unlikely that the occasional black or colored border on an ad will drive away users. Still, if you demand total control, there's one way to get it: Sell and serve ads yourself instead of turning your ad space over to a third-party network. But don't be surprised if your advertisers balk at being told what colors to use or what their ads' borders should look like.
As for explanations (or the lack thereof) from AdSense Support, it's unlikely that support reps are informed of everything that gets tested by the design team. They may become aware of tests via inquiries from AdSense publishers, but that won't necessarily happen overnight.
It makes a lot of sense for Google to test things like borders, ad fonts, etc. across a large (and random) selection of Web sites if the objective is to gather performance data for optimization purposes. Maybe an individual AdSense publisher doesn't care about maximizing ad viewership and clickthroughs, but the network as a whole benefits if (for example) Google can say "On average, replacing borderless ads with black borders can increase clickthrough by 11.8%" or (conversely)"On average, removing borders from ads can increase clickthrough by 11.8%." (And no, limiting such tests to publishers who volunteer to participate won't do the trick, because that introduces another variable into the mix.)
I think what did it, though, was the large black box on the bottom of the ad reserved for "Ads by Google." The entire bottom border of the ad was about 10 pixels of black.
I really don't believe that making ads stand out more is the solution to getting more clicks or at least getting valuable clicks. People tune out to ads that are obvious ads. What made text links such a great advertising option in the beginning was that we were all so happy to see an advertising solution that blended in with our pages. I mostly run text-link and not image ad types because from much testing on my site, text ads earn more and I believe this is because they're noticed more when they're subtle.
My suggestions is to allow publishers an option in the adsense account "Allow adsense to try alternate ad styles to improve my revenue" so you can opt in (or out) of these tests - you could then go to town and do even more risky tests.
There's one problem with that approach: It would introduce another variable into the test, so the results might be different than for a random sample.
[edited by: BaseVinyl at 4:57 am (utc) on Aug. 25, 2008]
.like remembr when people watched TV and when the ads came on the volume would get louder?
The volume didn't really increase--the commercials simply used more audio compression, which reduced the dynamic range and created an impression of higher volume. Maybe AdSense could use compressed fonts to get a similar effect. :-)
If you're stronglly against these "tests" like me, please email adsense about some type of "opt-out" feature for publishers.
[/end of lame petition] ;)
Some of my ads turned from black text over white background to grey text over BLACK background (#*$!?!)
I would post a screenshot but don't want to risk not abiding by Webmasterworld or adsense TOS.
I'll quietly go sit in the corner now :)
