Running hide and seek contests on sites with adsense?

Want to know if running a hide and seek contest violates adsense policy.

[jdogg4000]

Hi,

I am trying to figure out if running a hide and seek contest on my site will violate adsense policy. What the contest will be is there will be a picture hidden somewhere on the site and I want to tell my members that they have to search through the site and find the picture and those that find it will be entered into a draw.

Does anyone know if this kind of contest would violate the adsense policies?

Thanks

[Lame_Wolf]

Possibly, if you are running adsense with images. Use text ads only to be safe.

[jdogg4000]

Hi Lame Wolf,

Thanks and currently we do only have text ads enabled.

[Lame_Wolf]

Hi jdogg4000,

No problem.

You should be safe with just text adverts. Running that kind of thing with image adverts is extremely risky, as they could mistake the advert for the image.

Also, make sure the page the image is on is no index, no cache. You don't want the image to appear in image search. Google are rather quick now when adding images to the database. Not so fast when removing them.

[incrediBILL]

Yikes.

What a way to artificially inflate traffic which will skew your stats dramatically.

IMO, I wouldn't be surprised one bit if they didn't disable the account from running ads on that site, assuming you generated enough traffic with your contest for them to take notice in the first place.

Besides, why would you want to do that?

When people are rummaging around playing "where's waldo" on your site they won't be looking to click the ads, only find the image, and your AdSense stats will go right down the toilet.

[netmeg]

It *could* be seen as a sideways way to encourage people to click on ads, because in a contest where people are looking for something, they will click on everything.

As I said in a different thread - ask yourself, is it worth risking your AdSense account? If it is, then go for it.

[jdogg4000]

incrediBILL, you may be right and that is why I am asking. The main reason to run the contest is it engage the users to get familiar with searching through the site. Also some of them may see other things on the site they may be interested in if they get bored or even once they find the image might stay and look around. Kind of like door crashers for websites. Users seem to also find it fun to do these kind of contests rather then a straight giveaway.

[jdogg4000]

netmeg, good point and that is what I am weighing out if the risk is worth it.

[jpch]

Perhaps you could pull AdSense from the site during the contest and replace with ads from CPM Networks or affiliates?

[jdogg4000]

jphch, Although that seems like a logical step it would be very hard to remove all our ads on our sites. Here is an example of a site that runs this type of contest but the problem is If you read some of the comments you get people clicking the ads just to find stuff and this website even hints at click the ads [facebook.com ] . More and more I am thinking this is not a good idea neither worth the risk of my adsense account. Anyone else have any input?

[jdogg4000]

Another thing to question is the advertiser on the other end is getting some really junky clicks. I know if I was an advertiser on this site I would be annoyed that they are running this type of contest because of the useless clicks I would be paying for - on that note I have found my answer ;) thanks for all the help everyone.

[MikeNoLastName]

We did something like that on our site back in the late 90's (pre adsense).
In our version we had a set of 3-5 questions with one word answers that they had to answer on a form entry page and the answers were fairly easy to find but only on our site (like what is shown in the first picture on our so-n-so topic page which we were pushing that week) plus one tie-breaker, for those who got all the questions right, which was NOT on our site and which was pretty much a wild guess (how many parking spaces are there at the grocery store next to our offices) rather than a "random" drawing which everyone assumes is rigged. It was a weekly contest for about $25 of stuff and advertised right on our home page. Of the 30K or so unique visitors we had each week we would only get about 100 or fewer entries. Of those, about 10 were the same 10 people who entered every week.
Our site was not a very high-repeat visitor type site. So YMMV depending on the type of site you run. It would be interesting to see how much it actually boosts your page views. I would recommend the prize be something to do with your site (e.g. credit towards purchases on your site) otherwise you'll get mostly just habitual contest-enterers who won't be interested in your site or the related ads.
As far as GAdsense you can always write to them and ask in advance. I've done that a number of times (usually setting up a sample page if necessary to show them exactly what you have in mind) and gotten answers back within a few days. Of course I've also gotten two widely different answers from two different representatives on the same question, so...