Situation Where AdSense Arrows May Encourage Invalid Clicks

[tomede]

I noticed this only recently, but not sure if it is new or have always been like that:

there are times when the arrow in the text ad loads a couple of seconds earlier then the rest of the ad. It doesn't happen every time, and it does not seem to be an issue on my end - I tested on different (mobile)devices with different internet connections - some ads load right away, some of them have this two step loading where the arrows load first.

Have other seen this? I am concerned, because if the arrow loads first and the rest of the 300x250 ad unit remains blank for a second or two it really can be confused with the play button for a video. This may encourage invalid clicks and cause trouble.

[martinibuster]

You may have discovered a bug in the AdSense system on mobile devices. The arrows in a slow loading advertisement resembles the graphical user interface for videos. Because the arrows resemble the GUI for a video they may incite an invalid click.

While the actual incidents may be low, it may be in the advertisers interests that Google takes this bug into account and fix it. It's certainly in the publisher's interest.

What do you think?

[ColinPL]

When the ad unit font is set to one of:
* Open Sans
* Open Sans Light
* Roboto Light
* Ubuntu Light
* Lora
the browser has to download a font file before rendering the text.

[webcentric]

When the ad unit font is set to one of:
* Open Sans
* Open Sans Light
* Roboto Light
* Ubuntu Light
* Lora
the browser has to download a font file before rendering the text.

Also, note that you have no control over the font family if you are using the "Optimal" option for the Font Family setting so the above observation could also apply in that situation too.

[tomede]

thanks, I changed the font setting. I am new here and this is already the second time I received very helpful advice in this forum!

[incrediBILL]

Once the font is downloaded it never does it a second time does it?

I think it's fine if it only downloads once.

AdSense obviously thinks it's OK to have a one time exception for the font download otherwise they wouldn't offer those fonts knowing full well what would happen.

However, it's possible the engineers already had all those fonts on their phones so they had no clue how it would impact users without those fonts.

If it's a one-time thing, I'd leave it.

[martinibuster]

A few months ago experimented with some of the alternative Google fonts and one of my site visitors reported their browser gave them an error message that our site was attempting to download a third party file, something like that. She thought my site was forcing viruses on her computer...

[incrediBILL]

What browser was she using?

That would be interesting to know.

[martinibuster]

This happened in October. She was using Windows 7. No word on the OS. I couldn't reproduce the error on several boxes so I suspect it was a browser or security setting on her side. Nevertheless if it happened to one person it may happen to another one. I'm happy with arial or verdana, won't break anything to use those.

[netmeg]

Coincidentally or not, Google released this today:

Our new text ads have been designed with better readability in mind, regardless of what device they’re being viewed from. We’ve introduced a new default color palette of blue and grey, making the ads easier to read for the user. We’ve also updated our default font to Roboto, designed for easier readability on mobile devices as well as desktop. With this change, we’ve aligned our text ad font with the web font we use on our Android OS.

[adsense.blogspot.com...]

[webcentric]

It's not coincidental. I've been seeing the precursors to this for a couple of weeks now. Noted the change regarding the square arrows (displayed in the article linked above) in the earnings thread a day or two ago. First it was just showing up in IE. Now I'm seeing it in Firefox and it's not appreciated. Maybe the only good news here is that they've finally made up their mind about the Nessie arrow (v-whatever) and it won't change again for awhile. Question is whether anyone will ever click on an ad again. They've been mucking with default fonts too as I've mention recently. It may be worth your while to check your font settings for each ad and see what that setting is. Otherwise G may be making that decision for you.

[tomede]

incrediBILL: before I made the change to the font settings the issue manifested itself repeatedly on the same device.