New Ad Unit Design. VERY Low Hopes For This One

[Calum_Jones]

Are people really going to click these? They don't blend in AT ALL, the opposite of eye-catching.

[i.imgur.com...]

[ember]

I don't think it is so bad. Clean and minimalist. Loud, splashy ads aren't always the best.

[Calum_Jones]

But nobody puts ads on their website because they look pretty. I expect a significant decline in click through rate and earnings.

[ww2015]

I quite like it - more in keeping with the far superior mobile ads they are using

[ken_b]

Looks fine to me.

[Calum_Jones]

I agree that it looks nice but the problem is the CTR. The nessie button being the same color as the page links and the layout of the last ads were more likely to get clicked on than a small blank white arrow and random line of color to the left. Nobody associates vertical lines with links, only horizontal ones, and the button does not stand out at all. I don't think anybody is going to click these.

The title of the ad should be the same color as the page links. But the 300 x 600 hasn't changed to the new ad style yet so I'm not sure about altering the color scheme just yet.

[netmeg]

I'd rather have one of these than some of the ones showing up on my sites now.

[RedBar]

That's awesome compared to some of the garbage I've been seeing!

[keyplyr]

I don't know if ads will ever shed the 'bad rep' they have across the internet, but this is a good effort.

[tangor]

OP remarked "won't blend" and "needs to be eye catching" ... both of which do not blend. :)

As an ad this looks okay. Ads should look somewhat different from content. The lowered contrast is not to my personal taste, but will certainly stand out against full contrast content, just low key.

All advertising runs in cycles. What works on Monday might not work on Friday so constant tweaking and fiddling is involved. Like the weather, if you don't like it just wait fifteen minutes, it will change.

[MrSavage]

I remember the days when successful Adsense publishers who published books about how to make money, the main point was not making the ads look like ads. Blue for link because blue meant link. It wasn't to manipulate, but it was to have people see them read them as opposed to avoiding them. The new look is DS in my opinion any which way it's redesigned. It's barf bag material at best. Ads performed well in the past because of looks too. A thumb size arrow on my site surrounded by white space? If it stinks like an ad the eye won't look at it to even see if it's relevant. Show me Google properties with any new styling that we get to enjoy displaying to our visitors. I guess you could say the ad show in the OP is yuck, but so is any other version. When anyone says earnings are down because the arrow not showing? I just can't get there.

[trebuchet]

The ad format looks fine by me, however like the OP I don't have high hopes for it - mainly because I do not have high hopes for anything produced by Adsense lately. I reckon Google could invent an ad unit that reaches out of the monitor and strokes the user intimately, and it still wouldn't earn more than pennies.

[keyplyr]

I think that's an add-on with the VR Headset for PS5

[webcentric]

The only objection I have at the moment is the lack of spacing between my content and the anchor ad at the bottom. One or two pixels would help the eye here.

[martinibuster]

I don't think anybody is going to click these.

The OP makes an important point that deserves consideration.

The ad unit is nice looking and will definitely blend. But what Calum is pointing out is that the ad does not resemble an ad or anything that can be clicked.

User expectation contributes to what gets clicked
Think about this in terms of user expectation. It looks like a block of content. It does not resemble a link. It does not resemble an advertisement. In short, it does not resemble anything that a site user would actually click. So in theory that ad unit may result in less clicks.

Thoughts?

[ken_b]

Thoughts?

Are we looking at the same image?

Looks very much like an ad to me. The url would clearly signal "click here". The arrow would definitely do the same. And there are the familiar [>][X] in the upper right corner.

Other than the colors this doesn't look that new to me.

There is almost no likelihood that colors won't change as G experiments with this layout.

.

[webcentric]

and will definitely blend.

Really? I suppose if your site is all blue and white it'll blend. Don't mean to be flip this this feature (while welcome) has a long way to go still. Interstitials seem to have some bugs as reported in test mode. Haven't seen one on the live site yet.

[EditorialGuy]

I don't think anybody is going to click these.

I'd imagine that Google has tested the new format extensively. The fact that it doesn't blend into body text quite as well as some ads do is a good thing, IMHO. Google's advertisers want people to click on purpose, not by accident, and that makes sense to me.

[webcentric]

Has anyone seen any kind of reporting generated from these. Impressions, actual clicks? I'm currently testing on a couple of pages but am not seeing any mention of this unit on any report. Has to have been a few impressions at this point, even if no clicks yet. Performance reports are quiet on this subject. I know, these don't show up all the time but I've seen them with my own phone ( and not in test mode).

[tangor]

@webcentric, have to ask, do you think it is not being clicked because the user can't fine it? or that google is not reporting it? or (worse) it isn't view able because of your site layout or user non-engagement? Do you have an ad mix? other ad services, and if you do are they priority (top) before the adsense insert?

Are you doing any comparisons with reports and your raw server logs?

[webcentric]

Let me ask this a different way. We're is the reporting for these ads. They don't appear in the My Ads list. And I now know that other people are seeing them on occasion as well. So, I know they are producing impressions but there seems to be no reporting on the subject in Adsense. At this point, I don't have the time (I'm working on getting a house ready to go to market) to cull through raw log files. If I and others can see them on the site then there should be some kind of reporting to go along with that activity. So, in a sense, I'm not looking for clicks at the moment but I am looking for some evidence in Adsense that these ads are being tracked in some way. It's easy put these ads on a site. I simply want to know if anyone has seen any evidence of activity in their account

[netmeg]

Webcentric - Are we talking about the same thing? We're talking in this item about a new format for standard text ads; it sounds like you maybe are talking about Page Level Ads - the discussion for that product is here:

[webmasterworld.com...]

[webcentric]

You know what, I appear to be off topic. This thread showed up pretty much on the day page-level ads did. Glad someone is paying attention before I go even farther off track. A little more clarification by the OP would have been helpful for me anyway. Wasn't sure if this was related to interstitials in page-level ads or what. I'm slow sometimes. "Never mind."

[bumpski]

As long as its just above the "NEXT" button, and at the page boundary, of a series of paginated pages or images it will get clicked on. I can't believe how many Adsense ads I see just above, or below, "NEXT" buttons on paginated pages. How are they getting away with it? A little off topic, but that is how they will get a click!

[webcentric]

Looks like somecomparison testing going on. One day I see the new style, next, I'm back to the old style with the ugly grey buttons. And yes, I'm back on topic. I wish they'd just make up their minds.

[JS_Harris]

Don't run the tall units with these just yet, Google will only display one ad that takes up the top part of the space on occasion, which leaves a gaping hole underneath. They need to allow the block to collapse for a better fit when they do that. It has been a problem with text and tall units for a long time but it looks worse with these imo.

[gesh]

I spotted another new text ad design:

[i.imgur.com...]

It has two blocks of text, where the first one uses blue background color. The logo is an image, and the button with an arrow is an SVG image.

[RyuUK]

The line doesn't look good when you have a dark theme.

Just didn't feel right to me so switched off enhanced ads.

[netmeg]

I believe that's an HTML5 ad. Currently I'm having an issue where they are all jumbled up in Firefox; AdSense says other people have complained about it as well. Just with Firefox tho.

[keyplyr]

@netmeg - no issues w/ Firefox.

I'm seeing these new add units across my site and CTR doing well.