Advertising survery on your forum?

[Yamaha_R1]

I have a question.

I read a lot of posts that say 'click on our ads' is against the rules.

So I wanted to ask, are we allowed to do an 'Advertising survey' on our site?

And not asking from a moral or 'professional competitor' on this, or what people 'think' or 'thats not fair cant do that. I am asking by straightforward, specific rules and google agreement.

If so, what can I not ask? Obviously google doesn't tell us who clicked what.

For example, what 'type' of ads apealed to you the most, which ones stuck out the most, do you prefere image ads, etc.

Oh yes, and the usual topics.

We have been seeing a new ad - image, skyscraper. For gamers, so it fits very well.

FOR SURE, this adds up to be a 3c add. No doubt anymore - been checking the channel data. However it seems very apealing to readers, its been clicked far more than others.

[Rodney]

It sounds like it would fall under the Google terms that talk about not drawing any attention to the ads.

And not asking from a moral or 'professional competitor' on this, or what people 'think' or 'thats not fair cant do that. I am asking by straightforward, specific rules and google agreement.

If you are looking for specific rulings of the Google agreement, you should be asking Google and not other webmasters :)

All we can do is give you our opinion (or what we think) of the terms.

[Yamaha_R1]

Yes, I can understand that. Just seems like a lot of cut-throats sometimes.

Basically, we revamped the layout and converted to full CSS to include them, so I would like general comments from our community on what people thought about having them, good / bad etc. We seem to get a lot of ads that Blizzard Entertainment doesn't allow also.

Perhaps I will send an email off to google. :)

[hunderdown]

I agree with Rodney. Personally, I think that's calling "undue attention" to the ads and could get you into trouble. The higher CTR alone seems to indicate that you have been successful in calling attention to the ads....

But you should ask Google. If they say no, that's better than them finding out about it later and banning you. And they might say yes.

[incrediBILL]

The only way you might get away with it would be a pop-up exit survey, but having something on the same page as the ads would be a definite no-no.

[Yamaha_R1]

No our forum has a 'sister site' thats all tutorials, with adsense.

This would be a post on our forum, which does not have adsense.

I await the answer from google before anything, to take the safe road.

[Yamaha_R1]

Well, 'Suzie' from G says it sounds acceptable, as long as theres no direct incentives to click.

She also offered to review it for me, to make sure it complies. How nice!

A question

Why do I see so many 'public Service ads by google?'

Our main PHP template has the ad block, so all pages get it. Some show relevance, others show service ads.....

[jomaxx]

I really don't know what you hope to accomplish with this survey. There's very little you can do to control what ads are showing. Who wants to be subjected to ads and then have to fill out a survey form about it anyway?

There's a free tracking script somewhere on WW that will tell you exactly who is clicking on what ads. That's far more accurate than any survey could be.

[Yamaha_R1]

WOW

I found a free one. It uses MySQL too, so I can tweak the PHP to give me any format of stats I like.

GREAT food for curious mind.

Um, are using these allowed?