Google are about to implement a new change to the way clicks are counted. The background of a text ad will no longer take users to the advertiser's site. Only clicking on the Link or Title in an ad will take a user through.
I expect that this will reduce income for some publishers as accidential clicks will be far less likely. It should also bring more meaningful traffic to Advertisers.
Apparently it has been running on Google's search sites for a while. I understand that publishers are being warned that income may change as a result.
I should add that, at the the time of posting, only the title can be clicked on Google.com
However, the 'bad' thing about this changes is that you have to start testing (or tweak) campaigns running on the content network all over again because the paramaters will change. Sites in the content network that converted bad in the old (current) situation might convert well in the new (future) situation. So you might have to unblock some sites and start testing all over again. We all know this will cost some time, effort and money.
Or for example after a month of testing and tweaking a campaign running on the content network you found out that max 0,05 CPC works the best. Now you have to start test again and find out that perhaps max 0,10 CPC will work even better because of the changed paramaters.
[edited by: Dlocks at 11:53 am (utc) on Nov. 13, 2007]
Accidental clicks would be by the drunk or drugged surfers, or surfers slamming their mice to loosen dirt and dust.
I think I only accidentally clicked an ad's background once in five years. Maybe less, lol!
p/g
P.S. How did Google even think to look into this? Did someone here complain, "Uh, I think someone is clicking the background of my ads... accidentally..."
Maybe Google would be kind enough to show us its data on background clicking.
Haha, nope, was thinking the exact same thing.
There are people who try to trick folks into clicking with overlays and color schemes and such, maybe they'd have to test "things" out.
I can't see any credible reason why these accidental clicks would significantly change things otherwise - by that I mean actually necessitating a redesign of how someone optimizes their adsense layout and such, unless they had accidents in mind all along.
"Does anyone really suspect the number of Background Clickers was ever high enough to justify new testing now?"I don't know. I will have to test this to find out for myself.
At this stage I can only think that Google is not implementing this for nothing. And that alone is for me enough information to re-test a couple of things.
