Tricking Clicks

June 23rd, 2006 by Chris

So I’m sitting with my wife at breakfast and she asked me what I was working on this morning so I told here how I am experimenting with Adsense placement and how I’m testing if there is a performance different when placing a cube to the right of the first paragraph, second paragraph, etc.

She said that she knows she really likes ads because they make us a lot of money, but her first reaction when hearing that is that she thinks its annoying to put ads there. She said that sometimes she accidentally clicks on an ad and gets annoyed. She said she never clicks on ads except by accident. I said that I rarely click on graphical ads anymore, because I don’t really need a free Ipod and most graphical ads nowadays are just for some stupid program like that, but that I do click on Adsense-type ads when they interest me.

Then I kind of made a point by saying she didn’t really accidentally click on the ad either. She wasn’t randomly clicking on the page and accidentally hit the ad. She saw the ad, read it, found it interesting, and clicked. She just didn’t realize when she clicked on it that it was an ad. If she had known it was an ad she wouldn’t have clicked on it because she has had bad experiences in the past clicking on misleading ads or ads that result in drive-by-downloads or a mountain of popups.

Now there is an issue within the publisher community on whether or not to trick a user into clicking on an ad. The problem is the word trick is grossly the wrong word to use in this situation. By blending the ads into your site you’re not tricking the user, you’re just overcoming their natural ad prejudice like what my wife has. The user still reads the ad, and still finds it interesting enough to click on it, there is nothing dishonest about that.

It really is a shame that shady individuals have ruined public trust of advertising, and I did of course explain to my wife that Google polices its advertisers for such behavior. Still, an environment has been created in which we have to make our ads look like content in order for them to be read. I don’t think this is trickery, you’re not using an ad for steak to sell tuna after all. All you’re doing really is making sure the ads get looked at and then you’re relying on the targeting to make sure they get clicked on. If the user is not interested in the ad they won’t click, and if they are interested then “tricking” them into clicking can’t be all bad can it?

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Posted in: Ad Networks »  by: Chris

3 Responses to “Tricking Clicks”

  1. Andrew Johnson  Says:
    June 23rd, 2006 at 1:00 pm

    Besides being a publisher I buy ads from Google and a bunch of other PPC programs. My biggest problem isn’t clicks converting, its getting enough of them!

    Google’s ads usually are showing up on relevent targeted pages which means that the visitor is a potential buyer whether that click is accidental or not.

    Its up to the ad buyers to look at their click conversions and lower their bids if necessary to account for lower conversion rates. If they don’t, thats not the publisher’s fault.

    Google specifically tells publishers to put their ads close to content and blend the ads in. The culprit is ad blindness and that is the only way to fight it without publishers telling visitors to “look at my ads and please click on them.”

  2. Tony  Says:
    July 2nd, 2006 at 4:54 pm

    We just became publishers of Adsense ( a few days ago ), before that we were advertisers using Adwords. We started doing that when site targetted advertising started. We could specify what sites we wanted our ads to appear on. Very few resulted in high CTR, but those who did paid off pretty good. You might want to check out that option in Google Adwords.

  3. Ken Barbalace  Says:
    July 11th, 2006 at 7:23 pm

    It sounds like AdWords update to the “landing page quality” scoring algorithm is designed to address the issue of junk landing pages of some ads like those for arbitrage or MFA sites.

    Some people are griping about these changes, but I agree with Google that improving the quality of the ads is important for the long term health of advertising as you conversation with your wife has shown.

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