Accidense? |
Something odd I’ve noticed about Google Adsense ads (and keep in mind that we are Adsense affiliates) is that some ads have a significant amount of clickable white space. Some ads have more white space than text. I think this can, and does, lead to accidental user clicking. How much accidense, I don’t know.
Have you accidentally clicked on this white space on some website or in Gmail? To better illustrate this issue I took ads from another website and cropped out the site name, because the site and placement really isn’t unique and I’m not trying to pick on any specific site or affiliate. You can surf around various blogs and websites with Adsense ads containing a white background with black text and find the same thing rather easily, so there is no need for me to link this up.
See the Google Adsense ads on the left sidebar and above the content fold. With the mouse when hovering over a clickable link the icon turns to a hand, non-clickable areas result in a pointing arrow. With rolling your mouse over ads you can see the hand or arrow and tell what is clickable and what’s not.
What’s wrong with clickable white space?
For the Adsense affiliates this seems advantangeous certainly, but is this the kind of thing Adwords purchasers are really paying for? Somebody that could be accidentally or intentionally clicking on white space not intending to visit the advertiser? Not clicking the text of the ad or an actual hyperlink? Clickable white space would be fine if there was a colored frame around the ad which would clearly differentiate to the reader what was ad and what was site content. As pictured above, though, this doesn’t always happen.
Hmm.
This might sound odd coming from an Adsense affiliate, but I want people to click ads with legitimate interest, not click because they are trying to target the browser window.
Meanwhile, reports are starting to surface that Google is experimenting with animated ads. We chose to take the sidelines on the whole “Advertise on this Site” campaign. Interested advertisers that want to advertise specifically on this site can contact me directly. I sure wish the default for this program had been opt-in, but at least they didn’t just activate it and not tell anybody.
I’m all about improving ad placement and maximizing ads in places where interested users are likely to click on them, but want to send paying advertisers legitimately curious and/or interested customers. What do you think? Do you find this clickable white space deceptive? Maybe deceptive is too strong a word but that is the one that is coming to mind as I write this.
A few days ago I threw in a code switch that makes it a ten second deal to switch from Adsense to YPN or anybody else really at Hmm. I’m not sure if YPN has this same clickable white space issue and wonder what MSN will be doing.
I understand everybody wanting to improve clickthru performance, but I wonder what the closing ratio is on these serendipitous eyeballs. This isn’t on the same level as click fraud, but … well, what do you think?
Did this post make you go hmm?
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Tell that to problogger and all the spam blogs he has.
Comment by shane — November 28, 2005 @ 7:46 am PST
[…] Make You Go Hmmm makes the excellent point that the blank space in Google AdSense ads that is still clickable is basically cheating. If I click on blank space, am I really interested in an ad, or is it more likely my mouse cursor is there so it won’t click anything? Why does Google put so much clickable ad space in its ads, and are advertisers being cheated? […]
Pingback by » Word Of The Day: Accidense InsideGoogle » part of the Blog News Channel — November 29, 2005 @ 5:52 am PST
[…] Update 11/27: Russell IM’d to say that YPN has ad targeting options. I had noticed them shortly after I posted this, but they don’t seem to have made a difference — I still primarily see ads from Vonage and Lending Tree. With a brief look around Russell’s site — which serves ads under limited circumstances — I saw mostly the same. I’m left wondering if Russell’s results are due to positioning that results in high rates of accidense. […]
Pingback by T Bryce Yehl » Google Adsense vs. Yahoo! Publisher Network — November 30, 2005 @ 11:21 pm PST
[…] How can they trade links for something based completely — or even primarily — on clicks especially when it has already been pointed out that stuff like accidense exists. Clicks are not a failsafe method of proving anything. Clicks can be automated. Clicks can be fraudulent. Clicks are just as fallable and exploited, if not more so, then links. Ask anybody who has ever run and/or been involved with the affiliate owner side of running a pay per click (PPC) program. Google knows this well because they run a PPC program (Adsense). […]
Pingback by Make You Go Hmm: » Clickstream in, links out? — December 16, 2005 @ 10:18 am PST
[…] TDavid wins the “come up with a cool new word of the week” award for noticing “accidense.” What’s that? That’s what happens when people accidentally click on Google Adsense ads (he noticed that some Google ads have more clickable whitespace than others, which increases the chance they’ll receive “accidense.”) […]
Pingback by Scobleizer - Microsoft Geek Blogger » Advertisers must hate “accidense” — December 19, 2005 @ 8:05 pm PST
[…] - write down two or three keywords that describe the content of the story and blend those into the title creatively - consider using key (short) quotes within articles or stories you are writing about. For example, the quote from Google’s blog was so juicy I decided to use for the title (pictured above) - play on words. For example, I combined the word accident and Adsense to make the word: accidense - avoid getting too cutesy with titles and not summarizing the post body. If the title has nothing to do with the post it’s a big risk that is more likely to backfire than not. Readers don’t want to feel like they got suckered. - when in doubt, be boring. If you can’t think up a good title, then just come up with something descriptive with no sizzle. It’s better than doing a “no title” or just having the date. […]
Pingback by Make You Go Hmm: » How to write headlines even a corpse would read — January 14, 2006 @ 11:54 am PST
[…] I’m worried about Adsense on a number of levels. My biggest concern with this program by far is click fraud. As long as advertisers are willing to put up with this in their purchases, Google will continue to be successful in this arena, but Google’s willingness to explore more aggressive advertisements like rich media, intersitials and the omnipresent accidense continue to shake my confidence in their model going forward. How much can they squeeze from the marketplace? The answer isn’t to squeeze harder on the fruit they already bear, it’s find new fruit, cultivate more crop. They seem to be focusing on the former, not the latter. […]
Pingback by Make You Go Hmm: » Near miss or past midnight on April 15, 1912 for GOOG? — February 1, 2006 @ 6:45 am PST
[…] Honestly, nobody reading with blogs should want me to read their sites for being an ad revenue candidate, they should want me for the reason in the paragraph I just wrote above and because I genuinely like their content. I do buy from ads from sites I like, but I don’t believe I’ve ever intentionally clicked (see related post on accidense) on a third party’s Google Adsense ad. […]
Pingback by Make You Go Hmm: » Don’t have RSS feed, don’t want one, too bad, they can now use Feed43 — March 9, 2006 @ 12:17 pm PST
[…] - Speaking of games, there is a Halo 3 demo that was shown at E3 2006 earlier today for free download in Xbox Live. My son, the Halo gamer, was all over it. I’m going to check it out shortly. - Another Accidense-like sighting at Google, this time by seroundtable share/bookmark: MyWeb | del.icio.us | digg it! […]
Pingback by Make You Go Hmm: » Hmm quickies #25 — May 9, 2006 @ 7:05 pm PST
[…] Of course the Creative Commons license doesn’t stop somebody else from registering a domain and doing precisely this which gives back where points are taken away, as long as they attribute the source. If I was rolling something like that out, I’d also create an API with access to the terms so that developers could mash the terms into their other search engines easily. Maybe even plugins for the popular blog engines so that definitions could be flagged. This might seem like too much for a relatively small number of terms, but I suspect as time goes on more terms will emerge. What, no accidense? […]
Pingback by Review: Search Engine Marketing Glossary » Make You Go Hmm — December 19, 2006 @ 1:44 pm PST