Google’s AdSense program has significantly reduced the clickable area of its ads. Google Blogoscoped has mocked up the before-and-after, showing that only the title and URL of each ad can be clicked now; ad background will no longer trigger clicks. Google sent a letter to AdSense publishers, explaining why they’ve made the change (via Search Engine Land):

We’re rolling out a change to our text ad formats to help reduce accidental clicks and increase value for advertisers. Previously, users could click on the background and full text of an ad, but now users can click only on the title and URL of a text ad. This new format will match the changes we’ve implemented on Google.com to help decrease the number of accidental clicks and increase the number of ad conversions. A reduction in accidental clicks will keep users on your pages, interacting with your content until they choose to click on an ad. This change will enhance the users’ overall experience with your websites and improve advertiser campaign value, but it’s likely that your click-through rate will decrease.

The change means fewer accidental clicks and probably lower revenue, but Search Engine Roundtable notes Google has already successfully made this change for AdWords:

Does this seem like any old change? Well, it is, kind of. Google implemented the same thing back in April for ads that display on Google.com (i.e. AdWords ads). Yes, this did have a significant impact on advertiser’s spend and earnings. But it obviously is working, because both advertisers seem to have been happy from the change and Google is now implementing this on AdSense ads.

The new system may hurt publishers running AdSense on their pages for a little while, but it’s a boon to advertisers, whose ad dollars will be spent more efficiently. Nick Gonzalez at TechCrunch notes how this move fits with Google’s click-fraud fighting efforts:

Although Google has filters to detect outright click fraud, unintentionally clicking on an ad region may be a less insidious yet hard to detect cause of wasted ad dollars. Last year, Google and Yahoo got into hot water over allegations of click fraud and eventually agreed to an independent audit. Google also wound up paying $90 million in a settlement, a small fraction of any potential earnings from fraud, but a wake up call for them nonetheless.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 14th, 2007 at 2:31 pm and is filed under Advertising: Contextual, Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.