Earlier this week, Google Blogscoped reported the change on clickable areas on Adsense units, and it is only now that the Google Adsense Blog posted an official explanation about the changes.
Whereas in the past, the whole Adsense block units including the white spaces are clickable areas, Adsense has changed it to make only the ad title and URL as clickable. This according to the Adsense Blog post was implemented to reduce the incidents of invalid and accidental clicks on those ads and to encourage site visitors to stay on the site, interact with the site content and if they deemed it necessary, click on the ads.
The post further explained that the new clickable format aligns with the text ad formats that is being implemented on Google.com. The new format would also benefit Google advertisers by making them pay for ad clicks that were intentional and would contribute to the success of their ad campaigns.
Just before this post was made in the Inside Adsense Blog, it has already elicited various reactions from both bloggers and advertisers. For Adwords publishers, these will certainly increase advertisers campaign value and satisfaction. But for Adsense publishers, this may not be good news after all.
took them a while to fix this one!
It’s given Adsense more usefulness, how can publishers not like it? Oh no wait, maybe most of their revenue comes from accidental clicks… LOL
I am have only been using Adsense for a few weeks so it will not affect me in anyway, but I will be interested to see if it affects some of the big guys.
Why are Google only just doing this?
This is the way AdSense should have behaved from the beginning. I never really understood why AdSense ads were clickable everywhere. I’m hoping the negative impact on my AdSense eCPM will be negligible.
Google is doing this because they have to protect their clients, if a user want to click the link they know where is (with underline or the URL).
This is a huge and good step for the Adwords clients and a bad step for the people that get money from MFA´s sites.
I wonder how many clicks this will save? 10%? 1%?
It beginning of that idea can be traced to a post on a Google Engineer’s blog – complaing about the Adwords Sponsor links area
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/clearing-out-my-tabs/#comment-111708