An Adsense Policy That May Be Hurting Google's Revenue
Google Adsense Policies clearly states that "Clicks on Google ads must not result in a new browser window being launched." Adsense publishers are neither allowed to alter the HTML code nor can they give their visitors an option to open Google ads in a new browser window. But according to a report published in The New York Times, a majority of web users are responding to banner ads indirectly - they avoid clicking the actual banner advertisement on the website but type the advertiser's URL directly in their browser.
About a third of consumers sometimes click on banner advertisements on the Web. But twice as many consumers sometimes respond to such ads indirectly, avoiding clicking on them but later visiting the Web sites advertised.The main reason for this behavior is that consumers want to continue staying on the website where they first saw the ad. Clicking the ad unit would mean navigating off the current webpage.
While this behavior will not affect the performance of CPM (or impression based) ads, publishers with CPC ad inventory are getting hit definitely.
"People are engaged in the content they’re looking at the time that they’re exposed to the ad, and they don’t want to navigate off the page," said Rick Bruner, DoubleClick’s director of research.
Maybe Google can give a small check box in their large ad units that would allow users to decide if they like to see the advertiser's website on a new page or the current window itself. Incase of Flash banners, such an option could be added to the context menu of the flash player easily.
Probably, everyone would benefit from this.
Read: Click on Me Now or Visit Me Later
Adsense Feedback - Open Links in New Window (seen on Youtube)
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Reader Comments:
yeah but what if we select url color matches the background color in the ad banners !
the viewers will have to click on the ads rite??
i hope its not against the terms and conditions :D
An option to open in a new TAB would suit me down to the ground.
Using Firefox is much better for me than IE's multiple windows.
Holding the cntrl key down and clicking will open the ads in a new page. If only the user knows that. 2 things I am dying to know.
1. The cntrl key click will still get the credit from Google, right?
2. What is the main reason for Google's case against new browser for ads? Could it be that by doing so there it opens up more ways for adsense exploitation?
yeah, i agreed with srinuswat that alternatively google should allow us to blend the url color ...
another way is to have an option (when we setup adsense code) to select if publishers want to include url or not ... that would be cool & flexible ... frankly, do you see all the non-online advertisers includes their url (such as tv advertisement or hard-copy medias) ??
hope google will do something about this ... else it'll affect their bottom line as well ...
Some ads don't show the URL? I've seen this plenty of times, I think in the leaderboard style ad. Anyone know what I'm talking about?
I'm using firefox or flock so...CTRL key rullz
to ian - you are right, Adsense even said that somewhere, but I don't remember now where :(
Yeah, This must be true. Usually I don't click on ads, but If I do.. I make sure I hold my Ctrl button :)
Probably Google provides customized service for SEDO and other companies whereby the ads seen on parking page allows user to open ads link in new window.
Example, try going to http://www.wibreeinsider.com/ and then you see a lot of ads there (Google AdSense) and clicking on any of the ads takes you to new window.
This holds good for such domain parking sites, but when will google allow us to do the same is the big question.
Cheers,
Dreamchaser
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