5 Bucks a Day

I’m happy to see an announcement in the Google AdWords blog about how the clickable area on an ad shown on sites displaying AdSense is managed.

In the past, if someone clicked anywhere in the general area of an ad, it registered and off it went, whoosh. In fact I remember my first scare, when I was attempting to copy and paste a section of an article on my own page, and without knowing what would happen, I put the cursor over the text, meaning to copy a few paragraphs, and when my mouse clicked it went to an advertiser.

I found out quickly the reason. Beside my text was a large rectangle ad, and my cursor must have wandered over into that area by a pixel or two, and it registered. Even though it was nowhere near the text of the ad, evidently it was into the large rectangular area.

I was horrified. Would Google notice me clicking on my own ad? Would my account be suspended or investigated for click fraud? I shot off an email to support, telling them the problem and my IP address, and no harm was done, but I lived in fear from that point on about copying text from my pages.

Now according to the article I linked to above, a click will only register if you click on the title or on the URL of text ads. I guess by reading between the lines, if there’s an image or video ad though, the entire area is still hot, so watch out.

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I noticed a very valuable tip on the Google AdSense blog today. It makes a lot of sense if you read it, and I’m sure there are those that are taking advantage of human nature.

It concerns placing other clickable features of your page near (or on top of, like a pop up) where the AdSense ads are shown.

In a word, don’t do that, in fact according to the Google post, you risk having your account suspended if it happens too frequently.

A word of warning to the wise.

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If you’re placing Google AdSense ads on your pages, as many thousands of IM’ers are, you probably have had the same problem I’ve had myself.

That is, getting the Google spiders to know what ads to put on your pages.

Overall, Google spiders are very good at their job, but it’s easy enough to confuse them, especially if you have a lot of stuff on your page that is irrelevant.

For example, on your page might be a menu bar that has a list of 50 different links, to 50 different topics. You obviously don’t want the spider to read that area of your page because it might make them think your page is about one or more of those topics.

That’s where section targeting comes in. You define on your page where the relevant content is, and the spider will concentrate on that section (hence the name section targeting) in order to attempt to place ads in the right context for you.

Here’s a link to the spot where you can learn more: ==> Google AdSense Section Targeting

Hopefully this will help you match the ads on your pages to what your page is all about, because if they don’t, then you won’t get the clicks, and your visitors will leave the page confused.

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