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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 don’t have any pages showing AdSense ads on pages that are behind closed doors, in other words you can’t see them without logging in, but somebody out there reading this probably does.

If so, you can let the AdSense spiders see your page so that it can serve the correct ads by following the instructions on this page:

https://www.google.com/adsense/list-auth

This is nice to know, at the very least.

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I just read a very informative post over at the Google AdSense blog (not that others aren’t informative, but this one struck me as especially so).

Have you ever clicked on an AdSense ad on your own page?  You’re not supposed to, but many people do, or ask their friends to, and that’s clearly against AdSense TOS and will probably get you banned and your earnings forfeited.

But in case of accident, it’s refreshing to read this about accidental clicks.

I remember doing that once upon a time.  I was trying to copy and paste some text near the ad block, and I put the cursor a little over into the AdSense area, clicked my right mouse button, and was whisked away to an ad.

My heart stopped.  OMG, what will happen?  Right away, I found out my IP address, and sent an email to AdSense support to tell them about it, and that it was an accident.

Turns out you don’t really have to tell them if it happens, and if it doesn’t happen except once in a blue moon, it’s not a problem.

Just make sure it really is an accident, otherwise it could be a serious matter, to be sure.

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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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I just noticed this on the Google AdSense blog:

You may have noticed that some of your ad units have started to look a little different lately — we’re happy to announce that, just in time for spring, we’ve given our standard ad units a fresh makeover. After extensive testing and research, we’ve found that the new formats are not only visually appealing to users, but they also perform even better for publishers and advertisers. We’re in the process of rolling out this change to all ad units, and you should see that your ad units are automatically updated over the next few days. But, before you rush to make sure all of your ad units still match your site, please be assured that the fonts and colors of your ads won’t be changed.

You can read more about it on the blog post itself.

I checked out some of my pages, and sure enough, they’re showing the new format. I like it!

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