One of the most effective optimization that had been recommended by Adsense itself were to blend your ads in such a way that they look part of your website.
People have blended the ads the way they wanted, sometimes making reader wonder if he is looking at advertisements or the content.
But no more!
Google has been making changes to their adsense programs to make the ads more qualitative and deliver better results for their advertisers.
Today Google came out with reminder on blending, which to me look more like clarification.
Google says
- Ads shouldn’t be placed under a title or section heading in a way that implies that the ads are not ads.
- Ads shouldn’t be placed under titles such as “Business Opportunities” or “Hot Deals”. Placing ads directly below titles such as these implies to your users that the links in the ads are publisher-created content
- Ads should be easily distinguishable from surrounding content.
- Similarly, you should not place an ad unit by a group of links that has identical colors and line spacing. Doing so may cause users to think the ad unit is content created by you. In this situation, we recommend using a different color for the ad titles or indenting the ad unit to help distinguish the ads from your own content.
Google calls them guidelines and not suggestions. Just to stress upon the seriousness.
Googl’s original post gives graphical examples of what should not be done.
Google is trying quite hard to provide better service to Adword advertisers. It aims to remove uninterested and accidental clicks so that advertiser gets high conversion rate.
These guidelines too aim to achive this in my view.
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Tags: accidentall clicks, adsense, adsense guidelines, adsense news, Adwords, blending, clickthrough, optimization
