Blog Tipz

AdSense is a contextual advertising program that is used on a vast majority of blogs and sites worldwide. Advertising formats include text, image and video ads, and are administered by Google and help create revenue streams for sites on a per-click or per-thousand-impressions basis.

Over the course of the past few days, AdSense set out an email to publishers indicating a change in the area that is clickable on their textual ads. This change has sparked criticisms from blog and website owners. Due to a growing amount of abuse from Made For AdSense (MFA) sites, they removed the possibility of earning from invalid or fraud clicks (typically clicks through the white space or description of the ads). The MFA sites cost advertisers and publishers millions of dollars in revenue over the past years, as they feature pages filled with ads (many times against the AdSense Terms and Conditions as well as Program Policies.

An image representing new changes to ads – blue is previous clickable area, yellow is potential changes.

Currently, AdSense is testing and integrating the new format into their ads – for example some ads will remain the same – 100% clickable, while others will feature the new changes. Today, many website owners announced their Click Through Rate (CTR) had already decreased – resulting in a drop in earnings. Google already stated that this was likely to happen, but in the long run these changes may turn out to make AdSense an even larger leader in the contextual advertising world. It is thought that advertisers will likely spend more on advertising as they will be getting a higher rate of targeted traffic.

New Changes – First ad shows new ad changes, second ad still features fully-clickable ad.

However, if you see your CTR drop dramatically, and are no longer making enough money to support your site, it would be a good idea to switch or change the style of your ads. Integrate and style your ads to fit in with your site, or change them to look like regular links to help improve your revenue. It might also be the time to change to a different ad network – there are many with benefits and potential as good as or exceeding Google’s AdSense program.