After what seems like a very long test period AdSense today have announced that they’ve added scrolling ads to all CPC text ads. They announce it on their blog here. We started seeing them back in December.
These ads have been appearing increasingly on many publishers AdSense units of late and are little arrows at the base of ad units which allow viewers of the ad to hit forward and back to see more ads. Here’s how they look.
As publishers you don’t get paid when readers click the arrows or scroll through ads but I guess the theory is that they’ll be more likely to click an ad if they see one that is more relevant to them.
Here’s a little video of them in action:
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What do you think of these ads?
As a publisher I like them, if only for the temporary fact that they stand out slightly and avoid some of the Adsense-Blindness.
I’m about as Adsense-Blind as they come, but I’ve found myself playing with the scrolling mechanism every once in a while, so I have to assume my visitors will do the same.
I think this is a good move by Google.
Maybe I’ll put them back on my blog. I hadn’t had much success with them, but I didn’t put enough work into making them successful.
They’re interesting. I like that the arrows are pretty small, yet visible to those who are paying attention to the ads. As always with AdSense, there’s that balance between wanting people to click on the ads so you get paid, and keeping them on your site.
It’s a great feature for advertisers who want to do branding in AdSense – ie it’ll increase the number of ads viewed without increasing the number of ads clicked. Or at the very least will increase the ratio of ads views to clicks in favor of views.
I wonder what’s next? Ads that automatically slide/scroll every few seconds?
I wonder if the scroll feature will enhance clicks as “uninitiated” search engine viewers view it as a feature – they can scroll through this area of a site and pick the link they want to view. Since it is more interactive than a static list they may not realize they are being served an advertisement.
What a waste – do they really think that people looking at Adsense will take the time find a couple of tiny arrows to look at more ads? Not a chance – the surfer will look for another website first.
I give a few months and it will disappear.
whatever makes me more money
I’m not a big fan of bells and whistles, so it annoys me a little bit to see more moving parts on a website.
On the other hand, if it offers more-relevant ads and gets more clicking for the bloggers, then I’m all for it!
I don’t know if this is related with what happened on my sites today, but I notices a drastic drop in my adsense earnings per click…each click was worth about 1/5 as they usually are. It slowly climbed throughout the day, but never got back to normal…it’s now at about 2/3.
I just wonder if it’s loading “more ads” at once which will theoretically provide a wide range of click values.
I am definitely wanting the option to turn it off.
This seems counterintuitive. People don’t like ads anyway, why would they actively scroll to see more ads?
You have to assume they tested this and moved forward with it because it works. If it is making more money for google then it is making more money for me. I really can’t imagine it makes a huge difference though.
The arrows make the ad look more ugly in my opinion.
But thinking about it, it seems to be a step in the right direction.
I think people would have more success helping contextualize their ads rather than adding more of them.
Or, with this obvious alternative, we can clutter our sites with more visuals while increasing bandwidth and processor demands with additional javascript.
Boy howdy.
Honestly, I don’t really see the point of having the arrows present. The vast majority of website visitors are not going to make a point to scroll through ads.. But if they were animated and self-scrolling, that would probably make a difference (although it’d be annoying alongside blog content).
It’s a bit of a cheek not getting paid for the subsequent clicks on the ads. Seems like all take and no give. They’re effectively using our web site space for something that, IMHO, doesn’t look that nice and then getting all the benefit from it.
I’m not impressed :(
I agree with Lulu, I can’t see the point. AdSense has got extremely low CTR and annoy more than that they help. Why on God’s green earth would anyone want to scroll through even more ads which they don’t care about.
And as most people ignore the AdSense ads anyway, they probably won’t even notice this feature.
Stupid idea.
But will this benefit the small player in publishing industry..
I think it will help people get more targeted ads
maybe it’s an intermediary step to Google making adsense non-static, if you know what I mean …
Hi Darren,
I must admit that the new functionality works better for advertisers and makes Adsense “searchable”. I might not want to click on some ads but I an try to find something that would work good for me.
But there is another thing, a risk for the program. Publishers’ income is going down with the new ads at least withing the next few months because advertisers can just decide that they don’t like any of the ads displayed on their sites.
Everybody looses from this scenario!
Best Regards
Dimitar
Definitely don’t like them, it’s bringing AdSense away from a block of text ads. More and more notable graphical elements may mean that users will be able to identify it quicker as an ad block, less invalid click-throughs. Better for Google, not better for me.
While innovative, and certainly helpful to the end user, I do believe that some kind of revenue sharing scheme for the “next” and “previous” ads should be implemented. Fact is, on our sites, we either want a user to consume our content and/or click an ad. To have adspace not generate revenue, just seems odd to me. Kind of sounds like Google is saying “Hey, I didn’t find any relevent ads for this content, so here’s so more stuff we think you might like, and we’re not sending money the publisher’s way because his content did not yield relevant ads in the first place”. While I still like adsense, this further pushes me to explore other ad services as alternatives or downright replacements.
I think will increase user’s curiosity around ads, which does not mean users will click more…
It is actually a good idea.
People who is looking for a certain type of add may click up/down arrows to check and gives a bit of choice to them.
Any way the better click rate i don’t expect.
scrolling ads is useless, many viewer don’t care about the ads, they care about the content that they use to visit but not with the ads. I think much better if they make it an autoflashing ads that change automatically even without refreshing the page.
From Google’s perspective, it was inevitable. There are so many people hoping to have their adverts on AdSense now that only showing a few of them at a time isn’t good enough. That’ll just keep pushing prices higher and higher, and eventually people will have to stop using AdSense because there’s too many big shots hogging all the space.
As someone who’s living without AdBlock at the moment (using Fx3b5), I really like the new AdSense blocks and I’m more likely to click them now, since I’m just curious to see what the other adverts are that’re being “hidden” from me.
I’ve read through alot of your posts on entrepreneurship and business and there excellent, keep up the good work!
It’s important for all that adsense give a change performance of the adv look like. Cause, the adv adsense’s wondering old style.
Go go google …
Thanks Darren for the news of sliding adv of google, more innovative and more space to advertise its adv.
I think the placement of the ads is more important, but perhaps the ads will be more targeted this way when the scrolling enables more ads to be placed.
nice info.I hope it can increase my adsense earning :).
Ha, just spent an hour looking for the duff coding in my theme thinking I had left in somehow doh!!
I agree with Shane’s
sorry for the silly errors in the previous comment (Adwords ‘Publishers’ instead of ‘Advertisers’ and the block quote that didn’t close well)
I like this option, i believe this will increase “most targeted clicks”.
I don’t like them. If you use Google’s Adsense Preview Tool to find the URL of an ad, it won’t be included if it isn’t on the top ad.
Hi Darren,
This seems to be a big move in small measure.I am a newbie to this blogging world.I have seen some time back the arrows appear on one of my websites and wondered what it is.But feared of Google Adsense banning me so i didnt click on that.But i choose to do it on some one else site and when i clicked on the right arrow i found the new thing.Googles updated a new feature.No matter what google does it clicks in a great way.Lets see what the visitors do other than we slapping on each others.10 out of 100 may see the arrows and 2 outof that 10 may click on the arrows as of now,as this feature is pretty new and it takes some time for the visitors to understand what the arrows meant for.So no need to worry too much at this very moment.Flocks just enjoy the new feature it will definitely help every one.The visitor,the advertiser,the publisher.Lets see the response on a long term basis.All our assumptions may not quite go correct.So,lets hope for the best and leave the rest to Google.
As a publisher I don’t like this. All it does (IMHO) is make the fact that these are ads stand out more which reduces clicks. Where is my option to opt out?