It looks like Google are testing on a wider level the features I noticed back in October on one of their test bed sites.
1871 Media has noticed ads that allow readers of your blog to change the ads viewed to ones of a new topic.
It’s surprising on some levels that such an approach would ever work – as a web user I’m not sure I’d ever as a site to show me different ads – but obviously they’ve found this approach to be somewhat successful because they’ve been testing it for 8 months now!
I guess this shows that contextual text ads are becoming a more accepted part of the web and that some users are actually proactively using them to find the information that they seek.
In some ways this new feature is an extension of their ‘adlinks’ format which also gives readers an opportunity to choose to see a page full of ads on a topic. I’ve been using this format on most of my blogs for a few months now and have found it to be quite effective on some of my sites – largely depending upon where they are positioned and the topic of the blog.
Yes, I’ve also started seing this on some of the blogs on the network – http://www.aboutweblogs.com/ – about a week ago. But, I haven’t seen it elsewhere yet. I did wonder if anyone would actually click on it and basically choose their own ads (like a “Choose Your Own Adventure” book — got some memories of this — hehehehe).
Customer who liked this ad also liked …
At the moment, advertisers display directly linke ads. But why stop there? With knowlegde about research behaviour, it only seems logical that advertisers like Google and Yahoo will take it to the next level: Customers who liked this ad also liked …
just say one today on my site, and i really dont understand the reasoning behind it. if it works, good. but who wants to spend time looking for “other ads”, not me personally……unless i was looking for good ads to setup a adwords campaign….when is google going to let their publishers in on the secrets? like stats on rss, stats on other ads…..really googles the mind in how they ignore and treat their customers….
That ad remainds me of that search you can do on google that only searches in the ads. http://www.google.com/sponsoredlinks
This is the new ad layout of horizontal adlink that I found in my blog
http://www.themp3players.com/wp-content/adlink.jpg
I personally think that adsense is missing the boat, or missing a niche on the boat. It seems to defy traditional marketing methods. And I know that website owners and bloggers mainly use adsense as a source of income, rather than an opportunity. Maybe my marketing training from school doesnt apply to the internetwebosphere. But it seems to me that if your going to do ANY kind of advertising at all. Dont you want to have a relationship with your advertiser. Dont you want to survey your market (readers – in the case of bloggers) find out who they are and what they want. Rather than letting SEO and H1 header tricks and all the other mumbo jumbo, and finally google “award” you with ads. Ive read some place, maybe it was here, that there really isnt an infinite supply of keywords, and these words are going to get stupidly expensive. What then. huh.. In my simple little mind its always best to find out what a person is looking for then provide them with it. it just doesnt allow control from the user end of it, to properly target their market.I dont see that google adsense does this. For that reason I dont use google
[…] Another format is the “Change to ads about” format where you can change the ads shown. I had seen this on some of my sites and didn’t realise it! Update: It seems like this was an old format that had appeared before. […]