The Home Biz Blog

Google now puts ad block enhancers on your AdSense units

Experienced AdSense publishers know that putting relevant images close to your AdSense ad units can increase the click through rate.

Many webmasters have been adding these kind of "ad block enhancers" to their templates. But now it looks like Google is going to do it for you. Well, they're testing it out on a few sites.

I first noticed this on one of my websites. It was on a 728x90 ad unit and it was set to display both text and image. I'm pretty sure it's important that you choose to also display images if you want Google to add these ad block enhancers. This is what it looked like:

You can find that image here:
http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/verticals/110/88284552.jpg. This is a pretty small file (1.3 KB) which is good - doesn't slow down the loading of your page that much and they resize that image to fit the ad format. The ads on the AdSense unit were business related and that image was also business related - showing some graph.

The image is clickable but I didn't click it because I don't want Google to delete my account ;)

But I did see the same thing on another website (that isn't mine). This time it was on a 120x600 tower ad and the setting again was google_ad_type = "text_image";

It looked like this:

That image is located here:
http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/verticals/110/88294256.jpg. The ads there were health related and that image is health related - so it looks like they have a database of images for different catagories and try to match them to the ads.

I clicked on that one and then I went on a page similar to the one you get when you click on AdSense Link Units where I saw 10 ads. But I thought it was strange that some of the ads didn't have a headline... not sure why.

So, it makes sense that since these images/ad block enhancers increase CTR (which means that they increase the money you make) Google wants to help you make more money (because then they make more money). If Google's tests come out positive we might see images like this on most AdSense units in a few months.

While researching this I noticed that Google is recording the referring URL, your screen resolution, color depth, the actual height and width of the browser window among other things... I'm guessing they're using that to better serve ads and not just spying on us ;)

There is also a new feature: Site Diagnostics to see if your website is blocking the Google crawler from checking out any your pages. If you're getting a lot of PSAs or irrelevant ads you should definitely check that.

Michael Cheney gave me some great insides into using ad block enhancers on my AdSense pages. He even gave me the code to paste into my templates. Click here to check out his AdSense videos.

Posted by Hannes Johnson at August 3, 2006 1:26 AM | bookmark on del.icio.us