Google Ads: Adsense Blindness and Courtesy Clicks
Posted in Geek by CujoSeptember 19th, 2006 - 10:19 PM
Being an avid Internet user and more so the Wolrd Wide Web I visit a lot of different sites, blogs, news sites, review sites etc. A lot of these sites have one thing in common and that is Google Adsense (or some other form of advertising). The question is though, how often do you really see the Google ads anymore.
Adsense Blindness
As an example, for the regular readers to this site there are Google ads below this post, not only when it appears on the main page but also when it is in its own page, how often do you see these ads or have you come accustomed to them being there that you are now blind to them and just see them as part of the general layout, maybe they act as a border or another type of space filler.
Even when I visit new sites the Google ads always have that familiar shape, size and layout that I think my mind has been trained to identify them and simply ignore their existance on the site. Sort of like that part of the site is blank and doesn’t feature needed content. I think this may be a major reason why for smaller scale sites the Google ads simply don’t work. It is also something to be aware of when designing a site, people have been trained for ads to appear in certain places, if your navigation ends up in this spot people may not see it as they are blind to that area.
I tried the ads out on this site with an extremely low reader base just to see how they worked. In the first couple of weeks the hits poured in as the ads were new and fresh and people recognized a simple change to the site. Now that they have been up for 9 months or so the hits have dried up but the number of visitors continue to increase. Because every other site we visit features these ads a general Adsense blindness is happening to the common web surfer and because of this blindness a pageview count in the thousands is needed to generate a simple click.
The Courtesy Click
On the other hand however, how often have you visited a site and either liked the information, found something useful or just wanted to contribute to the cause of the site somehow so you clicked on a couple of the Google ads placed throughout the site? I know I’ve done this a number of times in order to support sites I like or found useful myself. Some of these sites could be a one time only visit for me but on that one visit I found what I needed and said thank you by giving back to them through a click of an ad, something I like to call a courtesy click.
Because of the general Adsense blindness that I believe does exist and the still prevalent use of Adsense on a multitude of sites I think the courtesy click has been the revenue generator for the majority of the successful sites. Sure they have more visitors but the visitors are probably at the site for a specific reason. Watching casual web surfers and their habits they will stay clear of any ads they see and tend to only click on links they know they want to follow. I think this is part of a lot of fear that has been spread around with identity theft etc in that if they go to the wrong site all of their personal information would be gone. However the experienced web user knows what an ads is, knows the sites that are using them and need them to survive and I believe provides a courtesy click to these sites to help them keep a float. I know I do.
In the coming weeks I will possibly be removing the ads from this site as I believe now they are taking away from the content and ruining the users experience. I may be sending the wrong message to new visitors by having the ads placed on this site. I deem the experiment over with and will use the ads again but on sites that are more geared towards the use of Goolge Adsense and other similar ad networks.
If you go to a site and see ads on it what are your first impressions? Are you more likely to visit a site without ads more often then one with ads?
I’d really like to hear different answers regarding those questions as an addition to my Google Adsense experiment.
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September 19th, 2006 at 11:02 pm
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September 22nd, 2006 at 7:18 pm
I do courtesy clicks a lot.
September 22nd, 2006 at 10:33 pm
Yeah… I think the courtesy clicks thing depends on level of user and mindset possibly. I was just reading a site where they got Dugg (featured on the main page of Digg) but had 0 click-thrus on the ads. That’s the user mindset of Digg though, read article, Digg it, comment. However, if I find useful info I’ll try to help out in some way or another.