Are Google revenues flat for Q2?
Just a quick addendum to my last posting. I guess I hinted at this in the posting, but I'm wondering if the change to borderless ads is being prompted by flat or declining revenues for this quarter. Total speculation on my part, but similar things were done with ad tweaking on Google's search result pages when they were facing problems. If there's a significant percentage of AdSense publishers who don't use blended ads then this could make a measurable difference in overall clickthrough rates. There's still a month to go before the quarter ends, after all, so it could affect things.
For the people who don't know AdSense: AdSense publishers can change the colors of the ad units to match the color palettes of their sites. If the publisher doesn't specify a palette, the default is to display ads with a blue border, blue ad titles, black ad text, and green URLs, all on a white background. What Google is doing is removing the blue border, replacing it with a white border. On a white HTML page (which is the most common scenario) this means that the border is effectively removed from the ad, making the ads appear more like part of the page content. This means they're more likely to be clicked, as studies have shown. More clicks = more money for Google.
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Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.
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