Deceptive Ads and Invalid Clicks

I've been noticing a strange AdWords trend that has me really concerned about how it might affect me as an AdSense publisher. I keep seeing very deceptive ads that I'm sure generate invalid clicks through no fault of the AdSense publisher.

These ads have turned up on various sites but today I found one on this very blog as I was previewing my last article.

The ads are disguised so they don't look like ads. The example I included in the screenshot above even closely matches the colors of my site's template.

From time to time I notice a new AdSense click that has high earnings (5-10x my average EPC), then a short time later the click is still there but the revenue has vanished

In some cases it seems these ads are a willful attempt to get more impressions and more clicks but not have to pay for it. The scam appears to go like this:

1. Create an ad that looks nothing like an ad.
2. Make sure the ad can be confused with the content of the sites it's likely to be displayed on.
3. Bid very high for your ad placements.
4. Hope the ads generate a lot of invalid clicks so you get a discount.

Is anything being done about this? Are these types of ads potentially putting my AdSense account at risk of being disabled?

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Website Header Size?

Your website's header is an important part of building your brand. But how big should your header be? Web design trends constantly change. Today I'm going to look at 10 popular websites in different markets and look at their header size and layout as well as their logo size.

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Large Ad vs Multiple Smaller Ads

Yesterday I discussed how it's not a good idea to rotate banners if you don't have a lot of traffic. Instead, you can try putting multiple ads in the space where a full ad would go. This will help you determine which advertisers work best with your site.

You don't want to go nuts including dozens of ads on your page, but you want to give the handful of ads you'd like to test an opportunity to be seen as much as possible. Since some of the spots in the grouping might do better, it's best if you can shuffle the placements within the group.

When you do this, you want to keep the larger ad size in mind and select the smaller ads so that they fit in the space of the larger ad as nicely as possible. That way if you want to switch to the larger ad, you won't have to make any major changes to your template.

You may not think you'll want to switch to the larger ad, but it's a good idea to keep it available as an option. Advertisers like the larger ad sizes (336x20, 728x90, 160x600, etc) and you may have an opportunity to display just one big ad if you get an offer. You may also find that one of the smaller ads does significantly better than the other smaller ads in the group, so you can experiment with running it at full size to see if you can improve the performance even more.

The reason the bigger ads are more sought after is that their size captures the users attention. What we're going to try to do is group together smaller ads close together so that they visually take up a similar amount of space. That will get the user's attention, and they will have an opportunity to review different ads. Within a couple thousand page views, you should have a good idea of which ads will get the highest click-through rate. After around 50k page views, you should start getting a good idea of which ads will have the best conversion rate.

This post covers some examples of common ad formats and how to break them up into groups of smaller ads. This should help you come up with other ideas for ad sizes you have on your site.

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Don't Worry About Optimizing Ad Placement

First let me say that testing your ad placements, ad formats and appearance is very important. Whether you're using AdSense or some other CPC program, using CPM or affiliate network, the benefits you get from optimizing and testing can be great.

So why would I tell you not to worry about it? Because there might be better things you can do to increase your ad revenue. This is primarily geared towards new sites or sites with not much traffic.

Instead, I'll give you some advice on the main things you need to be concerned about with AdSense Optimization, and optimizing banner ads and more importantly, the things you should be doing instead.

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Why are Ads on the Right of Many Blogs?

In the past few years, you've likely noticed that a lot of blogs and websites have there content on the left and their ads on their right. Some even go so far to use that sort of two column layout and push their content below the fold and only display ads above the fold.

I never understood why this became popular. Before this, many websites used to have navigation on the left side of their content, and many users still expect to see it there. Google even indicates that the left side of the page does well as illustrated in this heat map they released. The darker the color, the better the performance.

Even on my own sites, testing ad placements, I've found the left side of the page performs very well. Especially for AdSense link units.

But still many people are using and designing templates with ads on the right and I think it has to do with an SEO Myth I've seen many times.

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Consider Ad Placement even for sites without advertising

This may sound stupid, but when you're working on a new design for your site, even if you don't plan on running ads. There are very few circumstances on public facing sites that I wouldn't apply this rule and there are two main reasons why.

First, you never know what might happen down the road. You might get a great offer to put ads, the traffic to the site may require you to start making money to cover costs or you may decide to sell the site to someone that wants to put ads. If you design with ads in mind, you'll have an easier time fitting the ads into your site.

You know how time consuming it can be to get every element of your page in just the right spot and looking right in different versions of Internet Explorer, FireFox, Safari, Opera. Sometimes you think you're going to completely wear out your CTRL and R keys. You don't want to later find out that you have to do it all over again because you can't fit the ad you want, without breaking half your pages.

Second, most web pages contain more information than just the primary page content. Since it's common for visitors to have wider screen resolutions, and you don't want to have your content area too wide (makes it more difficult to read), you'll likely ad other elements to the page.

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Float Ad in your content

When you put your ads close to your web site's content, your visitors are more likely to read them. The more people actually read your ads, the more clicks you will get.

I don't think you should go too far and put ads in visitor's faces and then put your content below the fold, but you can set up your ad to float in your content. This gives you the best of both worlds. Your content and ads are easy to find above the fold.

If you author your website using a plain HTML editor you can put your ad code wherever you like. But if you're using a blog or most other content management systems, you rely heavily on templates and your ad code is likely in the templates, not in any particular piece of content.

In this post I'll show you how you can embed your ad into the content area of your blog posts or web pages, even if you're using templates. It only takes a little bit of HTML and CSS.

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Put your CONTENT above the fold

For years now people have been suggesting that you make sure to put your ads above the fold. Above the fold means that users won't have to scroll down the page to view the ads.

People have been taking this advice to heart. Too much so in many cases. It's an ordinary day, you have a question and you turn to your trusty friend Google to help answer it. You click on the links in the search results and page after page all you see are ads, until you scroll down a bit. Then maybe you find your answer or maybe not.

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