Images above ad units & complying with the AdSense terms
August 6, 2005
It has become popular over the last few months to place images above or next to ad units, with individual images lining up with each invidiual ad in an ad unit. For example, a leaderboard would have four small images above it. But some publishers have received compliance warnings about using images, since they are making them appear to be a part of the ad unit, and being asked to make changes to comply with the AdSense terms and policies.
So what exactly is within the terms and what isn’t? I went straight to Google for the scoop.
Publishers are still welcome to place images above the ads. The only exception is if it’s in such a way that it looks like the images are part of the ads.
When something like that comes to our attention, we’ll ask that the publisher place a visible border between the ads and the images, to make it clear that the images are not being served by Google on behalf of the advertisers. We generally do not ask publishers to remove the images completely, we just ask that they add borders to avoid confusion.
So it seems the complaint is that the images appear to be trigger by the individual ads and are reflecting on the individual ad itself. This could potentially cause problems when a user clicks an ad expecting it to be about the image, even if they didn’t fully read the ad text they happened to be clicking. And this could result in a lot of unqualified clicks to advertisers ads.
So to be fully complaint with the AdSense terms and policies while using the added images technique, you must have a border between the ads and the images, whether it be a bordered ad unit, or an on-page border you add yourself.
Posted in Google AdSense
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August 6th, 2005 at 1:13 pm
I guess many won’t be happy with this news, but Google aren’t against somehow.
August 6th, 2005 at 2:34 pm
Bilder
August 6th, 2005 at 5:12 pm
I think that with Google optimizing the ads to place less ads per adsense ad will solve some of these unqualified clicks also. As the ads will not always line up with the images placed above.
August 7th, 2005 at 9:14 am
Thanks for clearing this up (and for a wonderfully informative site).
August 7th, 2005 at 10:09 am
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Check out http://www.adsenseoptimized.com for info on Adsense. Let me know if you want to do a link exchange and e-mail me.
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I use very few images on my site, so this isn’t something which effects me.
But I recently asked the people who use my site what they thought of the adverts and the majority prefered the pages where the adverts were clearly seperate from the editorial, and were strongly against anything that could make them click an ad by accident.
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