Google Dropping Ads For Those Who Don’t Click
Barry Schwartz notes that some users are seeing the Google ads that appear in blue above search results dissapearing after a few page loads if the user doesn’t click them. This appears to be some new combination of AdWords’ quality filter and a local cookie. See, Google considers the ad above the results superrelevant, and it only appears there if an abnormal percentage of searchers click on it, so if your Google cookie sees that you (shock!) don’t click on this truly wonderful ad, it just *poof* goes away.
(via Battelle)
Hmm. That’s actually kind of surprising to me, considering that ads are Google’s main source of revenue.
True, if users aren’t going to click them anyway, then there’s no point showing them, but it’s rare in the advertising world to see such insight. The normal attitude in advertising seems to be “Let’s bombard the user with ads! They must have to click on at least one!”
I’m glad Google is going this route. Will it be profitable? Who knows. It’ll be interesting to find out.
Comment by Ciaran | September 18, 2006