Problogger.net broke a NDA to bring you news that Google is going to bitch slap your AdSense earnings by making it harder to click the ads. In the old AdSense setup, a reader just has to click anywhere inside the ad block to register a click and be sent to the advertiser. The new setup will require the readers to click on the actual ad title or the ad URL. The above click zone map shows what parts of the new ads are now clickable. As you can see, the click zone has been drastically reduced. The main reason for doing this according to Google:
We’re rolling out a change to our text ad formats to help reduce accidental clicks and increase value for advertisers…..This new format will match the changes we’ve implemented on Google.com to help decrease the number of accidental clicks and increase the number of ad conversions. A reduction in accidental clicks will keep users on your pages, interacting with your content until they choose to click on an ad. This change will enhance the user’s overall experience with your websites and improve advertiser campaign value, but it’s likely that your click-through rate will decrease.
It’ll be very interesting to see how the new setup will affect publishers’ AdSense earning. I don’t run Google AdSense on this blog but I have it on other sites. What do you think of Google’s new click zone? A good thing or one more reason to dump AdSense?