May 2008 Archives

Dynamic web ads, such as those served up by Google's ubiquitous AdSense platform, are a great way to earn passive revenue from your online presence or publications. However, these ads can bite you in surprising ways if you're not very selective about which pages they appear on, and where on those pages they go. At worst, they can not only confuse your users, but potentially result in a direct loss of traffic or business to competitors.

Click on the thumbnail of this image to see a full-size screenshot of a browser window I recently found myself looking at. I came to this website wanting to download the latest version of TortoiseSVN, a most excellent Subversion client for Windows. When I clicked the "Download" link from the site's front page, I saw this page. What do you suppose I clicked on next?

That's right - I saw "Download - Subversion Client", thought "Yep, that's what I came here for," and clicked the link without reading any further. I was then unpleasantly surprised to find myself at the top of a completely different website. I had unwittingly clicked on an ad that, due to the page's layout, looked like it was part of the page's body text! As a result, I'd been whisked away to the homepage of Syncro, one of TortoiseSVN's competing products.

A more subtle error here is the choice to use AdSense ads on this page at all. Because AdSense works by scanning the containing page's content and then choosing ads that seem relevant, a page with lots of mentions of Subversion clients is naturally going to result in ads for various Subversion software - almost all of which are guaranteed to be for products other than the one the page itself is hoping you'll download!

I myself make use of AdSense on other blogs that I publish; for example, The Gameshelf features a block of ads on every page. They're usually about games, or even other game publications, but since I'm not selling a product on the site I'm not worried about losing any customers to them. On the Appleseed blog that you're currently reading, however, I know that AdSense would see all the text about software consulting that decorates every page on this site, and would happily coax you to visit the websites of my many competitors.

Context-sensitive advertising is a clever invention that increases the chance that ads shown to your site's visitors will be more relevant to their interests, making it more likely they'll click through, and therefore send a little extra revenue your way. And that's quite nice - so long as you have an idea where those click-throughs are aimed.