I was browsing around one of my clients sites after making a few tweaks to the colors of their 468×60 adsense ads when I noticed something peculiar ?
? looks like the adsense team is testing a new ad format which incorporates keyword phrases as their anchor text. Curiosity almost got the best of me as I was pretty tempted to click on one of them to see if it in fact took me to a site or to some sort of Google search results for that keyword phrase.
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My personal opinion regarding this new ad format is that it is too busy and will become harder to integrate seamlessly into our content areas. The keyword phrases look like orphan text, and really makes the ad stand out.
I have all sort of questions regarding this new ad and have I tried googling to see if I could find any additional information regarding it. I happened to only find one thread over at webmaster world where a member spotted similar ads, but no clarification or supporting information and this thread over at DigitalPoint where there are some discussions around some of the behavioral traits of the links.
If you have seen these ads and know a little bit about the destination of the keyword phrases I would be delighted if you left me some comments explaining your findings.
If you are new or unfamiliar with these ads, please let me what you think? Do you like them? Are they too intrusive? Please share your thoughts in the comments area.
The text links go to a page of sponsored links in a similar way as the text larger link units. If they work like the other text link ads, I doubt you get paid per click. I suspect you get paid after the second click that occurs on the results page.
HawaiiSeo:
Firstly thanks for the feedback. On the DP thread(linked above)a user is confirming that behavior, however he also indicates that in one instance the ads being displayed magically changed to reflect those related to the keyword phrase that was clicked.
I’ve seen that before in other ads. It happens in both the serps and content network.
So far… The “Ad Personalization” is only driven by the previous query. (Not user account history)
Here is a link with some examples.
http://wiep.net/talk/ads/personalized-google-ads/