Here’s how Google plans to handle accidental clicks on ads
Resistive to capacitive touch screens, phones to tablets and tablets to phablets, it has all happened within this decade. Smart marketing has breathed through progressive technology and Google has always kept up with it. With Adwords’ and Adsense’s success there is not much of a story to tell about Google Ads platforms.
One major problem that third party studies have put forward is of accidental clicks that have risen up to 50%. With touch screens it has become highly likely that while swiping or tapping something else an ad opens up which the user otherwise does not mean to. For users it can be problematic and irritating and for advertisers it can inflate the click through rates and artificially increase costs.
Earlier in 2012 Google tried to tackle this by introducing confirmed clicks where a prompt was used to confirm if the user actually meant to click on the ad. Now Google has made three dominant changes to its click recognition on ads.
In a blog post Adwords has mentioned:
1. Clicks that happen close to image edge: Now to click on an ad, users will have to click the centre of the ad box. Any click on the edges will automatically and by default be blocked. This practise will definitely get the advertisers the exact click through rate.
2. Clicks on the app icon: Users will now not be able to click on the app icon of an install ad. (https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/6032059#display) in proximity of the ad close button. Now users will need to click on the call-to-action button to visit an app store page and install the app. This will promote genuine downloads and create a better framework to identify spam.
3. A Click-ability delay: Now ads are going to be clickable only after sometime of their being on-screen. This will ensure that users have carefully read the ad and have clicked it on purpose and not just accidentally. Often users click anywhere where they usually don’t expect to see an ad and it constitutes in the “accidental” category.
This was a much needed change owing to the great number of advertisers sign ups, internet traffic and penetration. Ads have continued to be a very major part of traffic that a web service attracts which has made getting the right and interested people very important. Significantly Google has observed some changes with the update’s enforcement and has said, “To date, we’ve seen a 15% average conversion rate lift on display ads by driving more qualified clicks with these updates.”