Ad and image placement: a policy clarification from the official Google Inside AdSense blog covers issues about placing images next to AdSense units, something that seems to have grown in popularity as a means of encouraging clicks. In short — don’t. Google doesn’t want images to appear related to AdSense links:
We ask that publishers not line up images and ads in a way that suggests a relationship between the images and the ads. If your visitors believe that the images and the ads are directly associated, or that the advertiser is offering the exact item found in the neighboring image, they may click the ad expecting to find something that isn’t actually being offered. That’s not a good experience for users or advertisers.
You’ll find some discussion on Techmeme about the clarification here, and Jennifer Slegg may be along to postscript or link to further thoughts or comments.
Related Topics: Google: AdSense
Chalk this one up as another attempt by Google to drive click prices back up. Obviously the AdSense network quality has been steadily decreasing and ROI continues to plummet for advertisers, but perhaps if Google didn’t just accept anyone who signed up for a blogger account these quality issues wouldn’t be out there as much. Then again, AdSense is by no means the most efficient revenue model for most websites, so perhaps this will drive more webmasters to use more creative and efficient advertising. We’ll see.
As an advertiser, I left the content network long ago thanks to tricks like this. I’ve seen some very “effective” use of images to generate clicks. Most recently, I noticed a recipe site putting very nice images of food on above a row of ads – it was very easy to assume the link would lead to a recipe matching that item.