How To Protect Yourself - Google's Clickable Area Change

I agree completely with what Google is trying to accomplish with the change. I think it is a step in the right direction for the industry as a whole in regards to quality.

That said... We were hit by the clickable area change as many other sites were from a revenue perspective. We've been testing a few different ad formats to see if can't make up some of the revenue we are losing. Previously we relied on the 336x280 as our primary ad block. This particular block seems to have lost the highest percentage of "clickable" area since it is so large but the titles are not that long in most cases, and the font sizes are quite small, making it extremely difficult for user to click the tiny title of the ad.

So we redesigned our page layout to utilize the wide skyscaper (160x600) and link units. Link units are unaffected by the change, and the wide skyscaper seems to do fairly well since the titles are often in a larger font and wrap two lines in some cases, giving more vertical click area, hence easier for a user to click on.

So what is our results so far? Here are some stats for one of our main pages:

• October (before the clickable area change): 2.00% CTR


• First week of December (post clickable area change): 1.02% CTR


• Last 7 days (With new layout): 1.37% CTR

So can see we are climbing back but we are not there yet.

Overall we are still down about 25% on our CTR for all Adsense ads on our site.

Our saving grace was that we coincidentally recently added a few additional revenue streams, one being Kontera and the other being BurstMedia banners. The addition of both of these programs made up for the 25% loss of Adsense income, and pretty much left us where we were before the clickable area change.

So the moral of the story?

1. Diversify your income streams.
2. Experiment with other ad formats.
3. Be patient. Give your changes time to really see how well they are performing.
4. Try image ads, they are not affected by the change.
5. Experiment with new ad placements.

If we hadn't, we'd be taking a pretty big income hit right now. Instead, we are holding steady.

Of course we try not to think of what we could be making if they hadn't made the clickable area change, but hey, that is the risk we all take by putting some of our eggs in another person's basket... ;-)