Google AdSense Ad Blindness

Nowadays, almost anyone can use AdSense, and sometimes it seems as if most of the world is actually doing so!

There are just too many AdSense ads around.

There is a ‘clutter’ of similar looking ads on millions and millions of sites, meaning you often have to navigate around the ads to use the content that you are seeking.

This is, therefore, exactly what you do – you work around the ads, without actually seeing them! Many people are now literally blind to the ads themselves.

This is not only an AdSense problem.

All text advertisers are in the same situation, but AdSense is suffering far, far worse than anyone else, perhaps because people have become resistant to the ‘Ads By Google’ tag.

People have got so used to Google ads that click rates have been falling like a very large rock this past year or so! This is a widely accepted fact of all advertising – when something gets too popular, people no longer see it or pay any attention.

That’s why the once popular banner advertising programs that originally enjoyed click through rates of nearly 8% have now fallen to .25 – .75% for even the most effective banners.

The ‘clutter’ of having too many ads contributes to a growing ad blindness problem, which in turn causes lower (and ever decreasing) click rates.

Even the AdSense ads that appear on the search engine results pages themselves are not immune to the problems of interminable clutter leading to increasing ad blindness.

Plus, the search engine result pages have one additional problem. Search engine users and websurfers are becoming increasingly educated and ‘savvy’ to the fact that not all search engine results are necessarily to be taken at face value.

When AdSense text ads first began to appear on search engine results pages, it’s a fair assumption that the average user simply did not realize they were ads.

So, they enjoyed a tremendous click rate as users assumed that they were ‘normal’ search results, just the same as all of the others on the page, pure and simple.

In particular, the most expensive paid ads, those that appeared at the top of the left hand side of the page above the non-paid results were, at one time, tremendously successful.

Now only the most casual or naive searcher doesn’t know the difference between what is and isn’t an ad in search results, resulting in much lower click rates.

And again, you can only expect this problem to get worse over time, not better!

The only realistic answer to this is that AdSense ads will have to be made to look less like ads and more a part of the natural search engine results, but even that strategy has inherent dangers.

One of the most noticeable side effects of the reaction against the AdSense clutter is that the majority of searchers now make a deliberate effort not to follow paid-for ads ‘masquerading’ as natural search engine results.

So, if Google start making even greater efforts to disguise the paid ads as natural search results, this could make an awful lot of searchers very unhappy indeed!

Perhaps they might see it as deception, or, even worse, downright dishonesty? Who knows, but I suspect so.