Last week Google Adsense team announced expandable rich media ads as another option for advertisers to choose from. Expandable ads are usually those irritating animated banners that we are usually subjected to on most popular portals that stretch beyond their initial height and width when we rollover them.
Don’t get me wrong, I actually think good of expandable ads and consider it a virtue of online advertising. It adds interaction and offers more scope for conversions when used well and perhaps better targeting if used in a CPC model. However, I have seen very few good examples of such rich media ads, especially among Indian advertising campaigns to date. This can either be dearth of imagination or a basic lack of knowledge on part of how to structure online campaigns. The fact that most publishers force these ads upon users with little scope of escape just adds to the melee.
In this case, Google at least suggests some better measures.
- Ads will expand only after a user clicks and interacts with the ad. Mouseovers or rollovers won’t trigger the ad, in order to prevent accidental expansions.
- An expandable ad won’t expand more than double its width or height.
- Once expanded, the ad will appear as a layer over the page content so that your content will not be modified or shifted in any way.
- The user may close the expanded panel at any time.
It creates a non-intrusive environment and above all that it is click driven gives it the better targetting advantage as well.
Expandable ads will be served as third-party ads and will be created by Google-certified rich media vendors for the top display advertisers in our network. This statement on the Google Adsense blog did raise some questions in my mind – is this feature only available for the existing top display advertisers on their network? Are only Google certified rich media vendors allowed to get the creatives done? In case regular adwords campaigns there are certified adwords professionals as well as other people just starting out in the ad campaign and management, both of whom can make and run adwords campaigns. Will the system be the same for expandable ads as well?
Google has been making notable changes in their ad display business and even including domain parking into the adsense revenue stream for publishers. This just cements the thought that Google is moving away from context and is perhaps battling some dwindling revenues.
