Back during Halloween, Google wheeled out some holiday-themed ads. If you didn’t see them, they looked pretty cool. They had a little pumpkin in the top right-hand corner and the black-bordered ads had pictures of ghosts and witches in the background.
They were made available to all publishers, not just the big ones, and there was a lot of talk about them on the blogs at the time.
The first thing that struck me about these designs was that they’d ruin all the hard work I’ve put into blending my ads into my site. I don’t use black borders, so putting an ad unit on the site with a thick black border is going to make those units leap off the page. It’s going to be pretty clear that they were put on the site by someone other than me. That means the ad units won’t come with the recommendation from the publisher that they get when they have the same design as the site.
Having said that, I have to admit that they were eye-catching. Of course, that’s not always a good thing. Make your ads too eye-catching and you’ll run into the sort of ad-blindness that has killed banners. But these ads were made eye-catching by unique pictures that were fun to look at. They were different to anything visitors will have seen before so they wouldn’t have minded too much being distracted from what they were reading on the site.
There’s certainly a good chance that people who wouldn’t have noticed the ads will have looked at them and clicked.
Or rather, I think there’s a good chance but I don’t know that for sure because I haven’t seen the results from people who used those ads. In fact, I’m not even sure how easily a publisher would be able to follow the stats from ads like that. Traditionally, the number of visitors to websites falls during holidays so a comparison would have to be made with the same date in a previous year. But the Internet grows and changes so quickly that year-on-year comparisons are fairly meaningless.
In my opinion, those ads are just too darned attractive to ignore. With Christmas coming, if Google do this again, I think the best bet will be to theme your site with pictures of Santa Claus and candy sticks -- effectively blending the site into the ad. That’s pretty unusual but then Christmas is a special time of year!
Joel Comm is The Internet Revenue Expert. Online for over 20 years, Joel teaches people how to make money in the digital age. The recognized authority on Google AdSense, Joel teaches how to multiply your AdSense income at The AdSense Code. To ask Joel Comm a question about making money online, visit http://www.AskJoelComm.com Joel invites you to download a free copy of The Internet Money Tree at http://www.internetmoneytree.net
