Mountain View, California — Undoubtedly, search engine giant Google is not spared from the current economic recession that everyone is going through right now, and AdSense, Google’s cash-cow, the main source of the company’s income, is no exception. Hence, the search giant is making every effort to keep it steady, announced Wednesday in a blog post that it has just rolled a new ad format for its Adsense program called — expandable ads.
The company is engaging advertisers on the use of expandable ad units to its search results pages, these ads start out as banners or square ads and expand into larger ads that cover much of the Web site’s content.
According to the Adsense blog, expandable ads are rich media ads that can expand beyond the original size of the ad unit. These ad units will expand only if a user clicks on an advert then it will expand over the page, enabling different sorts of media content.
“Expandable ads are rich media ads that can expand beyond the original size of the ad unit, following a user-initiated action,” said the company in a blog posting.
“This develops a more real estate for the ad, allowing for more interaction from interested users. For instance, expandable ads may stream a movie trailer, show video game clips, or display various views of an item for sale.”
The expandable ads are non-obtrusive according to the Google Adsense team. It will not in any way change the design of your sites as these ads will be layers on top of your site. Even so accidental expansions is out of question when viewing a site with expandable ads activated. In addition, the expandable ads would not expand more than the size of its original width or height.
Many users may find expandable ads annoying, but as Google points out, the format could be valuable to both advertisers and customers when used to show movie trailers, video game clips, or other images that require greater emphasis on detail.
Users will also be able to turn off the expanded advert at anytime and can even block them altogether using Google’s Competitive Ad Filter. Google said that advertisers are eligible by default to use the expandable ads if they have already inserted AdSense code to their site’s source code and enabled image ads.
The expandable ads is currently being available to AdSense members located in North America and Europe only that can bid on specific ad placement. Site owners who wish to use this new feature would need to enable image ads in their AdSense account and have to add the AdSense code into their site’s source code directly.
Google informed advertisers that earnings will depend on whether they use cost-per-click ads (CPC) or cost-per-thousand-impressions (CPM) ads. CPC expandable ads will generate earnings when a user clicks through to the advertiser’s landing page–not when a user simply clicks to expand the ad. Google has created an FAQ page with more information for advertisers.
The expandable ads are not likely to make a Google earnings skyrocket, but because they require user interaction to expand, they also are not likely to create animosity from consumers.