Google Adsense and AdWords issues

First the basics. Google Adsense is a system that allows website owners to display ads on their sites. Publishers are not payed by the number of ads displayed, neither by the size of the ads. They are not even payed by how many times the ads are displayed as it is done in traditional advertising, like print or TV. The publishers are payed by the number of clicks on the ads.



On the other side of the equasion, we have Google Adwords, that allows business owners to buy ads to be displayed on Google Adsense participant's sites. Advertisers need to specify keywords that match they advertisements. Google will match these keywords found on publisher sites and display relevant ads.

This sounds and works great. It's a great business for publishers to get a steady revenue, great way for businesses to publicize their websites to a targeted audience. And, it's a million dollar business for Google.

I've been on both sides. I'm running Google ads on this site as a publisher and do Adword campaigns for clients. I have a few reservations that I'd like to share.
Click fraud

First of all from the advertisers side. The big issue discussed heavily all over the internet and unfortunately for Google even at court is click fraud. Some "smart" publishers start clicking their own ads to generate more money. This practice can spend advertising budgets in no time and the advertisers don't get any valuable traffic for their money.

Apparently some publishers go to the lenght to hire people who click their websites regularly from different locations to try to hide the fraudulent nature of their clicks.

Google of course tries to fight this and have implemented many systems that detect these practices and shuts out publishers who misbehave.
Click fraud attack

This brings me to the second problem that affects legitimate publishers. If someone wants to do bad to a publisher and wants to shut him out of google and deprive him from his accumulated income with Google Adsense, he can theoretically click many times on a specific ad and the publisher will be disqualified. The publisher has no means to prove Google that it wasn't him clicking his own ads, but a wrong doer or competitor. This is a serious danger because when a publisher is shut out he loses all his earnings that were accumulated in his account till the incident and he will also be deprived from further incomes that may have been counted on for further operation.

For the advertisers I say suck it up. Consider that a certain percentage of your advertising spending is lost, just like with press and TV and be happy with the rest that brings in traffic and sales. Think about it as the cost per click for your ad is somewhat higher then it would be in an ideal world and live with it. Nothing is perfect, even this media has flaws.

For the publishers however I don't have a consolation. If they are shut out unjustly to protect the advertisers, they are at the mercy of their competitors and wrong doers. Hopefully Google tracks these maliscious users somehow. Unfortunately I have read about many publishers who had to look for other ways to monetize their sites, because they suffered a click fraud attack.
Pay per click vs. pay per view

The third issue I have is about the fact that publishers are only payed by clicks and not by number of times ads are displayed. It is a known fact that simple exposure to advertising messages on long term builds awareness and eventually result in sales. If a reader is exposed to an ad, especially if it is an image ad, he will register it uncosciously. He may not click the ad and not buy anything at that moment. But next time he wants to buy a certain product or service and looks for it, he may unconsciously or even consciously will choose the advertised brand. We know this works, otherwise we would not have brand building advertising everywhere on the streets, in the TV and press.

I feel it is unfair that the publisher is not payed for all these brand building and awareness campaigns that didn't result in direct clicks and sales. Again the system benefits the advertisers. They don't pay for all the impressions, and ideally they don't need to receive and pay for a single click to increase their brand awareness and eventually sales just by displaying their ads on Google's network of publishers.

I feel a combination of impressions and clicks would be a fair deal to both the publisher and the advertiser. Especially when we are talking about brand awareness messages. Until this is introduced I would not allow pay per click ads that mention brand names at all. Even in this case a certain ad can simply raise awareness of concepts and product categories, that indirectly helps advertisers.

Of course such a combined system will raise flags too. What about all the people who use ad blockers. Is it fair to pay the publisher for ads that never appeared?
Accidental clicks

Fourth issue is the accidental clicks. How many times have you misclicked on a page? Either because you didn't pay attention or because you have a poor mouse that has a jumping cursor or scroll wheel. Some publishers are so greedy that they put so many ads on a page that the readers have hard time navigate the page as if it was a landmine. If users click on an ad by mistake it's likely that they will not check the opened site, but will close the window or navigate back.

Is it fair that advertisers pay for these accidental clicks? There are many ways to prevent this unfair charge, but maybe again I should say suck it up, the free brand building you're getting should compensate for the occasional loss by accidental clicks.

Is it fair that the publisher is payed for these clicks? No, but similarly this compensates for all the free brand building.
Image quality

At last I would like to find a solution to an annoyance regarding image ads. Have you noticed that many Google image ads are blurry and squashed vertically? It is not the advertisers or web designers fault. It is a fault of Google AdWords system.

A perfectly sized image that is uploaded to Google AdWords will not only be recompressed, but also squashed to fit the small strip at the bottom that says "Ads by Gooooogle" and "Advertise on this site". There is no way to upload a smaller image, because the system only accept a certain size, so basically one has to get around it by designing the ad smaller as if to accomodate for the strip. Than vertically expand it to make it the original size that AdWords accepts. Upload it and see how the system resizes it back. This is a big problem, because with all this resizing you lose all the detail in your image. You can't have pixel perfect designs and can't use pixel fonts.

If you know a workaround please let me know, because this is causing a big headache for many designers.

After all this let me say that both systems work well in most cases and I'm very happy with both services. I realize that nothing is perfect and I trust Google will be able to innovate itself out of these issues sooner than you can click.