Google Adsense Interactive Widgets Ads

Google Adsense is testing again and a new Google Adsense ad widget format was spotted which promises to be more interactive, with scrollable photos and looks much less like an advertisement.

Technotip reported these strange Adsense widgets. I visited the site myself and spotted this 728×90px Leaderboard ad unit.

And another one 300×250px ad unit in the sidebar.

If you click the smaller images, they display in the larger image format on top of the widget and the ad title and text changes. The small arrows allow you to scroll across to more images. There are 4 link clickable areas – the logo on top, the larger image, the underlined url link at the bottom and the main title bold link. The Ads by Google link takes you to the Ad feedback page. Anyway they look much better than the Google Gadget ads.

It is interesting to see these Google Adsense widgets. It is a different variation with lot of click areas. Since this ad belongs to a tour site, the ad is nicely used to easily display different images with better interaction and only when the visitor is genuinely interested, will he click through. The CTR would be interesting to note, but the visits will be definitely well targeted from the advertiser point of view.

Google adsense usually runs limited tests and ad unit variation on select websites. Recently they were testing different font types in ads on our site. We have spotted several strange Adsense ads over the years like ads with 2×2 ads, favicons, no titles, titles in italics and no “Ads by Google” and interactive keywords.