Google gives fat fingers the flick before they click Google has admitted what an awful lot of people have learned first-hand (or perhaps first-finger): in the cramped environs of a smartphone's screen, it’s easy to mistakenly click on an ad. The ad giant says “most accidental clicks on in-app image ads happen at the outer edge of the ad … when you’re trying to click or scroll to …
Finally! Although they should get rid of the arrows altogether. This was one of the worse decisions Google has ever done since it's often so easy to mistake with site navigation.
Then again maybe it wasn't such an accident since it must have kept Google's money machine going with all those pointless click-throughts.
I guess their customers just figured their Adwords bill now and noticed click-troughs went through the roof with no increase in conversions.
Well, it would also help if app designers did not purposely position the ads where they're likely to get touched by mistake.
Now that you've applied a Band Aid to that issue, Google, perhaps you could do something about graphics-heavy start-up ads that take so long to load when I can't get a fast data connection that I decide that I do not need to use the app after all.
What are ads?
I installed Adblocker on my phone on day one, never seen an ad on it yet, and it genuinely puzzles my why everyone else doesn't do the same. No-one wants to see ads. No-one really likes them, yet we are buried in the damn things day in, day out.
(I have sometimes boycotted products purely on the basis I found their TV or website advert particularly irritating, sure I'm not the only one either. Take note ad makers.)
Looking at the normal bounce rate on my site from web adverts compared to bounce rate for mobile adverts is a shocking difference, 14% vs 85% - Of course it's easy to argue that the audience is very different but having accidently triggered ad clicks myself a number of times, the stats were not overly surprising.
I don't have much faith in mobile advertising as a consequence.
This will significantly reduce the revenue for some app developers, leaving them with the only option of charging for their apps. True, these devs shouldn't have relied on "fat fingers" in the first place, but a lot free apps depend on this effect. Ultimately Google will suffer as paid apps won't drive ad revenue, which is Google's core business.
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