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Reducing Unintentional Clicks
2017 August 08 by Brett Vogel
In October, we outlined what it will take to create a healthy advertising ecosystem: great experiences for people, meaningful business results for advertisers, and sustainable growth for publishers.
Ad placements that are built to drive unintentional clicks run counter to that goal. While they can be profitable for publishers, they fail to deliver good experiences for businesses or people. For advertisers, these kinds of unintentional clicks can drive down the value of their campaigns.
Over the next few months, we are making updates to stop delivering to ad placements that encourage unintentional clicks. These updates include policy clarifications on unintentional clicks, product changes to invalidate these clicks, and proactively pausing implementations that exhibit abnormal click behavior.
Utilizing Signals About Intentional Clicks
To understand if a click is intentional, one of the metrics we look at in our delivery models and quality detection systems is “drop off rates” — the time a user spends on the landing page of an ad. We found that people who click on an Audience Network ad and spend less than 2 seconds on a destination page almost always clicked accidentally. Moving forward, we will no longer count these clicks.
Example of a poor quality ad experience encouraging unintentional clicks.
Pausing Implementations with Abnormal Behavior
Publishers sometimes create ad experiences that fail to deliver true advertiser value. This can be due to implementation error, or because the ad is in the wrong flow of the app experience. When we see abnormal behavior, such as an inflated clickthrough rate (CTR), we'll automatically pause placements to protect people and advertisers. We'll also inform publishers so they can make necessary changes.
Clarifying Our Policies
We've also heard from publishers that they want more examples of our policies, and specifically how to create better native ad experiences. So we recently updated our our policies with clear examples to avoid unintentional clicks, and went a step further by introducing a new policy that prohibits clickable “whitespace” on native ads. By requiring users to click on an advertiser asset, we expect to see further reduction in unintentional clicks.
Going forward, we'll be experimenting with more ways to reduce the number of unintentional clicks by looking further into bounce rates, additional metrics, and trying to prevent users from accidentally clicking in the first place.
If you're a publisher looking for tips on how to make sure your ad placements are optimized to drive value and intentional user engagement, please refer to our best practice guide here. For additional questions, please reach out to your Audience Network representative.
Brett Vogel
Product Marketing Manager, Publisher Solutions
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