Complementing Your Ads

Everything I’ve discussed so far has been about making your ads appear
similar to the content that users will be reading. That’s pretty easy. But
there’s an alternative strategy, which can be very powerful: bringing your
users to your ads.
You have to be careful here. Google forbids you from saying to users “Look

over here and click on the ads... I want the money.” And that’s reasonable.

But with some clever
design work, you can
still guide your users to
look in that direction.
The rule to remember
here is that elements
attract eyes. When a
user loads a Web page,
he’s always going to
look at various things on
the page, not just the
text. That’s especially
true of images, which is
why one popular
strategy was to place
pictures related to the
content of the ad right
next to the ad unit.

Google has now got wise to that. It’s changed its terms to forbid that practice
specifically.
Not surprisingly, when Google brought out that rule, it created a mild panic
among publishers who rushed to change their page layouts. It didn’t help
that Google doesn’t specify how far images should be from the ad units. The
company just says that the images and the ads should not be lined up “in a
way that suggests a relationship” between them.That’s vague enough to give Google plenty of latitude to ban publishers who

think they’re doing nothing wrong.

.