Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Google Gadget Ads

Google Gadget Ads have been spotted before, but now Google made them official with a press release – albeit they’re still only available to some select AdWords advertisers. Gadget Ads, as opposed to normal text link or image ads, contain interactive content such as Flash or HTML connected to a potentially updating data source... as they’re part of the iGoogle gadgets API. Google presents a gadget ad example (a small Flash game, basically) saying that of the 94.5 million impressions the ad got, it was interacted with 0.3% of the time.

While gadget ads are probably the most free-form variants of all Google ads, advertisers still need to conform to some standards, Google says. For instance, you are not allowed to show animations longer than 15 seconds; also, ads aren’t allowed to read or write cookies (Google warns advertisers: “do not make mistakes”). Popups or any other types of external alerts are forbidden as well. A Google Gadgets Ads Editor helps validation in the somewhat complicated process to set up such an ad. I’m not sure how well these standards are enforced though: e.g. the gadget ad included in the sample page pointed to above specifically does use an endless animation, with balloons flying and the logo inflating & deflating, exceeding any 15 seconds limit. (Perhaps this ad conformed to an older standard from an earlier test phase.)

[Thanks Search Engines Web!]

Google Gadget Ads by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (1+3)

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