Advertisers must hate “accidense”

TDavid wins the “come up with a cool new word of the week” award for noticing “accidense.” What’s that? That’s what happens when people accidentally click on Google Adsense ads (he noticed that some Google ads have more clickable whitespace than others, which increases the chance they’ll receive “accidense.”)

Oh, I’ve seen people accidentally click on ads. I wonder if Google is able to discern how much of this goes on? Usually it’s accompanied by a very fast click on the “Back” button.

Shel and I are seeing a very similar behavior. Turns out if you search Google for “Naked” our Naked Conversation site is the 14th item on that list and it’s #3 on MSN Search. Almost every single one of those visits is a short term visit and people very rarely stick around.

This is an example of when picking a popular keyword isn’t exactly going to bring you the best results. I wonder how many commercial sites track their advertising effectiveness by how long the browser sticks around?

Comments

  1. Adam says:

    For a great many advertisers, length-on-site isn’t an important metric. For one of my biggest-spending AdWords client, for instance, the only thing of importance is how many sales or leads are obtained. Weirdly, we’ve found that the conversion of keywords is often seemingly random:
    - “Buy Widget” yields great results.
    - “Buy Widgets” yields awful results.
    - “Buy a Widget” yields okay results

    When it comes down to it, though, how often is site-time really relevant? Did he register? Did she purchase? Did he call the AdWords-specific phone number and chat with a rep? THIS is what matters 98% of the time, IMHO.

    P.S. — The “accidense” phenomena, however, is interesting! As a publisher, I love it. As an advertiser / advertiser-consultant, though, I think it’s not a very sound policy to have so much clickable space.

  2. Adam says:

    For a great many advertisers, length-on-site isn’t an important metric. For one of my biggest-spending AdWords client, for instance, the only thing of importance is how many sales or leads are obtained. Weirdly, we’ve found that the conversion of keywords is often seemingly random:
    - “Buy Widget” yields great results.
    - “Buy Widgets” yields awful results.
    - “Buy a Widget” yields okay results

    When it comes down to it, though, how often is site-time really relevant? Did he register? Did she purchase? Did he call the AdWords-specific phone number and chat with a rep? THIS is what matters 98% of the time, IMHO.

    P.S. — The “accidense” phenomena, however, is interesting! As a publisher, I love it. As an advertiser / advertiser-consultant, though, I think it’s not a very sound policy to have so much clickable space.

  3. Adam says:

    For a great many advertisers, length-on-site isn’t an important metric. For one of my biggest-spending AdWords client, for instance, the only thing of importance is how many sales or leads are obtained. Weirdly, we’ve found that the conversion of keywords is often seemingly random:
    - “Buy Widget” yields great results.
    - “Buy Widgets” yields awful results.
    - “Buy a Widget” yields okay results

    When it comes down to it, though, how often is site-time really relevant? Did he register? Did she purchase? Did he call the AdWords-specific phone number and chat with a rep? THIS is what matters 98% of the time, IMHO.

    P.S. — The “accidense” phenomena, however, is interesting! As a publisher, I love it. As an advertiser / advertiser-consultant, though, I think it’s not a very sound policy to have so much clickable space.

  4. Adam says:

    For a great many advertisers, length-on-site isn’t an important metric. For one of my biggest-spending AdWords client, for instance, the only thing of importance is how many sales or leads are obtained. Weirdly, we’ve found that the conversion of keywords is often seemingly random:
    - “Buy Widget” yields great results.
    - “Buy Widgets” yields awful results.
    - “Buy a Widget” yields okay results

    When it comes down to it, though, how often is site-time really relevant? Did he register? Did she purchase? Did he call the AdWords-specific phone number and chat with a rep? THIS is what matters 98% of the time, IMHO.

    P.S. — The “accidense” phenomena, however, is interesting! As a publisher, I love it. As an advertiser / advertiser-consultant, though, I think it’s not a very sound policy to have so much clickable space.

  5. Adam says:

    For a great many advertisers, length-on-site isn’t an important metric. For one of my biggest-spending AdWords client, for instance, the only thing of importance is how many sales or leads are obtained. Weirdly, we’ve found that the conversion of keywords is often seemingly random:
    - “Buy Widget” yields great results.
    - “Buy Widgets” yields awful results.
    - “Buy a Widget” yields okay results

    When it comes down to it, though, how often is site-time really relevant? Did he register? Did she purchase? Did he call the AdWords-specific phone number and chat with a rep? THIS is what matters 98% of the time, IMHO.

    P.S. — The “accidense” phenomena, however, is interesting! As a publisher, I love it. As an advertiser / advertiser-consultant, though, I think it’s not a very sound policy to have so much clickable space.

  6. Adam says:

    For a great many advertisers, length-on-site isn’t an important metric. For one of my biggest-spending AdWords client, for instance, the only thing of importance is how many sales or leads are obtained. Weirdly, we’ve found that the conversion of keywords is often seemingly random:
    - “Buy Widget” yields great results.
    - “Buy Widgets” yields awful results.
    - “Buy a Widget” yields okay results

    When it comes down to it, though, how often is site-time really relevant? Did he register? Did she purchase? Did he call the AdWords-specific phone number and chat with a rep? THIS is what matters 98% of the time, IMHO.

    P.S. — The “accidense” phenomena, however, is interesting! As a publisher, I love it. As an advertiser / advertiser-consultant, though, I think it’s not a very sound policy to have so much clickable space.

  7. Adam says:

    For a great many advertisers, length-on-site isn’t an important metric. For one of my biggest-spending AdWords client, for instance, the only thing of importance is how many sales or leads are obtained. Weirdly, we’ve found that the conversion of keywords is often seemingly random:
    - “Buy Widget” yields great results.
    - “Buy Widgets” yields awful results.
    - “Buy a Widget” yields okay results

    When it comes down to it, though, how often is site-time really relevant? Did he register? Did she purchase? Did he call the AdWords-specific phone number and chat with a rep? THIS is what matters 98% of the time, IMHO.

    P.S. — The “accidense” phenomena, however, is interesting! As a publisher, I love it. As an advertiser / advertiser-consultant, though, I think it’s not a very sound policy to have so much clickable space.

  8. Mike Dimmick says:

    AdSense sometimes suffers from the semantics problem as much as the search engine does. I read the webcomic ‘Shortpacked’ by David Willis (www.shortpacked.com) which is basically about a group of staff in a toy shop. Willis is obsessed with Transformers toys.

    Yesterday I saw adverts for _electrical_ transformers…

  9. Mike Dimmick says:

    AdSense sometimes suffers from the semantics problem as much as the search engine does. I read the webcomic ‘Shortpacked’ by David Willis (www.shortpacked.com) which is basically about a group of staff in a toy shop. Willis is obsessed with Transformers toys.

    Yesterday I saw adverts for _electrical_ transformers…

  10. Mike Dimmick says:

    AdSense sometimes suffers from the semantics problem as much as the search engine does. I read the webcomic ‘Shortpacked’ by David Willis (www.shortpacked.com) which is basically about a group of staff in a toy shop. Willis is obsessed with Transformers toys.

    Yesterday I saw adverts for _electrical_ transformers…

  11. Mike Dimmick says:

    AdSense sometimes suffers from the semantics problem as much as the search engine does. I read the webcomic ‘Shortpacked’ by David Willis (www.shortpacked.com) which is basically about a group of staff in a toy shop. Willis is obsessed with Transformers toys.

    Yesterday I saw adverts for _electrical_ transformers…

  12. Mike Dimmick says:

    AdSense sometimes suffers from the semantics problem as much as the search engine does. I read the webcomic ‘Shortpacked’ by David Willis (www.shortpacked.com) which is basically about a group of staff in a toy shop. Willis is obsessed with Transformers toys.

    Yesterday I saw adverts for _electrical_ transformers…

  13. Mike Dimmick says:

    AdSense sometimes suffers from the semantics problem as much as the search engine does. I read the webcomic ‘Shortpacked’ by David Willis (www.shortpacked.com) which is basically about a group of staff in a toy shop. Willis is obsessed with Transformers toys.

    Yesterday I saw adverts for _electrical_ transformers…

  14. Dave Carpe says:

    oh, interesting – i haven’t noticed that because when i use elGoog i don’t see any ads at all (happens if you use it only in firefox with customizegoogle.com running ;)

    …but you should know that you’re up to number 13 for ‘naked’ as of this evening (and holding number 14 with an indent!) – behind the bare naked ladies BUT ahead of the ‘naked dancing llama homepage’ (congratulations, you should definitely call your fam right away, this is big news)

  15. Dave Carpe says:

    oh, interesting – i haven’t noticed that because when i use elGoog i don’t see any ads at all (happens if you use it only in firefox with customizegoogle.com running ;)

    …but you should know that you’re up to number 13 for ‘naked’ as of this evening (and holding number 14 with an indent!) – behind the bare naked ladies BUT ahead of the ‘naked dancing llama homepage’ (congratulations, you should definitely call your fam right away, this is big news)

  16. Dave Carpe says:

    oh, interesting – i haven’t noticed that because when i use elGoog i don’t see any ads at all (happens if you use it only in firefox with customizegoogle.com running ;)

    …but you should know that you’re up to number 13 for ‘naked’ as of this evening (and holding number 14 with an indent!) – behind the bare naked ladies BUT ahead of the ‘naked dancing llama homepage’ (congratulations, you should definitely call your fam right away, this is big news)

  17. Dave Carpe says:

    oh, interesting – i haven’t noticed that because when i use elGoog i don’t see any ads at all (happens if you use it only in firefox with customizegoogle.com running ;)

    …but you should know that you’re up to number 13 for ‘naked’ as of this evening (and holding number 14 with an indent!) – behind the bare naked ladies BUT ahead of the ‘naked dancing llama homepage’ (congratulations, you should definitely call your fam right away, this is big news)

  18. Dave Carpe says:

    oh, interesting – i haven’t noticed that because when i use elGoog i don’t see any ads at all (happens if you use it only in firefox with customizegoogle.com running ;)

    …but you should know that you’re up to number 13 for ‘naked’ as of this evening (and holding number 14 with an indent!) – behind the bare naked ladies BUT ahead of the ‘naked dancing llama homepage’ (congratulations, you should definitely call your fam right away, this is big news)

  19. [...] Every single original content use of the word “Accidense” I can find: Scoble Randy Morin Henning Lange eWealth Forum Posted: November 29, 2005 by Nathan Weinberg in: [...]

  20. [...] Reading this, I realised that Scoble perhaps does not use mouse gestures, since he refers to a “Back” button I can’t remember the last time I clicked on one of those! Maybe when I last used IE. Internet Explorer does not have it. Opera has it by default (perhaps since forever). You can download an extension for Firefox. I use Firefox most of the time, and the All-in-One Gestures is always the first extension that I install. I can’t live without that thing… go back, forward, open a new tab, close a tab… i rarely need any of those buttons. And it’s such a pain dragging my mouse to those buttons. [...]