Tuesday Google announced the introduction of favicons in their text ads. Today we could spot the first examples of the new AdSense text ads including the favicon of the advertiser and look at the first data concerning CTR impact.
Looking on the first stats we found that depending on the image ads vs text ads share of your site the results differ a lot, but for ‘text ads only’ AdSense formats the CTR, hence CPM & earnings, seem to go up by up to 20% with the new favicons. So there will be a nice surprise in the Google Network Revenues when the Q3 Earnings are announced in October.
As they are obviously increasing CTR, you would probably expect Google to enable favicons for AdWords ads on search result pages as well. Unfortunately I think this would help users to distinguish better between ads and organic which would compromise the whole CTR uplift. I’m sure Google tested it as for AdSense ads these favicons make a lot of sense.
Favicon Integration
To define a favicon (Favorite icon) you just need to upload a tiny image to your server that will be shown next to your title in browser tabs and bookmarks, as well as in your text ads. A .ico file will work vor all browsers. If you don’t believe in IE, PNG, GIF and JPEG will work as well. Even animates gifs work pretty well by the way. 😉 There are a lot of tools which help you to transform any image into a suitable favicon.ico. Size of the favicon should be 32×32 px.
After deciding for an image and uploading it just reference it in the head section of your website like this:
Favicons in AdSense Ads,<link rel=”shortcut icon” type=”image/x-icon” href=”/favicon.ico”>
