A clarification on accidental clicks

We understand that there's been some confusion surrounding our recent post about accidental clicks. Specifically, many of our publishers feel that we've been sending mixed messages about placing ads near navigation controls, particularly where site optimization is concerned.

For those of you concerned about our optimization tips, we still recommend integrating your ad units and link units with your page content or navigation, in order to offer your users relevant ads in addition to the content they normally see. Here are a few examples of acceptable implementations:



However, in some instances we've found that publishers have placed their ad units so close to interactive (clickable) content that users accidentally click on the ads instead of the site content. While this type of ad placement may not inherently violate our program policies, it could increase the risk of invalid clicks being generated on the ads, which would be in violation of our policies.

You can understand that increasing the possibility of accidental clicks on your sites is not in the best interest of users or advertisers, and we wanted to make you aware of this risk. This is why we ask that you maintain sufficient distance between your ads and any elements of your page on which users may often click. Because every site is different, we can't provide you with the exact amount of space to put between these page elements. However, we hope you understand our reasoning, and we ask you to use your best judgment so as to avoid possible accidental clicks in the future.

To help you, here's an example of an ad placement that could have a high risk of generating accidental clicks, and which we'd recommend avoiding:



Thanks again for your cooperation and your feedback. If you have any questions about optimization techniques, feel free to visit our tips page