When we announced our iPhone ad unit back in August, we wrote about taking advantage of javascript and AJAX, but one of the other technologies we were excited about was the touch interface. Most mobile devices have a very limited input mechanism typically taking the form of a direction button. Pretty restrictive…but, with the iPhone people interact with their very own fingers, which allows you to know exactly where the user touches the screen.

We knew we could put together a dynamic ad unit but we also wondered if we could use the touch interface to provide further insight into the user’s interest in the advertisement itself. Could we follow exactly which words within an advertisement attracted attention?

We began serving iPhone ads about a month ago and we are excited to share some of our initial findings. We found that some words in an ad are clicked on more frequently than other words. For example, lets say I have an advertisement that reads:

FREE Apple iPhone Wallpapers

By looking at where users clicked on a given ad, we can show advertisers which particular words are drawing users’ attention, for example:

Click through rate (CTR) is a valuable metric to evaluate your ad, but it only allows you to evaluate the ad copy as a whole. By surfacing which words piqued users’ interests, advertisers have a new tool to help understand their audience and optimize their advertisements. Below are a few more examples of actual AdMob ads:

We hope you find this useful!

Special thanks to Wayne Pan, Ayman Farahat and all of the other folks who helped make this possible.

Donnie Flood – AdMob Engineering Team
Josh Snyder – AdMob Optimization Team