[thenomad]

A minor point here - from practical experience, if a website owner does indeed carefully select and test ads, there's no guarantee at all that the annoying ads won't be found to perform better.

Often, a LOT better.

The same applies to ad placement. Just because you - or most users - find an ad layout obtrusive, doesn't mean it wasn't carefully split-tested and kicked the ass of every less-obtrusive layout. Certainly, the floating banner at the bottom of my 400k unique/mo website outperformed anything thrown against it 2:1, despite being annoying.

[jiggy2011]

Is this just tracking ad clicks or is it tracking actual conversions on something?

When I get a really annoying ad I often try and click on anything that I think might make it go away and the ads often seem to interpret that as a click and redirect me to the target page.

[dpark]

Yeah, those are super-obnoxious, and frankly user-hostile. I'm not sure why advertisers don't consider that click-fraud.

I was on some page the other day that had a popover ad that looked kind of like this:

  B B B B B B B B B B
  B B C C C C C C B B
  B B C C C C C C B B
  B B A A A A A A B B
  B B A A A A A A B B
  B B C C C C C C B B
  B B C C C C C C B B
  B B C C C C C C B B
  B B B B B B B B B B

Here the elements are Ad, Background, and Content. Everything except the content was treated as click target for the content.

[thenomad]

The example I mention was clicks on a CPC platform, but the EPC from the ad remained higher than any other option for 9 months - long enough for high accidental clickthrough rates to be noted and corrected for.

Another blogger I know has tested layouts and settled on the same floating banner for his Clickbank ads - thus, conversion-tracked.