Remember a long while back when Telus went nutty with a Google Adsense campaign? I have a feeling that Dell is about to do the same, once again targeting Canadian IPs. When I checked up on my blog last night, I noticed this ad.
What I pasted here is a screencap, so don’t bother trying to click on it. I noticed a similar ad at John Chow’s site (also a screencap):
To make things even stranger, all of the ads on my site became unclickable (my mouse pointer didn’t transform into the “hand”). Not just Adsense either, but also the AuctionAds. This was only the case when one of the cryptic Dell ads was showing. If Adsense served up a different ad, within an individual post for example, then all the ads would become “live” again.
Is Dell brewing up something huge? We’re probably going to find out soon.
UPDATE: It seems that this “unclickable” problem only occurs in Firefox, because when I tried viewing my page in IE, the ads became clickable again. Am I the only one having this issue?
That’s indeed a pretty weird ad from Dell.
Definitely strange. Thanks for the “breaking news” even if does not turn out to be anything…
I have these Ads on my site too…
Possibly it’s a new marketing technique, pretend that they’re just testing it out, so people click on it because they find it strange…
I mean, why waste money on Ads that say “This is a test ad”?
i’d almost assume someone in their PPC dept forgot to click “pause campaign” after set-up. oops! 😀
That could be an expensive mistake. 😛
This might have been a firefox issue though, I experienced similar behavior in firefox but not in IE.