Do you Ban Ads, Which to Ban?

Need guidance

[Gernwax]

My Adsense has been performing progressively worse (i know its an oxymoron). Anyway, should i be banning low paying ads and how do you know which are low paying and should be banned?

[HughMungus]

Just banned ebay out of curiosity. I assume that the big websites get better deals in the form of cheaper clicks -- especially since ads appear ABOVE what look like more-relevant ads.

[mrSEman]

Does your site get alot of ebay ads?

If so I'd be interested to see the result of your curiosity experiment provided you change nothing else as to not spoil the experiment.

[dzcap]

I blocked all ebay, shopping, etc. Those are known low paying clicks I think.

[Gernwax]

Thanks,
I am going to ban ebay.com, shopping.com and kelkoo.com and see how it goes.

[HughMungus]

Does your site get alot of ebay ads?

Yes. It might be because the site in question doesn't really stick to one specific topic and maybe since MediaBot can't figure out how to categorize my site, I get general ads via eBay, shop.com, etc. In other words, maybe it's working the way it's supposed to be working and blocking them is a bad idea. We'll see.

[hunderdown]

If MediaBot can't figure out what to do, help it with section targeting....

[HughMungus]

help it with section targeting....

Help how?

I think I already have. I have 8 main categories and each category has subcategories which actually DO trigger relevant ads for each subcategory.

Really, the very general ads are probably appropriate (and it's not surprising that I'm getting ebay ads since they seem to appear mostly on the pages that are not very topic specific). I kinda just wanted to see what ads would show up if I blocked the advertisers that appeared regularly.

[hunderdown]

HughMungus, I have found that section targeting doesn't just help get rid of of totally off-topic ads sent due to some text on a page. It can actually focus ads that are already broadly matched to more closely match what you consider to be the subject of the page.... May not apply in this case, but from some of what was said earlier I thought it was worth mentioning.

[aeiouy]

I would be curous to see someone do a long-term study on the benefits/issues of blocking advertisers simply based on having low-paying clicks.

My guess is while it shows up okay short-term, over the long-term you would end up losing money.