Filtering unwanted ads -

Might as well give up

[miedmark]

Just learned something that blocking unwanted ads on your site is not that easy after all. With the preview tool you will see ads that will show in your location. If you live in Florida, you'll block your local ads - it's very hard to find out what ads are shown in California or New York or even Canada or other countries. You might as well give up as you will never achieve this. Adwords will let you advertise geographically (even only in your local area).

Not that I am heavily filtering ads (I have maybe 5 sites (might as well remove them)), just wanted to share this.

[incrediBILL]

AH HA! you finally caught on young jedi!

I typically just block the universal junk like ads to eBay, walmart, and whatever or the most blatant branding ads I've ever seen that don't get clicks when I run across them.

I never spend any quality time chasing ads otherwise I'd never get anything done!

It would be another story if AdSense gave us a page to preview ALL advertisements being displayed on our site in the AdSense control panel and let us just check off all the ones we want nothing to do with opposed to scanning the site like rats in a maze chasing cheese.

However, this is a one-sided AdSense relationship and the only tools you get are handicapped just enough you couldn't impact Google's overall income, not anything that allows you to control the quality of ads or set your base income for any ads, nothing useful like that as it might impact whether or not they get free steaks for dinner at the Googleplex next week!

[edited by: incrediBILL at 2:25 am (utc) on Feb. 26, 2006]

[Nitrous]

I think you dont understand how filtering works.

You filter the URL so it makes no difference where or what region/country that you are blocking or blocking from.

Personally I block all sites that exist on advertising alone or that dont directly sell a real product. And so should everyone else! It stops freeloaders and increases everyones earnings aND reduces advertising costs.

[miedmark]

yound jedi

Thank you.

It would be another story if AdSense gave us a page to preview ALL advertisements being displayed

Will never happen, adwords is to much of a changing world (everyday) - yet another reason why our ecmp's change.

[miedmark]

Nitrous - impossible. You might think you're achieving something. Do what I did, drive 500 miles to a different state (like I did) and have a look at your site - totally new world. I hope you understand.

[incrediBILL]

I think you dont understand how filtering works.

And you obviously don't know how the geo-targetting of AdSense works.

I'm the SF Bay Area and looking on websites about Texas topics I'm shown some ads geo-targetted to the SF Bay Area and not all Texas ads, which is what the point of the OP in that you may never see ALL ads that AdSense will show as it weights it by your geography.

If you want to see other ads you have to resort to using anonymous proxy servers located in that geography and VOILA! you see other ads you'll never see.

Try it, you'll be amazed.

drive 500 miles to a different state

Google up a list of proxy servers in that state and save on gas

[jomaxx]

So the lesson is that if you can't do something 100% perfectly then you shouldn't try to do it at all? I disagree, but if you feel you need to pre-check every single ad that appears on your site when viewed from anywhere in the world, then maybe AdSense isn't for you.

[miedmark]

Google up a list of proxy servers in that state and save on gas

Yes, I'm aware of how proxies work. Imagine if you had to do that for the entire world - just not worth the time. And the trip had nothing to do with this - just visiting family.

[Key_Master]

You don't need a proxy list. Just a good site search engine.

[ann]

Fastclick has a long list of everchanging ads for all the creatives they serve up so that you can set it to choose for yourself or have them do it for you. If they do it you still have the option to opt out of any certain advertiser, such as the site hanging colonize, that you wish.

It would be great if Google would provide such a tool.

[mikeybee]

what is the point, trying to filter ebay ads, and looking at the shortcut to get the URL, it has some weird domain name serving the ads, yet it states ebay.com in the actual ad on my site?

based on this, there is not much chance of getting rid of the crap that is shown on the site.

[maxgoldie]

mikeybee, you hit it on the head -- that is the single biggest thing that annoys me. It is one of the most popular ways advertisers game the system IMO.

[incrediBILL]

what is the point, trying to filter ebay ads

Because eBay has absolutely nothing to do with my site, so what's your point?

[david_uk]

The point of filtering ads is very simple.

Visitors go to your site for specific information. If the ads are on topic then they are much more likely to click. That's the beauty of adsense - they usually are well targeted.

The point about ebay is that the ads are nonsense. "new and used dead pope's", New and used Buckingham Palace" etc. How on earth is that crap going to increase your site's respectability and income?

In my experience, the worst of the junk ads just shoot worlwide. They don't geotarget, hence I see them here in the UK. I have found that blocking the most persistent ones makes a great difference to income, and I didin't need to move to the USA to find out who they were.

Don't bother with the preview tool, as it shows a sample of ads, and not ones that have actually shown on your site. Block ones that you physically see.

[Nitrous]

Then why is it - if filtering is a waste of time - that when I remove the 200 mfa and other fake search engines and junk and badly targeted ads from my filter, that my earnings fall by around a third consistently from 4k to 2.7k per month? And click through drops by about 20 percent? I have tried this experiment many times. Sometimes for a week, sometimes for a month. Result always very clear.

When I paste them back, we go straight back to normal.

All of these were found using the preview tool for us and uk only. On every one of my 200 pages as often as I get chance. Problem is only that the filter is full!

[elfred]

Then why is it - if filtering is a waste of time - that when I remove the 200 mfa and other fake search engines and junk and badly targeted ads from my filter, that my earnings fall by around a third consistently from 4k to 2.7k per month? And click through drops by about 20 percent? I have tried this experiment many times. Sometimes for a week, sometimes for a month. Result always very clear.

I agree with you. Filtering out anything is usually lost time. I was forced to some heavy filtering on my pages (AdSense helped me) because of "broad" targeting (I illustrate this theory of mine in another thread on this forum). The final result was that all those side-targeted (yes, I meant "side") ads no longer appeared, but since I knew of them because they previously appeared on my pages, the net result was that I was eliminating top paying avertisers going lower and lower the CPC ladder. I just asked AdSense to remove all of those filters.

Do I use competitive ad filtering? Yes, I do: I remove all those websites that use misleading banners and that do nothing more than presenting AdSense, YPN, Chitika and Ebay stuffed pages with the keyword on top of the page. I hope to improve visitors' browsing experience. Even if this would cost me some bucks.

[Nitrous]

Read my reply again. It MADE me much more money by junking the crap!

You seem to have got it backwards!

[mzanzig]

Nitrous,

I could not agree more with you. I have been on a business trip for about two weeks and I could not maintain my daily routine of checking what's happening on my main site. Guess what? EPC and CTR have dropped significantly (EPC down by about 20%, CTR down by about 10%). Only now that I added a few sites to the filter again, things seem to go back to normal again.

But I am facing the same problem as you: my filter list nears 200 entries, and I am wondering what I can possibly do once the list is full.

BTW, it is a good idea to check who's actually behind those blocked sites. I have done the effort, but the results were not too surprising - many identical names/companies show up for the blocked URLs, scattered around the world with the most coming from UK, USA, and Canada. That's why I would love to see a 'block all ads from this advertiser' feature. Ah - wouldn't that be GREAT. See one, and get rid of them all with just one activated checkbox.

Especially annoying are advertisers who put a different landing page in the ad copy than in the actual link, obviously obfuscating the real landing page. Google should definitely rule this out.

Also, there should be a rule against landing pages that carry no content, e.g. the target URL landingpage.com/mycity should -when entered manually- result in a valid page, not an empty page or a 404.

But then again, does Google care? I don't think so.

[Nitrous]

well they should because it is causing people to start getting adsense blindness! I do it already. I usually click the back button as soon as I land on an adsense site unless its really well done without hidden and blended ads. The average user will do the same eventually meaning less income for all of us.

[europeforvisitors]

I don't see many junk ads on my travel site, probably because there are plenty of legitimate ads for my topic, but I saw nothing but ads for vanity presses, phony poetry contests, and other scum when I had AdSense ads on my writing-related site. I didn't try to filter those ads, however; instead, I stopped using AdSense on the site. Playing whack-a-mole with sleazy ads wouldn't have been worth my investment of time, and it would have been futile since--thanks to geotargeting--I wouldn't have been able to see or filter sleazy ads outside my country or region.

[moTi]

largely different experiences with competitive filter, eh? ;)
i got the counter-example. at first, i also thought that kicking out ebay ads would be the most senseful thing to do. but stats prove me wrong regularly. i can't believe it, but if i let ebay (and the handful other 'crap ads') back in again, my ctr jumps up considerably. click earnings unvaried. so i tend to let adsense decide, which ads perform best and only when i really can't take it, i kick something out. what this does to your site reputation is another question..

[maxgoldie]

Nitrous is exactly right -- those useless and misleading MFA ads *will* cause ad blindness en masse across the Internet to all Google ads -- if Google doesn't tighten things up. They will hurt legitimate publishers, advertisers and G themselves.

Why does Google allow advertisers to create useless ads on MFA pages in the first place? The short term profit is not worth it IMO.

[DamonHD]

Hi,

I filter the eBay and dump-the-dictionary shopping clones, and people/sites that seem not to believe in ethics, but otherwise do my best to help AS choose well by itself, eg by adding specific meta keywords for each page, and dropping ads on pages with poor CTR.

Playing whack-a-mole is just not sensible when there is a queue of positive things to be done, eg more content to be added.

Rgds

Damon

[Scurramunga]

Had the same experience as the previous poster, (Mzanzig) as I too had recently returned back from a trip away. During my time away my daily routine of weeding out the scum sites was interrupted.

Upon my return, I had discovered that earnings had already started declining, so now I have taken to the trashing all the new rubbish sites once again.

[maxgoldie]

I wonder which is better:

1) go the "whack-the-mole" route, and filter out as many MFA ads as possible?

or

2) try to line pages with as many higher paying relevant keywords as possible to attract better ads?
(assuming that MFAs bid on low paying keywords)

[Nitrous]

What would be beter for all would be if google banned all the MFAs, directories, fake search engines, newsgroup "copies", etc etc. But then we would need to get yahoo to do the same because half the crap sites use those ads...

[Scurramunga]

I wonder which is better:
.....try to line pages with as many higher paying relevant keywords as possible to attract better ads?
(assuming that MFAs bid on low paying keywords)

My belief is that targeting higher keywords whilst ignoring the MFAs will not help us. Unless we take a united stand against MFA's and sit back allowing the practice of MFA targeting of legit publishers (via adwords) we will find an increase of MFA sites within our respective niches, as already is happening. It is very disheartening to me when I find the number of publishers within my niche has become so over run by MFA's and other junk sites.

This combined increase will create an artificial oversupply of publishers (legit publishers + MFA's) and we all know what happens in an oversupply situation.

Eventually ad blindness will set in as the average visitor will know better than to click on a useless ad link that will only lead to another (possibly useless) adlink.

I have always been ad blind. Even before I became a publisher I would always avoid following links that I suspected were paid inclusions (google sponsored or otherwise) Why? because I always belived that the ads were less relevant and less credible. The few times that I did find myself landing on a page full of sponsered links I knew that the best option was a quick exit. I didn't have any real knowledge about the way these link programs or how they worked yet it didn't take my eye very long to recognise them in their various forms and to totally ignore them. So why should the average surfer be any different if they continually come up against useless links leading to more useless links?

My point here is that as publishers of sponsered links we owe it to our visitors to strive harder in providing useful links to our visitors, not only for the credibility of our website but for the credibility of adsense and it future.

[EarleyGirl]

My filter list is full. I've added so many ebay sites. For some reason those sites (and MFAs) just really get me. But I can't possibly add them all. There are far too many. I have to pick and choose when I see a site that really annoys me - a game of which one is the lesser of the evils. It's a pain. I love the filter list suggestions another poster made earlier. But I do feel like I'm playing whack-a-mole. I have 3 sites (different topics) using AdSense. The 200 limit adds up quickly. So now I have to decide which is worse - ebay type sites or MFAs...

[Scurramunga]

I have 3 sites (different topics) using AdSense. The 200 limit adds up quickly

I have had the filter quickly reach it's 200 limit whilst trying to block MFAs and ebay on just the one site