Forum Moderators: martinibuster
The ads I saw for 10 days in Florida were barely comparable to what I saw in California and when I got home I saw the same old ads again.
The point of this is unless you check ads in every state and every country that you get traffic from you're just wasting your time chasing ads that YOU SEE from your desktop, totally worthless except in your local area.
You have to break out of your local thinking and skip the AdSense Preview tool too, think of Google AdSense as the worldwide dynamic beast that it is and you're only seeing a small snapshot of the global ads being shown to visitors.
Heck, you can only block 200 so it's a waste of time as there could be 200 in every state.
Don't get me wrong, I blocked about 20 of the most vile ads I've ever seen so I do agree with blocking ads, but chasing bad ads is a global adventure that you would be best served by working on your site and not wasting time chasing as it's an endless chase, you cannot win a global confrontation that happens daily on your website.
The ads will die if they don't pay well, that's the algorithm making the call as only the best paying stay on the network according to Google so let it do it's job and build your site.
Give us the firepower and we'll decimate the MFAs. The benefits will be two-fold, Google will have a great high quality ad network and we'll all make more money and provide a more valuable service to the end user.
Don't forget Google will have a much more viable ad network and will make more in the long run. So how about it Google? We need some good pollution control tools, to scrub those MFAs out. Human judgement is much better at picking out MFAs than an algorithm. We know this simply because in this forum, there is so much debate over what constitutes an MFA. Let the people decide.
Give us the firepower and we'll decimate the MFAs.
The MFA discussions are somewhat bizarre. Many publishers seem to be under the impression that Google wants to remove MFAs, but just does not know how to deal with this. Is that so?
I think they know the problem, and they know potential solutions, but they just are unable to make the decision to implement such tools.
As every large corporation, Google has various teams working to reach their individual goals. I bet there are different teams for Adwords and Adsense. Each team, however, has different goals, e.g. Adwords to increase REVENUE, Adsense to increase AD REAL ESTATE.
Maybe they award stock options to reach these goals? In this case I would not hold me breath waiting for better tools. Why?
Adsense-Team
Just cares about increasing ad space, not about how this space is going to be used. They will only be able to bark up if they are unable to replace publishers who leave the program by new publishers.
Adwords-Team
The Adwords team is just focused on monetizing the ad space, with the overwhelming majority coming from Search and Adsense. They certainly have no interest in losing ANY customer, not even MFAs. They just look at the money.
Feature Request Meeting
Now, just imagine a meeting with Adsense and Adwords managers. Adsense manager: "The publishers want better tools to block the MFA crap that recently flooded Adwords. They want bigger filter lists. I can understand them. It really makes our ads look cheap." Adwords manager: "If we block MFAs, we'll lose 30% of our revenues pronto. Can't we limit the filter to 50?"
The sad news is that we need either (1) intervention of top-level executives -or- (2) real competitors like Yahoo! or MSN, providing us BETTER tools to deal with the spam.
As every large corporation, Google has various teams working to reach their individual goals
This is an interesting perspective - in effect that Google policy emerges from the micro-interactions of individual interests in the organisation. I hadn't seen it like that - Google seems to be more in control of itself.
Rather, I see it as a more deliberate choice - the corporation equivalent of choosing neoliberalism over keynesianism, of deferring to market forces rather than being interventionist. In that metaphor, publishers' calls for tools to combat MFAs could be viewed as protectionist, which a neoliberal approach would oppose.
That is, it may be a conscious choice by Google to have a few global rules, but then let the market forces work themselves out. If that is the case then blocking MFAs as a primary strategy may bring short-term success, but will ultimately result in failure through lost opportunity and not adapting to the market.
In a mini-neoliberal-economy, the best chances of success are not to protect one's market (ie: blocking), but to apply entrepreneurial and innovative skills in order to compete and win (ie: positive action, through page, content and ad design, that prices MFAs off your site).
The hard fact is that adsense (and consequently Google) is underpinned by financial transactions whereby an end consumer flexes the cash and buys something from an advertiser. Therefore for the business to work, adsense as the middle man needs primarily people selling actual products to customers that want to buy them, and make a financial transaction. Without this basic requirement, the whole edifice crumbles. RIP Google Inc.
What do MFA's actually do? Do they have anything to actually sell? Nothing, and nothing are the answers. Yes, people click on the ads, but as many of them lead to pages where there are more ads leading to more ads you have a circle whereby money moves from one MFA to the other and back again with Google as the middle man. NOBODY IS BUYING ANYTHING. They exist purely as a layer of un-necessary middlemen taking a cut out of the advertisers budget for what? Oh - that would be nothing then! Advertisers don't need them - nor do we. Google will eventually reaslise they don't need them either.
So what happens if you take advertisers selling products and customers flexing the plastic to buy them out of the equation, or marginalise them? Think about it for a moment.
We are currently at the point where a lot of Google searches turn up MFA's in the top spots, and the ads on the right are mostly MFA's - let alone all the crappy ads they show in content. Whilst it seems that Google is currently marginalising advertisers with products to sell, and customers to buy them, the situation can't be permanent. The bubble of people clicking on mfa's leading to other sites of nothing but mfa's and back is not sustaneable and will eventually burst.
I'm not suggesting it's about to happen tomorrow, or that it will happen overnight. But at some point Google will eventually reaslise that it needs retailers who need customers more than it needs MFA's.
Yes, there will always be people that scam the system as MFA's currently do - nobody can deny this. Google at some point will act on the fact it has to keep the scammers in check, or at least to a percentage that enables the real business to continue.
MFA's offer retailing advertisers nothing - they just zap their budgets. Advertisers are ONLY interested in selling to the end consumer - having Google as a middle man brokering the deal is necessary, but do advertisers really want (or need) many more middlemen (MFA's) taking a cut of their profits? We have already seen various organisations being set up to fight click fraud on behalf of advertisers, how long before we see see something similar set up to protect advertisers from MFA's?
Currently it might seem to some that blocking MFA's seems like cutting off the heads of the Hydra, but does anyone seriously doubt that at some point Google are going to have to deal with the problem? Most of us who block MFA's succesfully have seen increases in cpc, bottom line cash, and I can say that I have seen an increase in visitors returning.
[edited by: glitterball at 5:29 pm (utc) on April 8, 2006]
Rather than worrying so much about MFAs your time is probably better spent working on your own site(s) and skills.
It takes a few hours per month to use the preview tool for uk, canada, us on all of my pages to do this.
Apart from anything else like the sheer satisfation of dumping freeloaders, its FAR more profitable than adding a third more traffic or a third more pages!
What you say does not make sense. And thats before you consider the damage to adsense and future ad blindness. Or your own traffic not returning because your links scammed them! Or the fact that an advertisers budget is finite and you are sharing it with these freeloaders, or that advertisers now see the whole content network as a scam and bid less or turn off content network completely!
Think.
I started blocking MFA's last June, and in that time I have seen EPC rise to nearly three times what it was when I started blocking. It took two months to recover fully, and the monthly average EPC has been stable (within a couple of cents either way) ever since. I know TOS prevents me from mentioning the figure directly, but to give some rough idea, it hovers somewhere around the UK retirement age for women (in cents of course). Prior to blocking, I was getting somewhere between the age it is legal to drink alchohol in the UK, and in most of the US.
Yes, I can (and do) work on my site adding content and promoting it. Everybody should. But if you are concerned about maximising your income, you also need to have a strategy for maximising EPC. Providing your visitors with well targeted ads that are relevant, and pay well is how you achieve this. And you do this by dumping MFA's. You do have to do this, because Google certainly aren't going to provide any help - even though it would earn them more money.
You can add as many pages as you like, but if you are only earning the peanuts MFA's pay for clicks on them, you are missing out BIG TIME. It's worth splitting the time you have to a) work on the site, b) uphold the quality and integrity of the adverts and thus increase EPC and repeat visitors.
"Concentrate on your site and let Google worry about MFA's"
Been feeding some of them poison content and getting them busted and it's much easier than chasing their ads as it's all automatic and they willingly take the poison from my site.
Gotta love the greedy little pigs.
Been feeding some of them poison content and getting them busted and it's much easier than chasing their ads as it's all automatic and they willingly take the poison from my site.
Hey Bill, I'm interested in your poisoning techniques. What do you do? Something along the lines of setting up RSS Feeds with text that says "click my Adsense ads", perhaps? Just curious.
which is why adsense support will, in the end, forward your mfa/untargeted ad garbage complaints to the adwords people... because in the end, there isn't anything that adsense support can do about it, since this problem was created by the adwords people.
the sector you are in can make a difference in whether or not there are regional differences in mfa's being served... afaik, it's not an issue for my main sites.
I have a persistant MFA that I've blocked. The landing page consists of one adlinks block masquerading as site navigation, one adsense block masquerading as content, and another adsense block at the bottom of the page. That's it - no content whatsoever.
According to Adsense tos, this site does not conform, yet adsense support have failed to do anything about it - not even stopping them from disabling the back button despite several emails from myself and others over the course of several months about the site.
I've also complained (as publisher and advertiser) to adwords support about the ad itself, and the landing page. The quality scores algorithm should make sure that this ad would either be charged a lot to appear above genuine ads, or it dissapeared without trace. I can't believe the MFA pays over and above real advertisers to appear, so the quality score algo simply does not work.
When I dropped my blocklist recently to see what happened, this MFA was the first to reappear and remove my well paying ads. So, I emailed adsense and adwords again, along with the thread from this forum and the details of my regular ads that had been dropped in favour of it, and guess what - no reply from adwords. Although I did get a personal solution from adsense, the darned landing page is still showing ads, and it's still using adwords to drive traffic to it!
....the corporation equivalent of choosing neoliberalism over keynesianism, of deferring to market forces rather than being interventionist. In that metaphor, publishers' calls for tools to combat MFAs could be viewed as protectionist, which a neoliberal approach would oppose.
With respect, I don't totally agree.
The Adsense/Adwords content advertising model is interventionist to some degree, because the supplier (ie publisher) does not have the ability to interact when it comes to setting price. As you already know in a free market demand and supply interact until (equilibrium point) market price is achieved. Sure there is bidding going on on the part of advertisers, however (with Adsense for content) it is not a direct interaction between buyers of ad space and sellers of ad space. To the contrary, in this case Google does intervene by placing a buffer between publishers and advertisers.
That buffer is part of the reason we do not know who pays what and also the reason why we cannot accept or reject based on individual bid price. Google's intervention is further extended if we bring smartpricing into the equation.
I guess I can see your point re: your intervention v's neoliberalism observation, as advertisers do have to bid against each other for position. However the bidding is between Advertisers and Google. Keep in mind also price alone doesn't determine position because Google factors ctr when allocating prime spots for advertisers.
