Forum Moderators: martinibuster
In June, I started very aggressively filtering junk ads from our site. Ringtone ads, MFAs, "offer/reward" sites, etc. Fortunately there are enough advertisers in our spaces that I could do this. If it didn't work out, I figured I could always remove the list...
Our numbers for June are showing a 40% improvement in earnings per click over May, with a simultaneous 28% decrease in the number of actual clicks we received across all of our sites. Actual traffic (page impressions) only increased by 10% over last month.
Based on these numbers, I'm sold on the concept of filtering the junk! If our new earnings ratios hold steady for a few more months, I'll try perform another experiment in August and pull the entire list for the month and let all the junk pour back into our blocks. Will be interesting to watch the numbers then, to see if it confirms my findings a second time.
For those of you in the US, have a great holiday weekend!
It is not feasible to verify all pages and regions.
In my case, I would review that about once a week or upon a trigger event such as a suddent deline in earning. It takes me about 1 hour for each execrise to check for new spammers, I would only verify those best earning pages and top 3 regions that brought most traffics to my site.
in my sector, the biggest offenders got filtered out initally, so it's been a simple maintenance function after that... i don't even bother looking for 'em unless i see a site-targeted ad showing up in my stats, because it means that the value of a page has fallen enuf to let the mfa's in.
the preview tool is a waste of time, because there isn't enuf room in the filter to cover all of the mfa's served around the world... the best that you can hope for is to clean up your biggest geographical audience.
Have you calculated your earnings per hour for filtering ads? It must be a labor-intensive process, especially if you're using the preview tool to see what ads are being displayed outside your own region.
Nope. Because mainly what we're earning on the site each day right now would just about get me a McDonalds lunch, and that's about it. I earn about 100x per hour in my day job in what I do from my sites. (but hopefully someday that will change with enough hard work!)
And also, because all the code for our sites was built from scratch from the ground up. Meaning -- it's buggy as hell because I haven't been a programmer in over a decade! ;-) So it *needs* daily checking across its critical pages to make sure everything is working as it should on each and every site. While I'm doing that, I keep an eye out for junk ads, and then just toss them into notepad as I'm working. Later on, I drop them into AdSense.
So, the extra effort for me is trivial. That could be because I don't have a site with 50,000 pages like some folks do. But the numbers really do stand out - 40% CPC increase with 28% fewer clicks, despite a 10% boost in traffic.
We'll see if they hold in July. And then we'll see if they drop in August when I test removing the blocks for a month.
As far as regions - I don't pay attention to that at all for now. What ever I see locally, that's what I filter.
Have a great weekend ...
in my sector, the biggest offenders got filtered out initally, so it's been a simple maintenance function after that... i don't even bother looking for 'em unless i see a site-targeted ad showing up in my stats, because it means that the value of a page has fallen enuf to let the mfa's in.
My experience has been the same. I got really steamed one weekend when I saw one of the ads in my blocks was one of those "offers" sites, and when I investigated them further - found out that independent tests showed that customers who signed up for their offers received over 400 spams a week. I think I probably spent an afternoon vigirously chasing down every MFA I could find, using the &num=100 trick in google.com on some of our core keywords, etc.
Since that first big day, it's mostly been maintenance. Some may have slipped by. Others may have paused their campaigns. And some might be brand new. I'd say I add no more than 5 sites a week into the blocks.
Once I reach 200, I'll leave it be for a while. Once a bit too much junk sneaks in, I'll pick a low-traffic weekend, delete the entire list, and start again from scratch with a very aggressive aftenoon of chasing.
Small cost, for a big potential return, IMO. I hope the numbers stay constant for July, because it would be fun to pull the list in August and see what happens.
Have you calculated your earnings per hour for filtering ads?
I don't know how you'd calculate this exactly, but I have to say that once I rid my site of the worst offenders it's been easy to maintain. I don't spend more than a few minutes every now and then looking for MFA's. These days I'm finding that doing a Google search for my keywords and blocking the MFA's that I see there is the best tool for rooting out MFA's. MFA's don't tend to target geograpically, but adopt a splatter gun approach.
My comment is that the very short time I've spent on blocking ads has repaid me by hundreds of dollars over the last 6 months. It's not even worth trying to calculate it - it's a complete no brainer.
Just to put a perspective on this:-
Most of us log in to check our stats many times a day. This doesn't earn anything. Spend 50% of that time on maintaining the blocl list per day and see how that increases income.
Although this forum helps us increase our earnings, spend 10% of the time we normally spend reading and posting on maintaining the list and I'll bet that most people see an immediate gain of more than 10%, plus the long term effect on smart pricing.
By maintaining I mean just that - keeping the list free of sites that no longer advertise and are no longer on line, and keep out ads we blocked for spurious reasons. I don't mean simply adding to it willy-nilly.
