Forum Moderators: martinibuster
- EPC as it should be
- eCPM holding
- Earnings as expected
Historically, doing this takes all 3 metrics into a nose dive, been testing for years, but being always hopeful, I am testing to see if Google is finally getting its act together, and freeing me to work on my site.
Will monitor over few days and see if it holds, ideally my earnings should see a positive jump (or continue the normal wave), crossing my fingers but not holding my breath.
Stats so far:
CTR: 10% less
eCPM: 15% lower
Earnings: Around expected given normal fluctuations and seasonal factors.
From only 1 1/2 weeks of testing I am unable to determine with certainty the full effect of a clean filter, but still here are my conclusions so far:
Conclusion 1: Effect on earnings
Blocking MFA for a well established site could have minimal impact on earnings, I would still recommend it for small, low traffic and new to AdSense sites
Conclusion 2: Limited resources
If blocking takes anything close to 5% of your daily work then you are better served leaving the list empty and improve the quality & quantity of your content or up the ante of your portfolio by building new web sites.
If blocking is a weekly half hour job for you then by all means go for it, but use common sense and other advice in this forum when you do.
Conclusion 3: An exercise in futility
The more I work on blocking the more I realize how much a loosing battle it is, the best I can hope for is minimize the MFA shown on my site, but we all know that extermination is impossible even with a 1000 entry filter allowance.
Conclusion 4: I am back to blocking starting next week.
Although the effect might be minimal, I am resorting back to blocking as during this test I have been wondering everyday if I could be serving my visitors and doing much better financially if I blocked MFA, the only difference is that I will be giving blocking much less time from now on.
the ctr is interesting, but what we really need to know is what happened to the epc during the test period.
EPC: No Change
EPC has been actually an eye opener indicator, years ago when I joined AdSense, EPC was heavily fluctuating daily, I blocked, EPC rose, cleared filter, EPC fell..
Also EPC change within the same day fluctuated in patters:
Years back, I start the Google day with high EPC, and end the day at a much lower EPC, the day to day fluctuation was relatively high, after removing ads from non performing pages, the pattern reversed, EPC starts lower or normal, fluctuates during the day, but always ends up at the same exact figure at the end of most days.
Now during this test, EPC has not been affected at all, and has shown the same pattern as with blocking MFA.
Which leads to my previous conclusion that the EPC for a new or lower traffic site is more unstable than that of an older or high traffic site, also leading to my suggesting that possibly new to AdSense sites need to block MFA at least till they observe some EPC stability day to day.
The 11th day was:
CTR: Low
EPC: Good
eCPM: Good
Earnings: Above average
CTR: High
EPC: Very low (but I know why, there was a click attack)
eCPM: Normal
Earnings: Normal
Due to recent announcement by Google and their effort to clean up advertiser landing pages and conversion, I think I might want to extend this faith marathon and renew the lease on the empty filter, who knows, this test might be the right move in the right time?
Will keep the usual hawk's eye on the metrics and allow the test to run a little longer, not having to look at MFA daily (even if artificial) has improved my state of mind and I really do not miss the adsense preview tool.
[edited by: Hobbs at 11:14 pm (utc) on July 13, 2006]
Friday (yesterday) was dismal, but so is every Friday.
I am thinking more and more that since Google is doing something about MFA, and with advertisers dropping off, it is wise to run with the filter on empty, thus allowing the ones left to compete for my space.
If you don't want this thread updated, just tell me to shut up and maybe I'll listen ;-)
Thanks for all you useful info thus far ;)
Your observations about about Google doing a lot of clean up appears to me to be correct. BUT there still is more innovation out there.
I am thinking more and more that since Google is doing something about MFA, and with advertisers dropping off, it is wise to run with the filter on empty, thus allowing the ones left to compete for my space.
I was thinking the same. However, with my filter being quite fine tuned, I am afraid that even more junk will show up. Mind you, it's not that MFAs are gone; rather genuine advertisers have been dropping off.
A quick scan of my site shows a vast improvement over last month and last year, also my numbers are holding, MFA can't afford my current EPC, I have to admit that I am more surprised than anyone else that my EPC has not plummeted the moment I cleared my filter, but hey, let's see how long it will take.
Which reminds me of 21_blue, where is 21_blue?
that is a good point... i think that the mfa'ers will soon figure out a way around it, tho.
since we are thinking that a good epc is pricing the trash right off of our sites, it brings up the question of how many mfa's did you see on that dismal friday?
why was friday bad? low epc or low traffic?
>> how many mfa's did you see on that dismal friday?
I don't check for MFA daily anymore, rather enjoy the time working on my site, I only scan my pages if there is an unusual fluctuation in my monitored metrics.
>> why was friday bad? low epc or low traffic?
Every Friday is bad for me, with or without MFA filter, it's a site specific trend.
[edited by: Hobbs at 7:12 pm (utc) on July 15, 2006]
The 16th went in flying colors,
Good CTR
Excellent EPC, eCPM, and earnings.
I am amazed I could have a day like the 16th with an empty filter.
Hobbs: thanks for the experiment and reportage!
I keep my filter list very small, only filtering out the known egregious shopping/auction sites and one or two sites run by people of suspect ethics!
I general I think that we have to let G do the MFA filtering for us else AS is just not worth the candle. An hour lost to my consultancy business on mind-numbing filter-list maint is several days' worth of AS revenue, for example.
So I'm very heartened to hear that I may never have to worry much about "dead cat" ads again...
Rgds
Damon
Something interesting happened that's worth adding:
Sat 22nd Was an unusually slow day
Good traffic
Low EPC
Low eCPM
I was thinking now SP caught up with me and I've been hit
Planned to refill my filter bit was distracted by more important matters, and later forgot about it.
Sunday 23rd is an excellent day
Good everything.
Now if I had blocked yesterday, I would have concluded that today's jump is due to the blocking, which is very false.
Conclusion:
Uncharacteristic jumps make it impossible to attribute the performance to any reason, even with very good historical data, it is impossible to be certain beyond doubt that any parameter change is due to any one factor.
Resistance is futile!
i think that the mfa'ers will soon figure out a way around it
Yes, I'm sure that the MFA's must be gnashing their teeth and doing plenty of wailing right now :). They will of course be trying to work out some way of getting back. But it's difficult to see how they can manage it if they have been priced out.
They can of course improve the quality of landing pages, but that will require work. Also, if you have content, then you are likely to get lower clicks/CTR, and returns are going to be less, hence less profit anyway. A landing page of a solitary ad in the centre of the page is going to get a higher ctr than an ad block on a page of content. The site that tried that trick in my niche died from search on day 1 of QS :) :) :)
The pages that use tricks to disable the back button, or launch the ads in separate windows without navigation buttons should be looked for the by Adsense account zapping bot as mentioned in the article EFV posted recently.
Since I started blocking a year ago, my epc has been very good, and has effectively kept the MFA's to a manageable number over that time. I think that as long as Google can develop strategies to keep MFA's priced out, then the quality of Adsense will rise giving benefits to all advertisers, publishers and restoring Google's reputation, which will in itself pay dividends.
