Blocking Advertisers

blocking bad adwords advertisers

[cyanweb]

i've been noticing quite a lot of mis-targeted / poor quality ads recently on some of our sites... and have gone ahead and blocked them... with the result being we salvage some CTR / eCPM

normally blocking ads reduces revenue - but with the latest changes going on it seems to help stop eCPM / CTR from scraping bottom on some sites...

most of what i read here says to stay away from blocking ads and let google sort them...

so i was wondering how many publishers out there are actively using the ad blocking...? and more importantly has it become more necessary lately to use it?

i currently have 48 blocked sites (normally 10)

[Longhaired Genius]

I block like CRAZY. Any off-topic or ethically questionable ad gets blocked. They're my pages, after all.

I can understand why Google lets through ads that are pretty obviously scams or near-scams. They're not the world's nanny. But I don't want those ads on my pages.

[cyanweb]

i never used to have problems with bad quality ads - a few "survey" ads and maybe 1 or 2 competitors... now in 1 week my sites are showing a lot of badly targeted ads, search sites and mostly bad geographic ads...

Google should at least check ads to make sure they are actually geo targeting correctly... like an ad that clearly states "Free California Security Alarms" on it showing up in Sydney Australia is just stupid...

The new "site targeting" option for advertisers is also going to make things difficult for some people... could even be open to abuse = this type of obviously loosely requlated system can be used to hit certain publishers with "ad bombs" aiming to kill their CTR / Reputation / Income...

that may be a little extreme pessimisism... but judging by how all of a sudden earnings can drop by 80% with the addition of a bunch of bad ads it's definitely a worry...

all this means is everyone will need to "police" their sites constantly for crap ads to block... we're going to need more than 200 blocks if it gets any worse...

[hunderdown]

FWIW, I think Google releases new ads periodically, and lets them sink or swim. If they don't work for your site, they should disappear on their own in a day or two. It's just part of the cycle.

I saw an ad for singles on my site yesterday--totally off-topic. They had obviously bid high on unrelated keywords. I didn't block the URL, but it's gone today anyway.

[icedowl]

What really got my goat yesterday is an image ad that appeared on my site. It was simply words on a blue background - and the words were not in ENGLISH! That advertiser immediately landed in my filter list. Bad enough that we get off-topic ads, worse when we can't even understand them.

[cyanweb]

yep - been getting italian ads on our pages as well... never noticed that before...

the fact that poor performing ads eventually dissappear is a good thing - but while they are showing revenue drops... and when every dollar counts it's not a nice feeling...

i notice that some of these adwords scammers have 3-4+ different domains for the same site... so once rotated out they can just plug in another domain...

i do think google will eventually sort these issues out - hopefully soon... it is frustrating as a publisher that we have such limited control over which ads appear on our sites...

[conjo_guam]

I have seen much success without blocking ads.
I only blocked two urls, who are direct competitors. Thats all.
Remaining unrelated ads disappeared in 8 days with slight modifications and wordings on my site.
Hope this helps.
I would strongly suggest, not to block ads, but try tweaking your site content.

Hope this helps.

[cyanweb]

seeing as advertisers can target specific sites - it would be nice in turn to be able to at least block ads based on specific channels...

[europeforvisitors]

Sometimes I'll block an ad that's wildly off-topic. But often I won't bother, because I know there will be many more where it came from. (If I ran a Web site on Paris, Kentucky and kept getting ads for Paris, France, trying to block every "Paris hotels" and "Paris rentals" for Paris, France would be a hopeless endeavor.)

Another complicating factor is Google's geotargeting. If you live in New York, for example, you won't see ads that are served only to residents of Britain, Australia, Germany, etc. (You could try to check for inappropriate ads around the world with the preview tool, but who's got time?)