Using URL filter a bad idea?

causes big drops in EPC and CPM

[ionchannels]

I have fiddled with the competitive URL filter in adsense several times and each time I have had the same result within hours of adding or removing sites from the filter: ads become targetted only to obvious keywords on my site and no longer are they varied and tangentially related to my site keywords. It seems that some sort of targetting database is reset when the filter is changed. Every time, ad units start disappearing, generally lower paying ads appear and due to poorer targetting CTR drops, along with EPC and CPM of course. I would recommend that one use the competitive ad filter once to remove competitors and leave it alone after that... has anyone else had the same experience?

[chiboy]

yep had the same experience. My EPC was already averaging a dollar, I visited the url filtering and accidentally deleted all my url filters, I put them back all again but my EPC went down to about 10 to 20 cents. I think it would be around 2 weeks before it goes back to normal.

[hunderdown]

I had been using the filter pretty selectively, only blocking a limited number of sites I found a bit shady.

about a month ago I went through the list and cut it down from about 12 to half that, removing URLs of companies I wasn't crazy about but decided my visitors could figure on their own.

My EPC immediately went up substantially.

IMHO, this is not due to a change in targetting. AdSense targets ads to your site as best it can. If you remove well-targeted ads, it will replace them with the next best-targeted ads, which might not be very well targeted.

The important thing to note is that unless you have a very diverse site, blocking even just a few advertisers can have a surprisingly large effect on earnings. The reason for this is that unless you happen to block some new, poorly targetted ads that the system was trialing, you are likely to be blocking the best ads on your site and they will only be replaced by worse ones.

I've heard of people assiduously blocking ebay and similar trash and seeing EPC go up, but that must be on a different kind of site. I seldom see such ads, and they tend to vanish on their own when they do show up, so in my experience I totally agree--overdoing your blocking can really hurt your income.

[ionchannels]

Thanks for the comments. I filtered out some strange travel-related URLs not at all related to my academic topic, but then ad units started disappearing. I removed the filter for these sites to try to get the ad units back, and a day later, most of my high paying ads have disappeared, CPM cut to 1/6th of its value which has been stable for several weeks. Seems strange that reversing the filter does not effect a reversal in the ad changes. I think Google chains ad groups together and eliminating one URL will affect a whole "chained" group and this can take several days to weeks to reverse itself. I have done this 2 other times with the same effect - I guess I never learn ...

[icedowl]

I just emptied my filter list. Fingers are crossed that some of the URLs that had been in it are gone, but I'm not holding my breath.

[JohnKelly]

What URL's were you filtering?

I'm filtering out the dealtime, bizrate, ebay.com, .uk .au junk ads and some price comparison tools since they were just shotgun-type ads ("looking for marriage counseling - visit eBay!") and the like.

[icedowl]

Mostly eBay and any other URL that had anything to do with it. Also, there were some rather disgusting ads that were created by some wacko type groups.

Amazing how fast they show up again when it takes hours and hours to get rid of them. I already saw an eBay ad return.

[badtigger]

Maybe it is possible that some sort of smart pricing-type algo is applied to sites with significant ad filters?

I have just been blocking the ebay crap, and never noticed any change in ePc.