Forum Moderators: martinibuster
The problem is that the targetting bot often achieves some pretty abysmal targetting. This isn't only down to poorly optimised sites, and very broad matching advertisers. Despite having an extremely well optimised site, many of us see some really bizzare placements, with Adsense often removing ads that historically pay well, and replacing them with ads that are totally mis-targetted.
Poorly targetted ads don't work for Google, publishers or advertisers. On my site, I'm constantly seeing adverts that are well targetted and probably work well for advertisers bumped in favour of made for adsense etc. who might have a higher ctr on other sites. It's not a case of "Advertisers should bid more" - targetting depends on many factors including ctr of ads on the network as a whole. Therefore good payers that have few clicks get bumped in favour of minimum bid advertisers with high ctr. For me, ads that will work well on my site are ones selling goods and services to my niche. All other ads don't work.
How many of us achieve good targetting is to watch what ads we see on our sites, and block the ones we know aren't going to work for us or the advertisers.
What happens is the competitor filter can fill up quickly. The reality is that the existing 200 url's is probably enough. Over that and the list becomes un-manageable. To keep the list manageable it means that
we have to occasionally look at who we have blocked, and try to find out which ones are no longer in existance, or serving adsense ads and remove them from the list.
My feature suggestion is to have the facility for adsense to indicate on the list if a particular domain we have blocked is still serving adverts. Removal of those that weren't in order to effectively manage the list would then be very easy. How about it Adsense?
Here we go -
Competitive ad filter: Would be great to be able to ban ads containing certain phrases ("eBay" comes to mind, maybe "Aff" or even "buy now"). Also some statistics might be interesting, like "ads banned due to this filter" to see the effectiveness of your filters.
Related to this (not displaying ads): The old wish to put a "minimum price" for a click. If a click brings less than the minimum amount, please display a PSA or my alternate ad. I know - many argue that this will lead publishers to setting their minimum prices "too high". So what? Let the market forces work. Some will see many PSAs, so they will decrease the price. I, for example, would like to get rid of all those eBay/Aff/scraper/no-content/made-for-Adsense sites with one single command, by putting the minimum price to a value that does not work for these guys any longer.
Being able to block ads by keyword would be excellent, too.
I used to be all for filtering out minimum bids, but I've moved away from that to filtering out ebay / made for adsense sites. It seems to me that my ads don't change much, yet I still get the odd low click. I think reasons may be that smartpricing looks at where the click is coming from, and possibly time of day. My epc always improves during the hours the US is awake and surfing, but is slow whilst the yanks are all asleep. I'm guessing that smartpricing has something to do with this. And yes, it's long been my argument that when the made for adsense sites have to outbid real advertisers, and not just rely on high ctr to get placement, their operations cease to be viable. An exclude minimum click ads button would help get rid of a lot of these scammers - my only concern is that of excluding clicks from normally good payers due to smartpricing decisions.
Also, it's possible that a US advertiser's ad would generate a lot less outside the US, even though the advertiser is targetting worldwide. Again, this sort of makes sense to me. So by booting minimum clicks you just might be booting clicks from normally well paying advertisers. I'm fine if one of my regular payers ad generates a low click occasionally.
I find my strategy of booting ebay / made for adsense works very well, but any tools Google throw our way to allow us some input into the targetting of ads has to be welcomed!
For example I don't mind ebay ads that take the visitor to a list of related objects. In my widgeting history related topic visitors actually like looking at widgets on ebay. What I don't want is ads like "buy kids on ebay" on a page about widgets for kids.
For instance, I have a site about rescuing dogs. I have lost MANY members over the ads that show up on my site for people selling puppies over the net. I have tried blocking them, but with more than 4,000 pages on the site and rotating ads, it's completely impossible.
I have banned all the affiliate ads, since I got ones like "Buy Puppies Cheap at eBay" (of course they don't even allow puppies to be sold on eBay).
If I could block all ads where the campaign had the word "puppy", "puppies", "buy puppy", "buy puppies", "get a puppy", etc., etc., etc., I think I could solve most of my problems. Well, my AdSense problems.
