Forum Moderators: martinibuster
In the last couple of months I've spent less time looking at the ads on my site, and have not blocked that many ads. I know Google are working on algorithms all the time, and some work has been done on quality scores in adwords. Maybe it's time to conduct an experiment in removing the list to see how/if the algo's have improved. I've removed all except ebay - that IS a step too far :)
I am also using a tracker to see what ads are clicked. That works OK except it doesn't tell me what ads were clicked from an adlinks unit.
It's too early to tell anything from the overnight results. However, I can report back on the ads I'm seeing. Firstly, I'm seeing 3-4 ads per unit. That may not be significant, as over the last few weeks I've seen mostly full ad units.
The other point to note is that the target bot clearly hasn't been improved. I'm seeing an MFA in the top spot both last night and this morning. Same viewing the US via a proxy.
The tracker shows that nobody has clicked the MFA - so far there have only been clicks on genuine ads.
It's too early to say if there are any financial implications, but I have to say that with MFA's appearing this is inevitable.
My gut feeling is that blocking is the correct thing to do, as even if nobody clicks the MFA's they are taking up space of genuine ads that people might click. I'll let the experiment run for a few days and see what happens. Obviously I'll report back here.
Also, as a side note, I hope that Google are looking at our existing blocking lists to see which advertisers are unwanted by the Adsense publisher community.
Yet I still get some low-value clicks. I really don't think they are to MFAs. I believe they are to real advertisers who are simply in a low EPC area--I get ads from a number of different areas on my site.Based on this experience, I think if I set a minimum EPC I would block legit. advertisers and lose some income....
I really doubt it. Legit advertisers would raise the bids.
Besides, I'm not in the business of assisting low bid advertisers, no matter how legit they may be.
I used to be very much for minimum bids, and I still think Google need to do some trials on it, but I would tend to agree with the first quote.
I still see some very low clicks, and as I've been awake at the time I've either used a tracker or looked on the site to see if an MFA has been showing. I'm convinced that the clicks were on genuine advertisers ads.
I think smart pricing may pay a role here. For example, a lot of US advertisers seem to advertise globally - even if their market, service or whatever is only for US territories. If the clicks come from a country on the other side of the globe, this may be taken into account as well as time of day. We don't really know what smart pricing does, but it's certainly possible that it's discounting legit clicks for a variety of reasons (not all of them sane ones) and that's not down to the advertiser who probably didn't get a smart pricing discount anyway. I'm an advertiser as well, and I KNOW how small my discount is.
That's why I'd rather have better tools to ban the junk, and suffer whatever RandomPricing(tm) throws at us. I think having less junk means the barmy RandomPricing(tm) algo is more stable that way, and less likely to whack your earnings.
Mzanzig, I don't think algo's are going to work - they are the root cause of the problem in the first place. Tools that allow us to easily, and effectively block advertisers, and types of ad manually are the way to go IMHO. I honestly don't think it's possible to develop algo's to do this. It's going to be down to us to filter the ads we see. It may be that Google can use the data from our filters to investigate and eject non-compliant sites to the benefit of everyone, but that's as far as I want them to go with algorithms here.
erm, yes, the algos - well, I don't believe in them either, and they certainly cannot be the only solution to the problems. But I guess this is what Google is working on right now, and something where they see hope.
I, personally, would love to see a clear toolset that balances the power in the marketplace (advertisers vs. publishers) with Google being just the middle man, enabling us to place ads and to earn money:
- increased filter list, e.g. to 500
- ability to disable all ads from the same advertiser
- minimum bids for ads
- all kinds of statistics, e.g. which ads were shown
All these features have been requested here before, and I guess that Google is already aware of these requests - at the end of the day, they do lurk here!
There must be a reason that we do not see such tools appearing. One reason might be that they prepare for the battle with MSN and YPN once these go live international? I could envision an improved toolset and an enhanced EPC for publishers when they need to secure their publisher base.
I really doubt it. Legit advertisers would raise the bids.
Not necessarily. There would still be plenty of publishers NOT specifying a minimum click. And as I said, some areas are simply not worth as much as others.
Besides, I'm not in the business of assisting low bid advertisers, no matter how legit they may be.
Neither am I. What makes you think I have some charitable motive? I would rather have a 5-cent click than zero!
On the whole, though, I don't really care. If Google offered this feature, I just wouldn't use it....
i wonder if google has already realized, that there is a huge amount of knowledge extractable of this data.
i mean, through our expertise, we help filtering out the crap, that the algo isn't capable of. kind of a manual review to sustain the network credibility. this free manpower can easily be used by google and we would be thankful.
Whilst many webmasters here are well aware of the benefits of blocking MFA's, agreement on MFA's denting profits isn't universal in this forum and I'm not sure Google agree that it's the case either. I just did a random search for cake icing (my wife will be icing a cake later today) and in the ads they show on their own search pages, 7 out of 8 are either MFA's, Ebay or Amazon. Only one advert out of the eight was directly selling anything to do with cake icing. You can forgive Ebay and Amazon appearing on this search, but that still leaves over 50% of ads appearing on this search being MFA's. If Google felt that MFA's were a problem, then they would logically shuffle them out of the way on later pages. However, they don't
From the email I got back from Google, they didn't rule out enhanced filters in the future. And to be honest, I think that is as far as they will go.
They might be convinced that offering webmasters tools to help filter ads could increase profits, they clearly don't (currently) see MFA's as a problem. Either that, or they haven't a clue how to deal with the problem.
One of their big selling points of Adsense is that webmasters can simply paste the code on their sites, and be assured that whatever income they get is the maximum income possible. I really don't see them then going down the route of then telling webmasters something along the lines of:-
"Bung our ads on your page - many as we allow and we'll do the rest to ensure maximum returns. BUT in order for that to actually happen you might be best dumping most of the ads blocks that don't get clicks (you need to channels for this and spend hours analysing data to see if it's worthwile), and you should also be screening every ad we show and dumping most of them."
I really don't seem them going down that route, and although I'd like to seem them dump MFA's completely, I'll settle for better tools to filter the spam (make no mistake - that's what it actually is) from my site.
I've already asked G/ASA/AWA for the "block from my site any advertiser that appears in more than N% of block lists" where I get to choose N% to reflect my risk/reward/desperation mentality. By default the value would be 100% or (say) 50% so that virtually nothing was blocked.
(Equally this could be a "block the N% most-hated advertisers" by number of publishers or by number of publishers times average daily revenue of each blocking publisher, which might have better characteristics, and be less prone to malicious manipulation.)
This would preserve some of the opacity that G presumably feels it needs to protect its business, but is potentially a nice and computationally-cheap vox-pop of the "new and used dead popes" and MFA advertisers.
I think that david_UK's suggestion to split the block list into two:
* Competitor ad filter
* Unwanted ad/publisher filter
would help this mechanism along.
Rgds
Damon
Google is not going to use global data in their publishers ad filters to universally block any advertiser. Most sites that are blocked are blocked for reasons totally unrelated to MFA ads. Besides, any such "feature" would be abused.
So you can either continue to block these ads until your filters fill up or you can be paid a fair price for them. Take your pick.
Although blocking MFA's works, IMHO it only works if you do it intelligently. I can see that there is bound to be a whole bunch of morons who are going to block all ads with *.com in them and then start whining they don't even get psa's.
I also made the point that Google's algo's are the root cause of the problem, so it's not that likely that the problem is going to be resolved by algo's.
As far as I'm concerned, what I really want Google to do for me is to give me better filters and a bigger blocklist. In my email reply from them they didn't mention increasing the size of the blocklist, and contrary to the reply others have had from Google, they didn't say they wouldn't be increasing it either. They may have an open mind on this currently.
Yes, I'd like to see Google go further than supplying better filters / bigger blocklist, but I'm a realist so don't believe it's likely. That doesn't, and shouldn't stop people discussing their ideas here in a forum that google reads.
So you can either continue to block these ads until your filters fill up or you can be paid a fair price for them. Take your pick.
I don't understand what you mean by this. As far as I'm concerned, if I use filters to block MFA's then not only do I get relevant ads that visitors want to click AND THEN CLICK BACK TO MY SITE, I also get a good income from Adsense. Therefore, Google's percentage of the cut is greatly increased, and genuine advertisers don't have to try and outbid MFA's to get placement on my site. All round winner - especially for Google.
That's "fair".
Do you mean that people should have ads on their sites that earn publishers and Google less money? That's only fair to MFA's - not to real advertisers, Google or us.
It's in Google's interest to help webmasters earn them more money. I think they have undervalued, and underestimated the contributions webmasters can make to how adsense works, and the profitability of Google.
I would like the ability to block any low paying advertiser. A penny here or a nickel there isn't worth the space to show the ad in my opinion. I'd much rather have a higher quality, lower performing ad display instead. Or even the option to display my own advertisement in its space.
This discussion reminds me of the controversy revolving around cheap, low quality imports from countries like China competing in the marketspace with higher priced but better quality goods from the West. Some countries would like to block or stifle such imports, others would like to see them compete in the marketplace on a more equal footing. I prefer the latter.
Blocking advertisements is too time consuming and a seemingly never ending job.
Google works for the advertiser, not the publisher.
Yes, but this is short-sighted. They still generate serious profit from us publishers, and they only can get away with ignoring us, because there is virtually no competition today.
However, once YPN and MSN are available on a global level, I guess better tools for publishers will be made available by one of the three players to differentiate in the market and to attract publishers. In the long run, the one with the best offer for both advertisers AND publishers will win.
Also, please consider the little effort it takes for us as webmasters to switch ad programs. How long does it take to drop Adsense and to put the new code it? An hour? A day?
I am satisfied with the idea of Adsense, and to some extent with the implementation. But the lack of control over the ads that appear on my site, directly affecting my income, is scary. If Google would only realize that they have to balance the market between advertisers and publishers, they would be much better protected against the upcoming battle with their competitors.
I think it is completely wrong to suggest that G is ignoring us publishers (or advertisers, indeed).
The payout they make to us is not tenable at all without a high degree of automation, so expecting anything that cannot be coded up is to expect utopia, IMHO of course.
Rgds
Damon
The payout they make to us is not tenable at all without a high degree of automation, so expecting anything that cannot be coded up is to expect utopia
Automation is fine, but it's clear to me that automation does not work here in the desired way. Most humans are better in detecting spam than any machine. That's why we -as publishers- need the right tools to support the automation. We are driven by the desire to maximize our profit. If our profit increases, Google's profit increases as well. So, all we ask for is tools that help us doing this.
However, the unwillingness to respond to even the easiest requests is stunning. Take the blocking list as example. Surely, the limit of 200 was set at the beginning of Adsense, when Google developers thought "what the heck, 200 entries are more than enough to filter out competition" - unable to foresee the scenario that we are experiencing every day, with MFAs, AFFs, No-Content-Sites appearing like a multi-headed Hydra. I think, it would be easy to raise the blocking list to 500 - it's probably just an entry in the Adsense engine. Why don't they do it? Why the silence from the Plex? I really don't get it.
Simple improvements to Adsense could be done, and should be done. Otherwise publishers will leave Adsense as soon as another big player offers exactly such tools and a similar level of payout.
"Simple changes" may have large effects, for example it may be that the cost of processing the block list goes up with the square of its size (ie O(n^2)) beyond a certain threshold, and is thus effectively impossible, at least until they have a chance to do a major code rewrite and test. We don't know.
And I disagree that humans are better at SPAM filtering. In an example close to my heart, I get between 10,000 and 40,000 SPAMs a day to my personal mail server, and so I wrote a filter in front of it which simply rigorously checks for correct return addresses, etc, which manages to drop all but about 10 of the SPAM and almost none of the ham. Without this automation I could not use email at all, or would have to abandon my good pre-Web email addresses to SPAMmer scum, which I am not prepared to do. Took me 6 weeks to write in my "spare" time though.
Coming back to your main point, G clearly needs to improve its algorithms, but their fundamental axiom should remain to deal with all but the most exceptional cases automatically.
And since so many users complain like billy-o when G makes the slightest change or introduces bugs with new features, I am not at all astonished that they seem reluctant to change things in a hurry.
Rgds
Damon
In one recent thread, one publisher wanted a filter to block *.co.uk ads. Quite frankly that is nuts (no offence meant to the poster), and I can see why Google would not wish to unleash powerful tools to block ads. They would bound to lose money from it - big time.
In that scenario, Google may figure that having a maximum list of 200 would mean that nobody can come to serious financial harm by blocking. However, as Mzanzig points out, the limit was set long before MFA's came about and they may never have forseen that. It may be that Google is faced with a problem it doesn't know how to solve, and isn't convinced the block list is the way to do it anyway.
I personally think (based in part on their reply to my email) that Google is aware that blocking MFA's intelligently does work, but whilst recognising this they also have to contend with the fact that whatever tools they release are probably not going to be used correctly by the majority. But it's my belief that they are keen to do something to help webmasters who are able to block effectively.
I think Google needs to do a lot more in the way of filtering out mfa's from showing on search pages and content sites - specifically make the quality score algo actually work! If MFA's were charged a lot of money to appear, then a lot of them would die out. If the cost of buying clicks was more than they could recoup from passing clicks through then they would go under.
The impression I got from Google is that they "may be able to expand their filtering options". What that means exactly, and when anything is likely to happen who knows, but the good news is that they no longer have the "No increase" policy on the filter. I do think that they need to do a little bit towards educating webmasters in the use of the filter.
I think we would be happy about almost any simple tools, e.g. why not have a small button below the blocking list saying "show active campaigns for filtered URLs"? Pressing this could result in a traffic-light style for each URL, indicating whether or not the URL is currently used in any campaign. This info could even be updated just once per day - it does not have to be live or near-live!
As it does not make sense to block URLs that are currently not used, this would help us tremendously, freeing up space in our 200 slots.
Easy. Simple. Probably just used by publishers that know what they are doing.
Sounds good: suggest it to ASA!
Rgds
Damon
