Block good ads, make more money?

Give repeat visitors something new

[farmboy]

I have a site that gets a lot of repeat visitors. I noticed the same ads kept appearing and I considered that basically a waste of space since a visitor is not likely to click the same ad multiple times.

So I started doing some testing with blocking some of the good ads that were appearing frequently. So far, it's working well. I have a list of ads (URL's) and I'm rotating them on and off the filter - sometimes on a daily basis.

I've been doing this for 2 weeks now and my earnings off the respective pages for the 2 week period is approximately double that for any prior 2 week period (except for the very early days of AdSense).

Maybe if Google could only show the same ad to the same visitor X number of times, the CTR would increase.

FarmBoy

[david_uk]

Interesting. I agree it would be nice if Google would rotate the ads in the way you describe, but I have to wonder if the ads they will show instead would be MFA's.

What happens to you when you block good ads - do MFA's appear in their place? Or are you getting proper ads as replacements?

Also, I wonder what the long term effect of this is going to be on smart pricing?

What parts of the statistics improve or go down? Have you got a higher ctr or epc? Are you comparing similar traffic over the two periods? How about the ecpm?

Sorry for all the questions - I'm interested in knowing!

[hunderdown]

I would think you'd have to have an unusually high percentage of repeat visitors for this strategy to be effective--and a deep supply of ads. By blocking good ads, you're allowing a not-so-well paying ad to show up instead of the "good" one, and the CTR would have to go up to compensate.

Sounds like it works for you. I'm not sure it would work for very many sites.

[farmboy]

What happens to you when you block good ads - do MFA's appear in their place? Or are you getting proper ads as replacements?

I had previously blocked MFA's that would appear on this site.

I have 1 leaderboard and 1 half-banner on the pages which means there is room for 5 ads (or 4 ads when the leaderboard only shows 3). For the site topic, AdSense appears to have a good supply of ads.

What parts of the statistics improve or go down? Have you got a higher ctr or epc? Are you comparing similar traffic over the two periods?

Traffic is basically consistent. EPC is up about 15-20%. Most of the improvement appears to be from the CTR.

FarmBoy

[farmboy]

Interesting. I agree it would be nice if Google would rotate the ads in the way you describe, but I have to wonder if the ads they will show instead would be MFA's.

If you block the MFA's, I guess Google would only be rotating good ads.

I have sites on different topics and I've noticed some subjects seem to have a lot more MFA's than others.

For a topic that didn't have a good supply of ads, maybe AdWords could let advertisers write several versions of the same ad, changing the text in each version, and then rotate those when a visitor comes back. Sometimes "Half price widgets" might not get someone's attention but "Buy 1 Get 1 Free" would encourage the visitor to click.

FarmBoy

[moTi]

So I started doing some testing with blocking some of the good ads that were appearing frequently.

that came into my mind recently, too. ok, on the one hand i kind of like faithful long-established advertisers. but they are boring.
especially if you are in a uniformly paying niche with sufficient ad inventory and ad space on your site not getting out of hand, then one can't go wrong with trying this out.

apart from that, i'd like to see a reinforced automatic ad rotation on a daily basis, too.

[ann]

I decided to try it after reading this thread as I cannot figure out why my clicks have went down so drastically.

The only reason I can come up with is visitors are less than thrilled to see the same ads that have hung around for the better part of a year and I do have a lot of return visitors so the majority have already visited the ones that appealed to them.

I hope to get some good ones but even just different ones would suit me just about now...LOL

Just did it at 5:30 pm cst ahhh yesterday ...late nights confuse me..hhhhummmmm

Will try it for awhile.

[farmboy]

that came into my mind recently, too. ok, on the one hand i kind of like faithful long-established advertisers. but they are boring.

Maybe doing what I am doing in forcing rotation of ads is one possible solution.

Another possible solution may be for AdWords advertisers to change their text from time to time. Maybe some AdWords advertisers will see this and give it a try and get a leg up on the competition.

FarmBoy

[DamonHD]

Hi,

I rotate AS ads with ads from other networks to help avoid this form of ad-blindness.

Rgds

Damon

[ann]

Amazing!

I just checked out the new ads that are replacing the blocked ones and I couldn't be happier.

They are better ads than the ones I blocked and not a MFA among them. Now to see how they perform. :)

Ann

[farmboy]

I've now implemented this method on a second site and so far the results are even better than with the first site.

FarmBoy

[danimal]

farmboy, your solution of blocking good ads is a temporal one at best... it'll be too difficult to implement effectively in the long run.

go back and read what damon wrote... then set yourself up with an ad server, and ypn if possible.

[pldaniels]

For small sites ( like the one I run ) I think the selective blocking does help to a degree, having the same adverts day after day does indeed seem to cause issues with people going "adblind".