Forum Moderators: martinibuster

Message Too Old, No Replies

Blue widgets ARE NOT black widgets

         

mikeybee

7:50 am on May 13, 2006 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



after having quite a successfull 6 odd months on adsense, and slowly filling up that damn filter list, i like many others have hit the 200

i hit the 200 3 weeks ago, and guess what, decreased earnings ever since.

why? becuase i offer black widgets, and there are many others that offer blue!

of course black and blue widgets are like chalk & cheese, totally different products

i am now doomed

adsense help provided no assistance except, "we dont offer specific keyword etc etc" in the ads

whilst adsense has given me some good income for a while, it now is that case that 75% of ads now showing offer a totally different product that what im offering

funny thing is, there is NOTHING that i or google can do to provide targeted ads for my site now

i suppose i can spend the time daily scouring through my pages, looking for blue widget ads, adding them to the filter and check every URL on my filter list daily to remove those URL's that no longer exist

what a pain in the cracker, should it be this hard being an adsense publisher?

there you go, my first rant

cheers
mike

pldaniels

8:05 am on May 13, 2006 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Sadly I think the way this is going to pan out is that the whole idea of clicking on a google advert is going to subside because of such issues. Adverts are going to be come less relevant and more and more are going to become pure MFA's.

If google wants to keep its revenue up it's going to need to let us cull crap more agressively.

A lot of advertisers (myself included) loath the content network advertising because we -know- that the bulk of the impressions are just going to MFA's and quite a lot of clicks are probably either (a) accidents or (b) bots. I'd much rather know that when my adverts are being shown they're -relevant-.

... at least, that's the way I feel about it.

david_uk

8:20 am on May 13, 2006 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



The problem of irrelevant ads is also in search - it's not a content only issue. I regularly search my keyword to see where Google have listed me in search, and check out the ads on the search page. last weekend it was up to 6/7 ads shown by Google were MFA's. OK - a useful tool for knowing what ads to put in the filter, but a worrying trend.

My worst experience with irrelevant ads was when my son developed a large cyst recently. In Googling for information on this I saw nothing but "We have found the top 3 sites for cysts", and unbelievably "new and used cysts at rock bottom prices" on Ebay. I should have added adsense to the Hosts file and not seen them as they annoyed me by even being there! I can see why people legitimately use ad blockers.

Ganceann

3:35 am on May 14, 2006 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



It does sound very frustrating. Especially frustrating when there isn't 3 sponsored ads on a topic - ebay seem to have an autogenerated default advert... it just replaces the term that failed to return the required amount of other adverts - although it appears limited to any search word with x amount of searches a month.

I have actually seen ebay adverts which are encouraging users to commit online fraud... not what you want to be associated with and a lawsuit waiting to happen for ebay.

It seems google should take proactive steps to combat click-fraud by actually making it when your 200 listings is reached it is archived and filed to google to check if the sites listed in the 200 you blocked are legitimate sites that adhere to adsense policies.

(Basically maybe even have a special list introduced where you can report 50 MFA / adsense violators at one time for google to analyse - it would make the credentials of the adsense and adwords programmes a lot better and subsequently attract more confidence from advertisers who will be more willing to pay the prices as google are shown to be proactive in reducing clickfraud instead of guessing it may be clickfraud as in many cases I have read about).

They may get ignored by google because those sites are also adwords customers and google are duped into thinking it is better to have someone paying adwords than somone complaining about ads on their website that is provided by google.

Troutnut

7:30 am on May 15, 2006 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



"We have found the top 3 sites for cysts", and unbelievably "new and used cysts at rock bottom prices" on Ebay.

Yeah, I really wish AdSense would ban the auto-generated crap ads. I've got a screenshot of Ebay ads for new & used insect larvae on my site.

Anyone need a used caterpillar?

Hobbs

8:00 am on May 15, 2006 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



I found a solution to the 200 listings limit:

I have been blocking for ages, and always keep a text file with the list of the sites that I block.

When I reach 200, I used to remove all, flush the list, start over from scratch.

One time I took my MFA history list file and did an alphabetical sort to fish out entries repeated many times (depends on how long you have been blocking)

All you need to do is now pickup and block those persistent (hard block) listings permanently, turned out to be 100 in my case, the others just come and go (soft block), so I have room for a 100 listings, every once in a while I do the sort again and add a few to the hard block list and flush the soft block and start over..

21_blue

9:06 am on May 15, 2006 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



mikeybee, blocking MFAs is only a short term strategy - not only do you come up against the filter limit, but there will be plenty of MFAs you don't see, and your income can suffer.

There are a couple of threads I've posted that provide alternative strategies. The first is on Poison Words [webmasterworld.com] (there may be a particular colour of widget that is attracting your MFAs). The second is in the library, on taking an EPC-based strategy [webmasterworld.com].

The former strategy has helped keep my site pretty free of junk ads, and the latter has made my site earnings higher and more consistently so.

sfrederiksen

4:40 am on May 16, 2006 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



How do you know which ads are MFAs? We're not allowed to click on any adsense ads (against their policy), and a lot of the contexual ads don't have the advertiser's website's URL below the ad (only if you use really big adblocks), so without clicking on the ads, how would do you know which are MFAs?

I'm curious because I'm going to start filtering out MFAs tomorrow ... I just don't know which URLs/keywords are MFAs =)

toomer

5:06 am on May 16, 2006 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



"We have found the top 3 sites for cysts", and unbelievably "new and used cysts at rock bottom prices" on Ebay.

I've got a screenshot of Ebay ads for new & used insect larvae on my site.

Do I sense a "Dumbest AdSense Ads Ever" website in the making? Might drive the point home to the folks at G that their system is a mess.

Then again, I'm sure it's hard to read the screens over at the 'plex ... what, with all the piles of cash laying around the office ... getting in the way.

mikeybee

11:11 am on May 16, 2006 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



thanks for all the replies guy/gals

i think at the end of the day an analogy like this is how i feel.....

i operate a unique BMW car sales yard (many repeat clients)they will only buy BMW's

i only have one supplier though

my only supplier says he cant get BMW's for a while but he can supply FORDS untill he gets more BMW cars

so this is my situation.....

fill up my car lot with FORDS, even though 100% of my buyers want BMW's!

this is a far from perfect scenario for any publisher, considering i am in fact a customer of google!

untill such times as google offers REAL tools for us to display RELEVANT ads on our sites and open up the ads filter list, they wil only stand to lose quality sites that will publish their ads..

i for one still enjoy a monthly check from google, but i know it could be a great deal more $$ for me and google, if only they start to help the sites that make them $$ as well

Rant #2

cheers
mikey

pldaniels

2:45 pm on May 16, 2006 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



As per a link posted a few replies back, I decided to try out the "increasing EPC" method by culling off the low-EPC adverts. So far things are looking positive.

It feels a bit difficult at first pulling adverts off pages but when the positive results come in it makes such worries go away.

I'm now down to about only 20% of my pages having adverts. The pages that the adverts are on are typically browsing "end pages" (ie, where my visitors are leaving and moving along).

However I'm still having to check each day for new MFA's creeping in.

hunderdown

3:47 pm on May 16, 2006 (gmt 0)



mikeybee, to carry on from your analogy, maybe you should SELL BMWs, not just advertising for them? If your site gets lots of tightly focused traffic, then you might do better with an affiliate program, if there is a good one in your area.

Just a thought.

sfrederiksen

6:24 pm on May 16, 2006 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



How do you know which ads are MFAs? We're not allowed to click on any adsense ads (against their policy), and a lot of the contexual ads don't have the advertiser's website's URL below the ad (only if you use really big adblocks), so without clicking on the ads, how would do you know which are MFAs?

I'm curious because I'm going to start filtering out MFAs tomorrow ... I just don't know which URLs/keywords are MFAs =)

hunderdown

6:37 pm on May 16, 2006 (gmt 0)



so without clicking on the ads, how would do you know which are MFAs?

You can hover your mouse over the ad and note down the URL, then visit the site.

Or you can use the preview tool.

sfrederiksen

6:55 pm on May 16, 2006 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Ok, I noticed that I can only see the URL if I hover over the ad with IE (not firefox). Is this the "preview tool"? I tried a search, but didn't come up with anything specific..if anyone can explain this to me a little I'll be most grateful!

pldaniels

12:11 am on May 17, 2006 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



It actually can be a little bit precarious getting the URL's off the adverts.

I /RIGHT/ click and view the source with an installed extention called "view source chart", what it does is cluster/indent the code so that you can rapidly locate the stuff you want.

However, I fair warn people, don't go blindly doing this as we all know a single accidental left-click could be rather disasterous.

I personally want to see a better way of doing this... perhaps there's another Firefox extention which will show the -true- destination on hover-over (there probably is). Even still, I worry about my left-click, years of gaming has left me with a twitchy finger.

Content_ed

12:30 am on May 17, 2006 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I'm beginning to wonder if the way to combat a full competitive ad filter is to remove the lowest performing pages in the best performing subject area on an account that covers multiple subjects. It just hit me that when I look at our pages to check for MFA's, I always check the poorest performing page in our strongest channels because that's where the MFA's consistently appear.

But thinking about it, it makes sense that the junky ads would keep returning to the very pages where the higher quality ads don't convert as well as they do in the rest of the channel. I tend to look at the channel eCPM and think, "That's great, no problems in this channel" but when I track all the indivdual pages in the channel, there are still winners and losers.

Even though the losers in the best eCPM channels outperform the winners in some of the weaker channels on different subjects, it's possible that Adsense is also seeing them as losers in the relative sense, and not wasting the better quality ads on them. As soon as things settle down, I'll have to run a new experiment.

hunderdown

2:28 am on May 17, 2006 (gmt 0)



sfrederiksen, no, hovering is not the preview tool. It's something you can download from the AdSense site. It only works in Explorer on a PC, as far as I know.

Hobbs

5:13 am on May 17, 2006 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



There is one for FireFox too

sfrederiksen

6:27 am on May 17, 2006 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



The IE one seems to have a whole lot more features than the Firefox one.

The preview tool is pretty neat!

BTW, I have an Adwords account (with $100 credit)..how do I check to see which keywords for my website pays more? Can someone tell me specifically or possibly link me to a page that does? I tried running a search, but to no avail..