Forum Moderators: martinibuster
How do you know which site is junk and which is not?
Thanks for the advice.
Otherwise it's considered for blocking. However, be careful with blocking as it does fill up the 200 entries available very quickly, and does have the potential to lose you money if you aren't careful.
I'd say don't block unless you see it on your site. IE the preview tool whilst good at showing you the URL to block doesn't necessarily show ads that have been seen on your site.
I'd also say don't block an ad the first time you see it. Some ads show just the once and never again. Keep an eye on it for a day or so before blocking.
As to what ads are junk - the more you see of them, the easier they are to recognise. They usually look like junk before you look up the landing page. Ads such as "Best 4 sites for", "Free information" and the like. Obviously the ebay "New and used dead vicars" ads should be blocked without seeing them.
The one exception to my personal rules above is that I do a Google search for my keywords and block any MFA's I see on the front page of the search. That shows MFA's likely to be shown, and are worth blocking.
How tight are the margins for converting a click? If you don't know, then one way to get an idea of how tight profit margins are is by reviewing affiliate payouts. If the payouts are single digit percentage points, it's possible you're in a low margin niche where budget spending is tightly watched- meaning low EPC.
If that's the case, it's entirely possible that a ringtone ad might pay better than a low paying ad from a low inventory niche.
[edited by: martinibuster at 8:56 am (utc) on July 9, 2006]
this may have nothing to do with the ads on offer, but to do with the position of hte ads, the subject of your site, the type of sit e you have.
1. The mfa that goes something like "find the highest paying keyword for blue widgets" this will usually take you to a spamdex site that lists all popular and lucrative keywords under the sun .....and surrounded by Adsense ads.
2 An mfa purporting to be a keyword tool for webmasters that is nothing more than a search box which returns bougus keyword results that are nothing more than two or three 300x250 ad blocks.
Even if these sites were genuine keyword research tools and weren't useless MFA's I would still trash them, as my web site is not aimed at webmasters. Nor does my website relate to webmaster resources, SEO, publishing or the internet.
The bottom line is the advertiser here doesn't care where they place their ads as long as they are in fairly lucrative niches. ie a finance site would see "find the highest paying keyword for insurance widgets" etc etc
2.) Adsense on advertiser's site
this also shows that advertiser wants to gain some revenue through adsense, he wouldn't bid much per click (arbitrage)
3.) Navigation of the site
if there's no links like
"About us"
"Contact us"
it seems like they don't want to represent their company and tell who they are. i don't trust them and their CPC bid.
4.) Sites with Affiliate link on it
there's no need to explain this
For example, a site may be of use to your visitors, yet have a link to a book at Amazon, or indeed show adsense. I think the main factor in making the decision to block is if the site is potentially of use to your visitors, and you don't mind losing a visitor to them.
I'd say don't block unless you see it on your site. IE the preview tool whilst good at showing you the URL to block doesn't necessarily show ads that have been seen on your site.
Thanks everybody.
And I broke my $1.50 mark yesterday.. ..hehe.. ..now I move to $2.00, but it varies a lot.
For example, looking at my page in the UK, and having selected UK in geotargeting 2 out of 3 of the ads currently on the page don't show up in the preview tool. It's also not unusual to see ads in the tool that you blocked months ago. There are also a lot of ads showing in the tool that are totally irrelevant, and I have never seen in ad blocks or the adlinks.
Therefore I personally don't believe that blocking based on what the tool says does anything other than block up your filter with ads you may never see.
Personally, I think that putting in your keywords in Google search and seeing what MFA's show up there and blocking them is a better bet than using the tool if you want to block blind.
Using a tracker I've noticed that people that click on the ads often click back to my page. I doubt if that happens if the ad landing page is not what the visitor was expecting. I would guess that if the landing page was not what the visitor wanted then they will click out - not back, and probably not visit your site again. You have lost the visitor forever. Or at least, if they do return to your content, then the chances of them clicking on another of your ads is zero.
Personally that sort of ad would hack me off bigtime. I was expecting a download - not a link to another page selling what I already have!
This is one of the most reasons to become smart priced. Advertisers have sneaky ways to lower their CPC.
