Forum Moderators: martinibuster
A little sleuthing showed me that there are quite a few sites out there trying to scoop up clicks at the minimum cost and funnel them to a site with some minimal junior-high-school quality content and a huge emphasis on reselling AdSense clicks.
I'm not going to bother arguing that what they're doing is "wrong". I'd do the same myself, although not in such a brazen way. But I have filtered them because there's no question in my mind that they're displacing higher-quality, higher-paying and more relevant sponsors from my site.
No doubt I'll pay some price in CTR for filtering them, but since I believe they're paying less than 1/10 the cost of more mainstream sponsors, I'm pretty sure I'll come out ahead.
Smart move if they're not relevant and low quality. After all, you deposit earnings in your bank, not CTR. And having relevant ads for reputable sites will have a positive effect on your site's perceived integrity, which sometimes counts for something.
There are lots of variables, I suppose, involving advertiser daily spend limits, actions of other sites displaying the same advertisers, etc. It would be nice to think that by blocking some bad advertisers you could push them to competing sites and force "better" ones to your site.
Let us know how things turn out if you test this theory.
Actually since Google's algo isn't perfect this can happen.
Suppose you have a site about web hosting, which is high paying ads.
On your site you mention that a host offers free email accounts with their service.
This could bring in a lot of low paying get your free email account ads. By filtering out these ads you stand a better chance to get the higher paying web hosting ads.
This could bring in a lot of low paying get your free email account ads. By filtering out these ads you stand a better chance to get the higher paying web hosting ads.
Or you will bring in other worser ads. This is due to your content, not Google's algo.
I've noticed slightly better targeting on some pages, but on one of the central pages there is now a default ad showing, LOL. This is in a niche where Overture bidders pay anywhere from $1 to $10 per click! I hope these AdSense resellers didn't cause all the legit advertisers in the niche to stop using content sites.
A little sleuthing showed me that there are quite a few sites out there trying to scoop up clicks at the minimum cost and funnel them to a site with some minimal junior-high-school quality content and a huge emphasis on reselling AdSense clicks.
I'd guess that this problem exists mostly for topics where the maximum bids are extremely cheap. With luck, the problem will be self-correcting as more legitimate advertisers enter the marketplace for contextual ads and bids edge upward. In the meantime, you can play Whack-a-Mole or just grin and bear it. I don't think it's practical to block any but the most extreme offenders, though--especially with Google using geotargeting, which serves different ads in different regions.
I'd guess that this problem exists mostly for topics where the maximum bids are extremely cheap.
On the contrary: this is arbitrage. The technique is increasingly used for topics with a large spread.
Even min bid PPC ads buried on serps page 2 or 3 get a few clicks. A percentage of these will convert to high-bid clickthrough.
High-bid advertisers actually benefit from the increased traffic.
BTW, for much the same reason I have disabled several advertisers promoting "find articles on XXXXX". where XXXXX can be any topic under the sun. This appears to be another case where they are trying to scoop up the maximum number of clicks at the minimum bid. Again, I don't begrudge them the traffic except when they are displacing what are probably better ads.
Guess what? It was GOOD ADVICE.
Just goes to show you "good content" is subject to interpretation. As a surfer I was pleased with what the page offered. If that guy's AdWords ad has a high CTR and gets more traffic to a page that also has a high CTR for his AdSense, then more power to him as a publisher - he's doing a good job IMHO.
I get a few of these. I've nothing against the charities so I haven't (yet) blocked them.
On the other hand, I'm sure that being charities they're bidding minimum CPC. As such they are probably displacing other potentially more valuable ads.
They're a charity; I'm not.
Thoughts?
Thanks,
John Q.
It would make it easier for me to look through my site for it.
No need for a sticky. All you have to do is click on the words that say, "Ads by Google" and it will spawn a new page with the urls of the websites behind the ads.
Copy the urls into your browser's address bar and review the website yourself. Simple. :)
I started a thread like this back in mar/apr but cannot find it anymore. Jenstar, are old threads taken out for any reasons?
Anyway, I agree with you that there are some ads worth filtering out because they are low paying, spammy and non targeted.
In the post I mentioned, a few people shared their filter list but mostly they inlclude affiliates to ebay, shopping.com, amazon, etc.
You must realise that since adwords ads do not have their CTR counted on content sites like our, what they actually do is have a different campaigns for content sites that have much lower paying (minimum 5cents) ads. These "proffesional" affiliates are very good at getting their 3 cents ads on our site and actually outposition higher paying ads on ousr site due to their high performance "search only" campaign ads.
This also means that sometimes they put in "branding" ads on "content" only campaigns.
I started a thread like this back in mar/apr but cannot find it anymore. Jenstar, are old threads taken out for any reasons?
jino, do you mean the following thread? Ads lowering EPC [webmasterworld.com] The following Google search is your friend:
site:webmasterworld.com <WebmasterWorld username> adsense <another word/phrase>
Thats the thread I mentioned. I tried searching for it via the webmaster search but had no luck. I should know better to use google instead :)
edit* added to my site with a couple related to my content which are just affiliates, wonder if I will notice a difference - will keep you posted.. :)
There are basically 2 types of ads I filter out. The general spam/shopping/ebay ads which lowers the tone of the site and the super affiliate ads, which pays 3 cents and takes my visitors to 1 page landing sites.
Try it.. you will be surprised to see how 3cents ads overwhelms 30 cent ads.
I use that with channels to help identify the cheap ads. When a channel has an unusually low EPC, I look at all the ads going to that channel. Say you get 40 cents for 10 clicks in a channel, you can be sure that most of the ads coming from that channel is low paying.
We implemented it with Cold Fusion. Works great, but it also logs right-clicks (good way for you to test it).
The subset of my site I was looking at was up quite a bit in terms of EPC Thursday. However, as I said at the outset, the number of clicks and impressions is quite low so this is far from startistically significant.
However the REST of that site also had a very high EPC, high enough that Thursday was my highest-earning day of all time by about 8%. I figure this was either
(a) coincidance, or
(b) maybe the same advertisers have ads there as well, which is possible since it's in a different but related subject area.
Overall EPC for yesterday and today remains at higher-than-normal levels. The main site is really too large for me to keep track of all the advertisers manually, but now I think I'll re-implement that tracking script so that I get a better view of what's happening.
