Adsense publishers shortchanged by Adwords delays?

Adwords is taking weeks to authorize content ads

[bumpski]

I'm both a publisher and advertiser.

Publishers are effectively being cut out of holiday advertising campaigns.

When you create an Adwords ad, in most cases you will see the ad on the "Search Network" (Google results pages and other search engines) in 15 minutes. However ...

if the advertiser enables the ad (default is enabled) for the "Content Network" (publishers), it can take weeks (2 to 5) before the ad is "approved" and its first impressions will occur on the content network. Granted if the Advertiser contacts Adwords and asks this may be expedited. Of course new advertisers do not know this, it may be documented, but who would think to look.

So any campaigns created specifically for a holiday may never make it to the content network. This could be quite a bit of revenue (high paying?) that publishers will never see. I didn't really pay attention to this until I started to create ads specifically for the content network and realized after a couple weeks of no ad impressions there was a problem. (I was aware of the delay, but not the magnitude). So in a couple cases I turned on the "Search Network" and sure enough in less than 15 minutes there were impressions.

Experienced Adwords advertisers may know this and prepare holiday campaigns months in advance, but I'm guessing this is somewhat uncommon. One place this delay might be an advantage is making MFA arbitrage more difficult.

I'm not sure I understand why there is a large delay propagating ads to the "Content Network". Trademark problems? (Don't try to use the word "Wow" in an Ad, somebody own's it, regardless of context by the way?)

Regardless this is quite a shortcoming of the Adwords, Adsense system for publishers. As it stands the "Search Network" is reaping most of the rewards for holiday and transient advertising. Of course the "Search Network" is using the publisher's content to create its pages. (And now Google is paying major news sources for the rights to place snippets on Google News? (I couldn't read the article)) [webmasterworld.com...]

[Hobbs]

If you are saying that they finally decided to manually review ads before throwing them onto our pages, then fair enough and let it take as long as it takes, we are the ones that asked for it and cannot have it both ways.

If they decide to not filter MFA in their search, it's their business.

I'd say it's all good news.

[europeforvisitors]

I agree with Hobbs. If anything, reviews of AdSense ads are more important than ever before, since the new AdWords landing-page "quality scoring" is likely to be driving MFAs and other marginal advertisers to the content network.

[bumpski]

If an Adwords advertiser creates a high paying Valentines day Ad, he may not even realize that it is not being displayed on the "content network", and, that may well have been his desire, to have maximum exposure and to pay for it. These holiday and transient ads are not reaching the content network in many cases, bad ads certainly are.

This delay has been present for a long time, it may have grown in size. If Google is "manually" reviewing the ads, I wonder what the criteria is! Granted the volume must be tremendous, they've supplied an API to make the ebay style ads extremely easy to produce. They've also decoupled the "Search Network" and "Content Network" pricing, in many cases facilitating the egress of MFA arbitrage to the content network. Now perhaps the workload is so high it simply can't be effectively handled anymore.

Clearly it has been trivial to trick the system with cloaked landing pages, this appears to still be true. I have seen examples of this numerous times, using the Adsense tool, the landing page is ultimately not at the same domain as the display URL. This has been achieved with Javasript's etc.

Now at least some automation is being used to check landing pages, but it probably still does not defeat simple scripts.

Regardless I think many good campaigns are not reaching the content network in a timely fashion.

[malachite]

Maybe that explains why I sometimes see time-specific ads for the previous month appearing on my site. For example, it's August now, but I'm seeing ads for "July offers" :o

[ken_b]

I've got mixed feelings about this. I definitely want Adwords to be checking the ads for a quality and relevance, etc. At the same time I want the best, highest paying, ads in the inventory pool to show on my site as soon and as often as possible.

2 - 5 weeks does seem like a bit on the long side for a review though.

[netmeg]

I am of the opinion that they are severely understaffed. Might explain why they're bringing a large add-on facility to AdWords to Ann Arbor and going to be doing all this hiring. Obviously, that doesn't alleviate the situation NOW, but I do expect it will get better.

[Green_Grass]

"
I agree with Hobbs. If anything, reviews of AdSense ads are more important than ever before, since the new AdWords landing-page "quality scoring" is likely to be driving MFAs and other marginal advertisers to the content network. "

The adWords team only looks at text, spelling mistakes, trademark terms etc on the ad. They care nothing about the landing pages. The landing pages are being looked at by the QS algo.

If this was not true, all MFA's would vanish forever as they would never be able to get an ad approved. As you may know and experience, 'Content' side is full of MFA ( albeit under new URL's). As almost all MFA's change their URL's to get over the QS hit, the adWords team is overworked APPROVING the MFA's to RUN on the CONTENT network under new URL's. This is causing delays.

Isn't this funny?

Ad approval is taking a week or more these days but if one writes to them , it happens within 24 hours.

[europeforvisitors]

I wonder if Google is trying to concoct a robot-reviewer algorithm even as we speak. Hiring 1,000 or 2,000 people in Ann Arbor may be helpful, but isn't what Google would call "scalable."