Forum Moderators: martinibuster
My site is top 4 for my keywords on Google and has been for a couple of years. It gets good traffic, and up until recently was earning good money - enough for my wife to not have to work.
Since QS, I've seen a non-stop barrage of useless ads for scrapers, loads more MFA's the last few days and to top it all, today the few remaining well targeted ads have been removed in favour of some prankster site. Earnings have dived to the point that I could make as much money from Fastclick, and the ads they now show are just as crappy.
My site is a respected authority, and good ads used to work well. Good ads seem to no longer exist - Google have driven them away by allowing them to be the victims of non-converting MFA's, and now QS has simply made things a lot worse. I've had enough. I don't need to give over a large area of prime ad space to Google and wreck my site's credibility in the process by allowing them to target prankster ads, and other junk.
I'd rather show no ads - and that's exactly what I aim to do for the moment. I have a few cpc ads I run myself that don't earn much, but they are appropriate for the site. I'm going to concentrate on direct advertising even though I will be taking a cut in earnings.
A great shame, but I'm not going to allow them to place MFA's for peanuts. Google aren't going to resolve the MFA problem. They haven't even tried to date, and I suspect they never will. In the process they have killed my sector because all the quality advertisers left. I leave them to it.
Oh, and I will at some point be emailing adsense support. But as they have no intention of doing anything about this, and I'm too angry right now I suspect I won't be talking to them any time soon.
just fess up and admit that you have never compared the number of adsense advertisers for content vs. search, in the european travel sector.
Of course I haven't. You haven't, either. You couldn't even if you tried, because (a) every page view produces a fresh set of ads, (b) the population of advertisers and ads is constantly changing, and (c) at best, you could study only a sample derived from a limited set of keywords and keyphrases. (European travel, for example, could encompass hundreds of thousands of keywords and keyphrases.)
What's more, even if you could get accurate relative counts, you'd have to do so over a period of months to support a claim that AdSense keywords and keyphrases about European travel are losing, gaining, or holding their ground in relation to search.
You might find it worthwhile to make that kind of effort (fruitless though it might be), since you need to support your claims that AdSense is losing advertisers, EPC is falling, etc. I have no need to do that, because I don't make such generalizations: Like other reasonable people here, I merely describe what trends I've observed for my advertisers, EPC, eCPM, and total revenues.
As I've said many times in this forum, it's always a mistake to assume that one's own experience is universal. I can only tell you that the sky over my house isn't falling, and other members have also reported that they haven't seen little pieces of blue stuff falling around them. Your mileage or km/L may vary.
wrong, because unlike you:
1) i did my homework with the server logs and adsense channels first.
2) i had enough ad blocks to get a reasonable advertiser count on my sites.
efv, you only have one ad block per page on your site, so you don't have a clue what the rest of the advertiser pool looks like... or is that all the adsense advertisers you can muster up these days?
the overwhelming trend was that i kept seeing advertisers on the search network that never showed up on the content network... and i also checked other content sites in my sector as well.
the overwhelming trend was that i kept seeing advertisers on the search network that never showed up on the content network
This surprises you how?
That happens in almost every sector, some advertisers are more aggressive than others, some more paranoid of click fraud on the content network, some afraid they'll spend too much, the reasons too varied overall.
efv, you only have one ad block per page on your site, so you don't have a clue what the rest of the advertiser pool looks like...
He claims he's making a living off that one ad block so why should he need more ad blocks?
I think he has a real big clue as he's running a successful business model while others complain trying to survive in their own space so maybe it's the sector that makes the difference.
Notice EFV also has affiliate programs, not all AdSense as diversification is healthy to the long term site revenue, but I suspect his AdSense is the best payout on a regular basis.
[edited by: incrediBILL at 3:03 am (utc) on Aug. 27, 2006]
...so maybe it's the sector that makes the difference.
I think the sector or topic is very important with AdSense (just as it is for affiliate sales).
On my own site, some topics earn a lot more mony than others do. But that's fine, because every page or article doesn't have to be a big moneymaker. At the end of the year, what counts is how much you earned overall, not how much you earned from this page or that.
but it might help some of these people who are swamped with google mfa ads?
in his first post, the o.p. stated "In the process they have killed my sector because all the quality advertisers left." ...so we have been debating the size of the advertiser pool ever since then.
efv stated: "I see plenty of advertisers in travel, for example." ...that statement is totally misleading, because he failed to mention that he only has one ad block to populate... and he has to run cpm also, because it pays better than what he can get with a second adsense block.
i have been working with 4 ad networks myself, but not everyone is diversified like that... most people out here are using adsense exclusively, so they need to hear *all* of the relevant info.
but it might help some of these people who are swamped with google mfa ads?
It might, if the MFA ads are in the second and third ad units.
One thing to remember, too, is that ad inventory is often limited in both the content and search networks. For some keyphrases, I see no ads at all on the search network, or I see ads that aren't targeted any better than ads on my own content-network site.
Example: I just did a Google search on "[Sicilian yachting city] boat rental," and the only AdWord was for boat rentals in the U.S. city where I live. I did another search on "[Famous Italian resort island] boat rental," and I got two ads for villa rentals plus the same U.S. boat-rental ad that I'd seen in my previous search. I then changed the search to "[Famous Italian resort island] yacht rentals" and got eight AdWords, none of which was on that topic (in fact, one was for yacht charters in Newport Beach).
I also did some Google searches on topics where I ranked high, and I had more ads in my "Ads by Google" block than Google had on its SERPs. Not all of the ads were well-targeted, but--as I showed above--not all of the ads on Google's SERPs are well-targeted, either.
Trying to second-guess Google is an inexact science at best, but I have the impression that Google tries harder to fill up Google AdSense ad units (even at the expense of some mistargeting) than it does to supply ads on its own SERPs, probably because it's trying to maintain a decent "user experience" on Google Search.
On Aug. 23, you said:
i just finished switching all my contextual ads over to ypn exclusively, we'll see how it pans out.
I presume you did so (and looking at your sites at that time, it appears that's what you did), because you felt that all the advertisers had pulled out of the content network.
But three days later you are saying:
the overwhelming trend was that i kept seeing advertisers on the search network that never showed up on the content network... and i also checked other content sites in my sector as well.
So far so good, except if you removed all your adsense contextual ads on the 23rd, why are you posting in the adsense area, when you no longer have access to information resulting from running them, since you claim you removed them?
Now, I could be wrong about this but when I looked again at your sites, where you ran adsense ads, removed them on the 23rd, what I see is that the adsense ads are back, and the YPN ads are gone.
So, if the adsense ads aren't working for you, why did you remove the YPN ads between the 23rd and the 26, and put the adsense ads back up?
Just to add, from looking at the ads that are displaying on one of your d racing sites (it don't work in firefox btw), I see that you haven't blocked the ebay junk (if you're that concerned, that would seem to be the obvious step). Targeting would probably be so dicey on the site that it's quite likely that if you look at that site, you may believe it's a problem with advertisers, when it may be a result of difficulty targeting with so little text.
I also see a fairly good array of ads, although you have so many ad slots (2 250x250 and a leaderboard, all above the fold) that you're almost guaranteed SOME junk ads.
If you want to cut down on the crappy ads, you can clearly do that by stressing quality over quantity in ads -- there's easily enough content adverts for you site if you don't use so many adblocks, and if you want to help the process along, then if you provide real text (rather than your typical 50 words on a page) that might also help.
But anyway, I have to admit confusion about your continuing to argue there are problems with adsense, while at the same time removing your YPNs you trumpeted about, after what appears to be less than three days.
the stuff you listed sounds rather esoteric.
and for the record, efv, most of my sites need a bunch of work, including cutting way back on ad blocks in certain places... if it looked like i was bashing your site design, that wasn't my intent.
the stuff you listed sounds rather esoteric.
Well, my examples were more esoteric than "Paris hotels," but people do go yachting in [Sicilian port] or [famous Italian resort island].
It's often surprising how many esoteric topics do yield ads--and readers. See Chris Anderson's WIRED article, "The Long Tail," [wired.com] which has statistical insights that can be carried over to AdWords and AdSense. For example:
- More than 50% Amazon.com's book sales come from outside its top 130,000 titles.
- 20% of Netflix DVD rentals are outside the top 3,000 titles.
The "long tail" can be very profitable, and it's far less competitive than the obvious money topics that the get-rich-quick crowd are likely to target.
since you are only presenting 4 advertisers a page at the most, how could the ad well run dry for those topics? most people out here don't have an ad pool of ~80 potential advertisers to draw from.
the real question is, how many of those advertisers are using the content side of the fence?
the real question is, how many of those advertisers are using the content side of the fence?
Since you seem to be the one that is concerned about the number of available content advertisers, why not present your own site information, niche, ad layout, etc, since no doubt you have a lot more understanding of your site issues than someone else's.
If you did that, you might get some good advice about why you are experiencing all these problems and others are not.
A general comment. Sometimes it amazes me that people spend so much time asking the wrong questions like "are there more content advertisers, or are their less?
If some people are experienceing problems, and others are NOT experiencing problems (in whatever topic), isn't the obvious question:
How do those NOT experiencing a problem manage to not experience the problem?
Now that's information that's useful for the wallet.
there are 11 advertisers a page in the google search results for some of those topics... a total of about ~80 sponsored links.
OK, set your page to show 100 results at a time and you'll see more like 80 ads just on the first page or Paris, Venice or Naples hotels alone.
Google doesn't show you all the advertisers at once unless your niche is real sparse, they are rotating the advertisers based on budget, click rate, popularity, all sorts of factors so I suspect there's a lot more than I can easily see hitting reload a time or two.
If you really want to know how AdWords/AdSense works just run an AdWords ad and see when your ad shows up as it's interesting to watch how the system does it's thing.
most people out here don't have an ad pool of ~80 potential advertisers to draw from.
Are you so sure?
Have you checked your site with some online AdSense preview tools?
The only sites I know that are in real trouble with ad inventory don't generate 12 ads in Google's tool, or 20 ads on AdSense preview sites.
If you get full sets then the inventory is there.
[edited by: incrediBILL at 6:14 pm (utc) on Aug. 27, 2006]
If some people are experienceing problems, and others are NOT experiencing problems (in whatever topic), isn't the obvious question:How do those NOT experiencing a problem manage to not experience the problem?
Rbacal, your comment inspired an intriguing thought:
What if Google is using a "quality score" mechanism (not unlike the AdWords landing-page QS algorithm) to allocate ads? What if an account, a site, or a page with a high QS gets more high-bid ads than an account, site, or page with a low QS? Over the long run, that would tend to result in a higher-quality network, better performance for advertisers, and a bigger lead over the competition (since low-QS would be more likely to sign on with Google's competitors, thereby diluting the quality of their networks).
From Google's point of view, a stealth QS ad-allocation scheme could work even better than smart pricing, since it would reduce the need for advertiser discounts that reduce Google's own average earnings per click.
Also, if Google isn't using such a mechanism now, what's to keep it from doing so in the future?
(Side note: It would make perfect sense for Google not to reveal the existence of such a "stealth scheme," since doing so would just cause a lot of public teeth-gnashing and headaches for AdSense Support.)
If nothing else, the possibility that Google could have such a scheme, now or in the future, might send a "food for thought" message to publishers who think optimizing for high clickthrough rates and finding "money" keywords is more important than developing intrinsically useful content.
From Google's point of view, a stealth QS ad-allocation scheme could work even better than smart pricing, since it would reduce the need for advertiser discounts that reduce Google's own average earnings per click.
Well, actually, they've said that the ads they display are chosen to optimize revenue, so obviously they are already using algos to choose which ads to display, so I'm not sure it's really that much "stealth".
It's just that we don't know how ads displayed are chosen, but certainly if I was serving ads, I sure as heck send high paying ads to sites where those were working, and low paying ads to sites where high ones weren't "working", even if topics were identical (but, then the pages wouldn't be anyway).
They could do that using actual data for a site/page/ad combo, or they could do it less directly by looking at other variables like site quality (I'm a little doubtful that they'd choose indirect variables when they can serve, test, re-serve.
good point about the preview tools... sure wish there was something that showed more than 12 or 20 ads.
the real question is, how many of those advertisers are using the content side of the fence? ...]
*****
~80 potential advertisers, that is a nice number, but the ratio of junks among those potential advertisers would be a sign to alert. When it reaches a certain level, it would start to collapse and run into trend toward the "death" side, like David's sector.
[edited by: GoldenHammer at 4:23 am (utc) on Aug. 28, 2006]
I totally agree that well-targeted ads are actually an asset to any website, while bottom-feeder MFA's are a black eye to it. I'm thankful that I get a reasonable amount of highly relevant ads for prestigious advertisers (even though my eCPM is very possibly lower than David's is even today).
Anyway good luck. This is a great process for any site owner to go through. Tracking down potential advertisers, figuring out ways to create value for them, and pitching your ideas so effectively that they reach into their wallets and hand you cash money. It's a real masterclass in e-commerce.
I just came across and read through this thread. First of all, props to David for not turning it into a flamefest. He's just making a business decision based on the longterm well-being of his website, not even claiming he can earn more money elsewhere.
Thanks :)
I didn't want to start a flame war - I just wanted to communicate what happened to me, in my individual circumstance. I know that one individual's decline thanks to the arbitrage game doesn't mean the death-knell for adsense as a whole, but it is a salutory tale as to why MFA's and the arbitrage game is a bad thing if it's allowed to take over, and kill off a sector. It's also possible that it could happen to any of us. If someone decided that European travel keywords were fashionable this week, EFV might sing a different tune in six months time!
Still, the good news is that since quitting adsense I've been approached by a couple of advertisers who want to sell direct, and that's going ahead. I won't earn anything like what I did with Google, but at the end of the day there is only so much suffering you can take at the whims of the target bot and smartpricing. The time comes when you have to make the decision to pull the plug to uphold the reputation of the site. I am hoping to put adsense back, but they have to get the advertisers back first.
If someone decided that European travel keywords were fashionable this week, EFV might sing a different tune in six months time!
I don't know that I'm singing any particular tune as far as MFAs are concerned. Like many of the other people here, I don't like them, just as I don't like generic plug-in-the-keyword-ads like "buy rattlesnake bites on eBay." I do think they're likely to be a problem in some sectors more than in others, but there's nothing new about that: the topics of e-mail spam and run-of-network display banners tend to be fall into predictable categories, too.
As rbacal suggested in a recent post, it does seem likely that Google will move to defend the credibility of the "Ads by Google" brand in due course. In fact, Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, hinted at that in a recent press Q&A session at SES, according to a news story the other day. So, David, I hope you're just pulling AdSense code off your pages and not formally resigning from the network. In a few months, or maybe a bit longer, you may find it worthwhile to do some testing and see what kinds of ads (and revenues) you get.
That is very true, maintaining a quality website is always the king. That probably not necessary a total loss for quiting Adsense, it is very likely a loss from Google on the other hand.
So, David, I hope you're just pulling AdSense code off your pages and not formally resigning from the network.
That's exactly what I'm doing. I haven't shared my thoughts with adsense support yet, but will at some point. To be honest I'm spending a lot of time working on the content of a site that will NEVER have ads on it at the moment, and as I know from experience all I'll get back is a canned response from the fortune cookie generator there hardly seems any point bothering.
Also, I do anticipate better times round the corner now that Google have finally wised up to the fact that the arbitrage game is out of hand, and crappy ads are denting credibility. I do understand the commercial need to sort out search before content, so hopefully they will concentrate on that at some point. Unfortunately it seems that QS has simply spawned a new generation of scrapers, and driven off the last few remaining advertisers, but maybe that's just my little niche.
I don't unfortunately have any faith in Googles policy of making an algorithm to fix an algorithm that fixes another algorithm that didn't work very well. It's got too ridiculously complicated and that is probably a great deal of the problem.
Time will tell.
It's got too ridiculously complicated and that is probably a great deal of the problem.
Exactly my thought. Once upon a time you had a basic AS control panel and was given some basic JavaScript code to place on your site and it was all working great. Spot on targeted ads, quality advertisers and lots of them(with no option for them to muck around with ads and bids over the content network, site targeting CPM and other crap). It was simple, it was reliable, advertisers were joining in droves and click payouts were decent.
What do we have today?.....lots of unhappy publishers with deteriorating earnings. Unhappy advertisers with deteriorating RIO, tons of MFAs and an over complicated control panel that more and more publishers could not be bothered with as earnings continue to slide to ridicules levels with every so called "maintenance"....the new Adsense for ya and it is going south faster and faster.
You did good David. I did exactly the same a few months back and could not care less. I am now into getting my old advertisers back as well as giving other networks some space....equal to better earnings as with AS in the good old days plus better peace of mind not having to relay on whatever the new brain fart is "on" at the plex right now.
[edited by: Web_speed at 12:36 pm (utc) on Aug. 28, 2006]
just pulling AdSense code off your pages and not formally resigning from the network.
You might want to consider leaving Adsense running on a couple pages so you don't get your account closed for inactivity.
What do we have today?.....lots of unhappy publishers with deteriorating earnings. Unhappy advertisers with deteriorating RIO, tons of MFAs and an over complicated control panel that more and more publishers could not be bothered with as earnings continue to slide to ridicules levels with every so called "maintenance"....the new Adsense for ya and it is going south faster and faster.
You're talking about a couple of different things here, and it's too much effort to filter out the hyperbole, so I'll simply say that:
1) Many publishers and advertisers continue to do well with AdSense, if we're to judge from the only available evidence (Google's revenue reports); and...
2) That "over complicated control panel" is an obvious response to requests by publishers. Can you imagine the keening and teeth-gnashing we'd hear on this forum if Google went back to the old AdSense control panel with no channels, no custom colors, and fewer reports? (FWIW, I think the Web would be a better place if there weren't so many publisher options and if reports were given out only once a week or once a month, but I suspect I'm in the minority.)
no, google revenue reports do not give out specific numbers for publisher earnings, and you know that because we have covered it in detail out here before.
i thought that the new qs is for the search side only? since it doesn't rate content landing pages?
no, google revenue reports do not give out specific numbers for publisher earnings...
Rather than rehash previous discussions, I'll simply say that the numbers in the quarterly reports are the best indicators that we have, and they're certainly more meaningful than sweeping assumptions based on individual publishers' experiences.
i thought that the new qs is for the search side only? since it doesn't rate content landing pages?
Yes, the new advertiser landing-page Quality Scores apply only to search ads, at least for now. (And, by definition, they apply only to advertisers--not to publishers.)
no, the quarterly reports can't indicate anything relevant to publishers, because it doesn't tell whether overall publisher income is up or down... TAC is relevant to google stockholders, not google publishers, because TAC is not publisher payout.
i think that it's natural for publishers to look for a correlation between the new qs and the content side of the fence... the only thing that i can see is that google search got it and we didn't, and that speaks volumes for how important the content network is to google.
since some publishers are reporting more mfa's these days, i guess the inference is that mfa'ers in some sectors left search for content? afaik, it didn't happen in my biggest sector, and the slow downturn in my epc has been there since the end of last year.
maybe there should be a poll:
1) more mfa's since qs
2) less mfa's since qs
3) can't see any difference
