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.
no, the quarterly reports can't indicate anything relevant to publishers
They're no less meaningful than the than "My EPC is down, so advertisers are bailing out of AdSense" drivel that we often see in this forum. :-)
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.
It indicates only that Google's first priority is maximizing user satisfaction for its own audience. That's not unreasonable; many publishers do the same thing.
In an AdWords Forum thread, somebody mentioned the technical reasons why landing-page quality scores are likely to be harder to implement on content-network ads than on search ads. At some point we might see something similar, but I'd imagine that--on the content network--publisher quality is a bigger issue than the quality of advertisers' landing pages. A purge could be in store, or--more likely--Google will use smart pricing and other QC algorithms to starve out the "I want easy money, and to hell with value to advertisers" crowd.
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?
Could be. If so, it may be a short-lived way for them to buy traffic at reasonable rates, given Eric Schmidt's recent comments about click arbitrage.
maybe there should be a poll
Unscientific polls are more likely to promote confusion than to provide illumination.
also use only one ad box per page in your best spot.
I remove ring tone sites, and large shopping sites that spam the adwords program.
My theory is that say your key word is "home insurance" and it pays .60 per click. A adword spammer could squeeze in because they bid .10 on home insurance online, and your page reflects that term more then home insurance.
so filter and only use one ad per page somes two will work on articles to catch people whom actually read the article.
Another point I'd like to make is that there is far more volatility in AdSense than there is in trading stocks. I don't believe there are effective means of modeling AdSense that can yield reliable, predictable results. If it wasn't so easy to game the system, there might be a better chance at developing such models.
We've seen lots of testimony that advertisers are opting out of the content network because ROI is poor for them.
There's nothing new about that. In fact, that's why smart pricing and separate search/content bidding were introduced: to make the content network more attractive to advertisers.
Scrapers, MFAs, and other junk AdSense sites are only part of the problem. Don't forget that the "content network" also incudes gmail, parked domains, and other venues that can be only loosely described as having "content."
On the brighter side, some AdWords Forum members report that they do very well with content, and some publishers (I'm one of them) have been seeing many of the same advertisers month after month, year after year, which suggests that some advertisers are profiting nicely from running AdSense ads.
As for your comparison of AdSense's volatility to the stock market, that's a good observation, and it reminds me of what a honcho at the old Sprinks PPC network said a few years ago: A lot of PPC advertisers have a "day trader" mentality. When advertisers behave like day traders, it's no wonder that publishers sometimes feel like shareholders in a volatile mutual fund. Fortunately, diversification within one's topic can help to smoothe things out. (I'd guess that my own eCPM is nearly always within 20% of the monthly average on any given day, and usually the variation is less extreme than that.)
efv, that is your third post on the subject, and you still haven't shown how the quarterly report is relevant to publishers... so put your threadjack to rest :-)
>>>It indicates only that Google's first priority is maximizing user satisfaction for its own audience.<<<
not if adsense partner sites also reap the benefits of qs.
google put qs on the search network because that is where they make most of their money... for example, the traffic from the myspace deal will be huge.
>>>Unscientific polls are more likely to promote confusion than to provide illumination.<<<
especially when they don't ever seem to agree with your viewpoint ;-)
efv, that is your third post on the subject, and you still haven't shown how the quarterly report is relevant to publishers... so put your threadjack to rest :-)
Yeah, we know: Advertisers are all deserting AdSense, and all of our EPCs and eCPMs are falling even though we can't see it in our stats. :-)
google put qs on the search network because that is where they make most of their money... for example, the traffic from the myspace deal will be huge.
No, they've implemented landing-page quality scores for ads on their SERPs because where people are sent by such ads reflects on Google. Google has a brand to protect. Some of us understand that, because we recognize the value of the user experience in protecting our own reputations and repeat traffic. (That's why some publishers get upset by MFA ads, and it's why I refuse to run ads for vanity publishers, book doctors, etc. on a freelance writing site. It's all about "brand equity.")
especially when they [scientific polls] don't ever seem to agree with your viewpoint.
Which polls do you have in mind? Perhaps you could point us to the scientific polls and their results?
efv, we are still waiting for you to back up your claim that the google quarterly report is relevant to publishers... stop trying to threadjack your own threadjack :-)
>>>No, they've implemented landing-page quality scores for ads on their SERPs because where people are sent by such ads reflects on Google.<<<
not relevant to the search network making more money than the content network.
and it's also wrong because of the publisher ads that read "ads by Goooooogle"... if brand protection was so important to google, they wouldn't be serving up mfa's in their branded content ads.
