Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I continue to see some mismatched ads (What's an ad for hotels in Boise doing on a European travel site?), but on the whole, the ads look better and--fort the most part--don't compete directly with my own affiliate links.
Have other people noticed any change in ad quality lately?
(FWIW, I haven't made any recent changes to my competitive ad filter, which includes only a handful of domains.)
Me too. But algoes tend to get things wrong at first as well.
It suddenly hit me (about half an hour after posting my message) that I'd made some changes to my navigation scheme on the sections of the site where I was seeing a lot of hotel-booking ads. I'd removed nad consolidated some of the links to my hotel affiliate pages, which comprise only two- or three-tenths of a percent of my pages but were featured pretty heavily in my navigation links (possibly to the point where the tail might have been appearing to wag the dog).
Now that there are fewer navigation links with the word "hotels," I'm seeing fewer hotel-booking ads and more ads for tours, airline and travel-agency destination packages, etc. because the AdSense bot no longer thinks my pages are about hotels. That's just what I'd like to see, because I prefer not to have AdSense competing with my affiliate links and I like offering my users a good, varied selection of relevant ads. I don't know what effect (if any) the change will have on my AdSense revenues, but with luck it will be positive.
IMHO, this just goes to show that "deoptimizing" pages can be useful in assuring a good mix of ads and, presumably, greater immunity from the too-many-advertising-eggs-in-one-basket effect.
If the ads served are of poor quality, link through to MFA sites and offer surfers nothing of real value beyond more ads to click, then it is something Google should be doing something about IMHO. Otherwise it spirals downhill at increasing rates of velocity.
Competitive filters are one thing, but more quality control at Google's end would solve this problem overnight.
Those running worse scams; just ban them, set up and follow up on a reporting mechanism. If needed use the public at large or just use the publishers (but give us good tools, much better than the MSIE only preview tool).
IMHO the smartpricing that was designed to keep the publishers under control is being used against the honest publishers by dishonest advertisers (most of those will then go on to be dishonest publishers as well).
E.g. I'm still seeing an ad from a known spyware maker. I've reported them to Google, but unfortunately no action from their end. Apparently there is not enough evil in spyware.
[Though if you google for their name, you find pages full of descriptions from antivirus vendors and methods to get rid of the stuff]
Off to seek a windows PC to find the URL to add to the filter ...
Although the filter is far from a good tool: if you ban the offenders that show up, you see them replaced by worse offenders (that's why I try not to do it anymore). But I just cannot justify to continue to run promotion for spyware makers either.
IMHO the smartpricing that was designed to keep the publishers under control is being used against the honest publishers by dishonest advertisers (most of those will then go on to be dishonest publishers as well).
How? Through phony conversion tracking? That's the only way advertisers could even theoretically influence smart pricing, but even then, it's unlikely to work because (a) smart pricing is based on more than conversion tracking, and (b) Google would have to be awfully dumb to make it easy for crooked advertisers to cheat both publishers and Google.
In my case it seems that the pool of advertisers in my niche seems to have increased markedly. Since this niche typically has a rather small pool of advertisers, changes are easy to notice.
Whatever the situation, my CTR has increased approximately 20% in the last five weeks with a resulting increase in earnings. This change comes after a 14 month period in which CTR never varied more than approximately 5% in any given month.
I have made no changes in AdSense configuration or site design which could have accounted for this sudden upswing in CTR.
