Competitive Ad Filter

Do you use it to block irrelevant ads?

[clickme]

Hello,
I have a niche site (ie one about a particular city) and just blocked sites that are not relevant ads. Is this an accepted practice? I'm just trying to show sites that are of local importance rather than those about NYC, Boston, and other areas. I am hoping that this will improve click through rate and be better for my viewers.

Thanks in advance

clickme

[FortySomething]

Thing is, if the city in question is NYC and you are seeing the ads in LA, then it's possible you will see LA ads and others will see ads for their local cities. If you are looking at the site in NYC, then you may be seeing mostly ads for other places, and others may be seeing ads for NYC. Also, it may be that advertisers are targeting certain geographical areas to show their ads, so that may be a factor.

Quite honestly it's an unrealistic approach to take. The best thing you can do is to make the content informative, relevant, and of good quality and targeting might improve. You might also try the section targeting to emhasise (or de-emphasise) certain keywords or phrases.

Blocking good advertisers is never a good idea. Blocking MFA's is. It's better to work on the page than to try and get ads by blocking. Besides, you can't see what other regions are showing and block them. It's a waste of effort!

[Fryman]

Of course it is a good practice. Anything not relevant to your site should be blocked.

I once started getting ads about greek statues and crap like that on a buddy icons site.
#*$!?

First thing I did was filter out all that junk.

[FortySomething]

Oh well - you know best. Go ahead and block everything then.

[Harry]

That was the original purpose of the competitive filter. That, and to block direct competition.

It's only later people used the filter to block MFAs and low paying ads.

[FortySomething]

Wrong. The purpose of the filter was to remove ad that were DIRECT COMPETITORS, or ads your visitors may object to for some reason. Whilst it's true that blocking MFA's may increase earnings, randomly blocking ads may well decrease them.

If the ads shown are poorly targeted, then that may be because of the page itself. Blocking ads to correct hopeless targeting will simply not work. If you want to show ads that are relevant to the content of the page, the work on the page content itself.

For example, a page about Boston with just a couple of sentences to enable targeting of ads and a wall of ads may well result in getting all sorts of ads. But a page about Boston with good quality content is more likely to see relevant ads. As I mentioned earlier, you also have section targeting to help out.

You must also rememeber that the ads YOU see maye be different to the ads someone in the next state 10 miles away sees. How on earth are you going to block ALL of the ads you can't even see?

I suggest working on the page content to improve targeting rather than assuming it's the targeting that's the problem.

[Fryman]

A dumb advertiser can also cause this. Someone was stupid enough to use the keyword "icons" when bidding on his ads, thats why I ended up having his junk on my site.

My content had nothing to do with it.

[clickme]

Yes, but I get traffic mostly from the city it resides in. And some of the adds are way, way off topic and totally irrelevant. So thus, I went in a block them.

[moTi]

i'd advise you to not be overzealous in eliminating ads you think are off topic. webmasters tend to fancy that they know which ads are best and which aren't. i tell you often enough they are spectacularly wrong in estimating their users clicking behavior..

irrelevant ads ade frequently a sign of bad content quality or quantity.
of course there are dumb advertisers too, but it can be assumed that they are priced out of the topic sooner or later anyway.
and then there are these incredibly annoying "bid minimum on every keyword in the world and pull visitors by all means" guys. not exacty mfa, mostly price comparison or shopping directory types of sites. these i would kick out first. sadly enough i recognize that the qs for content has left them untouched.

another thought: good ads are either substitutes for your content (competitors or same relevant topic) or complements (give information on what is not to be found on your site, often falsely regarded as off topic). be careful.

[greatstart]

I like to block garbage sites like ringtones. It seems to work for a while, but then more sites like that start appearing again.

I wish there was a way to block by keywords, rather then by URLs.