Why filter MFA and Directory Sites?

arent we earning from them?

[digic]

Since I started AS about a year ago, I never implement "Ad Filter." Until later this week when my average ($22) eCPM was dropped to $12.

I review my site and adblocks are occupied with some MFA sites and a bunch of directory sites. I also removed "On-Site Advertising" because I am seeing the same ads on every pages of my site, thinking I was site targeted.

Does filtering those sites I mentioned will do good or harm my site? Arent we earning from them? Or we will earn better without them on our site because high-paying sites will be displayed on ad blocks?

Lastly, did I made the right move?

[mzanzig]

There have been several discussions on this topic already. My impression is that the majority of people here see an increase in revenue and ad quality when using the filter. A minority typically claims that it does not help (or even harms) the total revenue.

The beauty of the filter is that you can easily use it and see what it does to your revenue. If it does not improve, you just release the filter again, and everything should go back to "normal" within reasonable time.

Attention-

1) Give the filter a week or two to settle in. A 24-hour experiment may not be long enough to get sufficient results.

2) Use the preview tool to determine the URLs to be blocked.

3) Repeat the excercise of finding MFAs once a day to remove also the 2nd/3rd level of MFAs.

4) You will also want to look for certain services on the web offering generic MFA lists. They might (!) give you an idea about other URLs to be blocked.

[hunderdown]

FYI, turning off "advertise on this site" won't stop site-targeting. Site-targeting can only be stopped by contacting AdSense Support and asking.

[Marcia]

I asked for CPM to be turned off for a couple of reasons. First, it may be OK for very big, high traffic sites but not so smaller ones with niche traffic. And then, it can look tacky when only one ad occupies a large space meant for 3 or 4. I also wanted more variety, since I consider good Adsense advertisers to be a value-added alternative for visitors and happy visitors are more likely to bookmark or return to a site.

[FortySomething]

I had it turned off middle of last month. I'm not sure if it's made things dramatically, better, but this month is deffinitely a nudge in the right direction compared to last month.

It also has to be said (yet again) that Google does NOT place top ads in the top slots. It places what it THINKS MIGHT be the best payers based on a lot of factors. Unfortunately it gets it wrong a lot, and places the MFA's who gain placement primarily because they are good at manipulating the system - not because they pay well, as they most certainly don't. Therefore blocking them makes financial sense. Just be careful to follow the advice in the above posts.

[swa66]

I try to get rid of bad advertisers because:

It make me look associated with their scams, and as such makes it harder to gain/keep incoming links, repeat visitors etc.

Some of those advertise known spyware, are obvious scams (so they pay for running ads and give it all away for free, yeah right), ethics prevent me from allowing those to stay

Arbitraged ads often are a bad experience for your visitors clicking on them (it traps them once they click)

Arbitrage ads typically pay very little for your visitors, even if they have the top spot in your inventory of ads. In fact it's so little that you're likely rather try sell them something yourself (no matter how small the odds are of them buying it).

electronic auction houses typically do not sell dead religious leaders or other hard to own things.

Arbitrage scams work by e.g. buying $0.03 clicks for keywords like DVD , leading it to a site containing only ads and some very limited pharmaceutical high paying terms (and resulting in a high chance for a $3 click ... as long as they can con 1% of your visitors they make money.

Do watch out if you have little other inventory in your niche: The scams you see might get replaced by even worse scams and you might run out of space in your filter before you can get rid of them all.

Once every so often clean out your filters as the advertisers switch domains and stuff your limited filtering with domains they don't use anymore.

[digic]

nice point there swa66.

this scammers and unwanted ads are giving us extra workloads to maintain our site the way we wanted it to be - clean...

[incrediBILL]

Forget worrying about MFA and arbitrage as Google is upping the ad rates with their new landing page quality guidelines. Soon they'll be priced out of business and my eCPM has been steadily rising ever since they recently started this quality program in AdWords.

Kiss cheap arbitrage goodbye, so let them in, they're paying for the privilege :)

[edited by: incrediBILL at 5:12 am (utc) on Nov. 19, 2006]