Forum Moderators: martinibuster
We operate nearly 50 large portals, so I don't tend to surf too deeply into each one. I was browsing one of our portals last night and found a large number of extremely off-topic image ads throughout the site on nearly every page. I decided that the fewer variables the better, so I had all ads changed to text-only.
Now, today, our CTR and eCPM is back up to pre-Oct 20 levels with only a slight drop in EPC. At least in our case, it seemed to be off-topic image ads that were the culprit.
Google may have a glut of image ads and may be dumping them anywhere regardless of the effect on eCPM. My original impression was that they would try to maximize eCPM, but it appears that perhaps their supply of image ads is so high that they can no longer meet the demand for ad space. Our visitors appear to respond much better to targeted text ads rather than barely on-topic image ads.
At least in our case, it seemed to be off-topic image ads that were the culprit.
I can believe it!
For many months I ran text-only ads, but decided to try image ads, wondering if my visitors experienced text-ad blindness. I thought maybe visual variety could enhance their experience.
Profit plummeted immediately. I went to check the page with image ads, and they were so offtopic it was ridiculous. They were 100% irrelevant. They could not have been more irrelevant.
I have no idea how Google, which says its text and image ads are contextual, could possibly have used its algo to match the image ads to the page content. The ads were neither on site text nor any theme on any page. Imagine an ad for MIT on a site for chicken farmers, lol; that's how bad it was!
I mean these ads were nothing like the text ads. They weren't the same companies, like you would expect, i.e: the image version of the text ad with basically the same message going to the same URL. In fact, for over a year of periodically checking my site's text ads, I had never seen these companies advertising on my site.
My conclusion is Google uses a very different algo for image ads than text ads and has few if any contextual matching standards.
To add insult to financial injury, this one ad was a stupid love calculator piece of absolute nonsense, which was a Flash ad, so you couldn't see its target url to filter it!
Google is so pathetic it won't carefully screen every Flash ad, knowing full well its URLs aren't visible. That's an extremely bad business policy!
I saw the same Flash ad on many sites, which also had nothing to do with love calculations, so it was obvious Google lets some cheesy companies run their Flash ad spam rampantly across its entire network.
Very unprofessional of Google.
Unable to filter that cr*p, I killed every image ad from appearing on my sites.
By the way, research shows user openness to image ads is far less than text ads. So I really don't plan to revisit image ads ever again, even if Google engineers figure out how to get relevant contextual image ads before the next century.
It's bad enough to have off-topic text ads on your site; it's even worse to have image ads. They are much more likely to harm your site's image, because it's harder to miss awful image ads. They are in your face and often look so cheap and nasty with bitmapping etc.
p/g
The first consideration is that it's not uncommon to make a change and see a temporary positive effect that eventually reverts back. You're reporting in a change made within 24 hours. A longer period is necessary to make a better assumption.
The second consideration is
Glitch in Stats?
[webmasterworld.com...]There was a lag in reporting that caused the stats to report higher than actual eCPM.
I strongly believe that site targeted ads/images hurts if you have "big" site.
I have had them disabled since the first month site targeting was introduced because of a bad experience I had with it. I too have been hit with lower eCPM on some of my biggest sites (and medium sites, too). So I doubt site targeting is a reason for your problem since I did not have it turned on.
Fwiw, I just turned site targeting back on to see if it encourages competition in the auction.
