Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I'm told that a person can, through AdSense, buy ads that target your site specifically, or even a specific page on your site. I have a highly-ranked stock site, which shows quotes and investment advice, and what's been happening is that small public companies (OTC's & Pink Sheets) have been running ads that promote their stock on my site. These look like banner ads and instead of having 4 ads at the top it's one big banner advertising one company.
I've been blocking them as I see them, but it's causing a real problem because people think that my site is endorsing these stocks and 9 times out of ten the stock being advertised is one that I would strongly advise AGAINST buying. The problem is I have more than 45,000 pages and will never see them all.
Isn't there a way to show only the 4 little ads at the top like you see on most sites without having to individually block those who target my whole site? Is there somewhere to turn this off? I don't want Google selling targeted real estate, because frankly most of these ads are making my site look bad and these companies are trying to capitalize on my research and information and people are thinking I'm endorsing them.
Or you could just try just changing your ad settings to text instead of text and image, but that might be a lot more work generating new code, etc.
It's also killing my revenue because no one is clicking a single stock. Isn't there any way to turn it off without waiting 24 hours for Google to get around to responding?
I have a highly-ranked stock site, which shows quotes and investment advice, and what's been happening is that small public companies (OTC's & Pink Sheets) have been running ads that promote their stock on my site. These look like banner ads and instead of having 4 ads at the top it's one big banner advertising one company.
Sorry this is happening to you but if you think about it, AdSense is performing exactly as promised - it's a contextually based system. You write about stocks and AdSense shows ads about stocks.
As I've written before, the same thing happens to political sites that support a particular politician. The page has text about the opposing politician and up comes ads promoting the opposing politician.
You can try and chase the undesirable ads and put them in your filter if you want to go that route.
But in reality there are some sites that are just not a good fit for AdSense.
FarmBoy
The Ad Review Center, when it's enabled for your account, might be more trouble than it's worth. You'd have to take time daily to check what's new. So just turn off site targeting. The problem isn't that your site isn't good for AdSense, as farmboy says. These aren't contextual ads. They are site-targeted, so the lesson I'd take from this is that your site's just not good for site targeting.
Plus, if you ask Google to turn off site-targeting completely, you may wish to enable it again once you find sites you want targeting you. In other words, there may be no need to completely turn off site-targeting when you can (or will be able to) block advertisers who site-target.
If you do not have access to the Ad Review Center, hopefully you will soon. I'm already using the Ad Review Center to block site-targeted ads and it works fine. Yes, you have to check to see if new sites are targeting you, but you're already checking anyway.
Ad Review Center [webmasterworld.com]
Honestly I wouldn't mind if the exact same ads were part of an ad group, because that's to be expected on the site. There will always be ads promoting specific stocks that slip in, it's the nature of the business.
The problem is when instead of showing 3 or 4 ads at the top which blend with the site, these ads I'm talking about are a single ad, promoting a specific stock, come up with a dark gray background and they really stand out - they're text based but they look like a banner. It looks like my site is endorsing a specific stock, instead of just advertising a variety of investment-related sites, and that's a bad thing in this business. If someone were to buy that stock (and the companies that are doing this are usually junk, that's why they have to resort to promoting their stock this way), because they believed it was one my site recommended, they're likely to lose their money and thus lose confidence in my picks, even though I had nothing to do with it.
But I also don't want to put a big honkin' box around all of the ads that essentially states "these sites are not endorsed by example.com" because that's basically saying "Don't click my ads" :P
The review center sounds neat for some other reasons, but I don't want to have to manually review each and every ad. I believe that it's just the targeting that's causing the problem here, these guys know exactly what they're doing - they're trying to promote their crappy stocks on a trusted source. I'm thinking about taking the AdSense code down until I've confirmed that the site targeting is disabled, because I don't have any way of seeing who is targeting at this point. I'd rather go a few days without making any ad revenue than have one person buy this crap because they think I recommended it.
It is really not your responsibility to educate your readers about the nature of advertising.
One of our sites is a large consumer review/complaint site and we often get ads on our pages from businesses offering to help businesses negate the effect of the reviews on our site. I have no problem with this at all. It's free speech in action. If companies want to waste money on such activities instead of cleaning up their act, that's their decision.
Just parenthetically, a site like yours should have a well-educated, savvy group of readers, so it may be possible you're worrying about something that's not really a problem.
