Forum Moderators: martinibuster
One side effect was that the AdSense stats changed fairly dramatically.
Page views were down, Click Throughs and eCPM were way up - keeping the daily income the same.
I've noticed a lot of people griping about dwindling AdSense revenues as measured by eCPM. Perhaps it's not AdSense that's dwindling - Perhaps it's an increase in crawlers and scrapers.
I didn't anticipate the change - I had assumed scrapers and bots wouldn't trigger the JS code behind AdSense - evidently some of them do.
Page views were down, Click Throughs and eCPM were way up - keeping the daily income the same
So, in reality, the only benefit was server load
I think mbennie is saying eCPM may not be a good way of measuring fluctuations if you haven't truly looked at your traffic
Blocking is a dangerous game, one could argue that restricting site traffic to only Europe and North America could raise your EPC and eCPM, but in the end of the day your grocery does not get paid in eCPM & EPC but in real money, so the impact on the overall earnings is what needs to be taken into account.
Also in case we are discussing geographical targeting, keep in mind that what you could gain in earnings per visitor, could be a quadruple loss long term if the Google search engine finds that whenever it sends visitors your way, they bounce back to the serps looking for alternative links.
Having said all that, I recently blocked Class A IPs for the whole continent of South America due to botnet activity, life is too short and so is my time and patience no matter what the loss could be.
but in the end of the day your grocery does not get paid in eCPM & EPC but in real money
Very true. But I also remember posts of WW members who state that they have reduced/filtered 'bad' traffic resulting in higher ECPM and higher earnings.
I personally think bad traffic can get you smartpriced, which why I filter out some stuff.
I think mbennie is saying eCPM may not be a good way of measuring fluctuations if you haven't truly looked at your traffic
Blocking is a dangerous game, one could argue that restricting site traffic to only Europe and North America could raise your EPC and eCPM, but in the end of the day your grocery does not get paid in eCPM & EPC but in real money, so the impact on the overall earnings is what needs to be taken into account.
We didn't do it to increase eCPM. We did it to reduce server load and prevent scrapers from stealing content.
I was surprised by the difference in AdSense stats and thought some users here might appreciate another way to look at the problem of declining eCPM.
how do you 403 ips? I have a site riddled with bots and don't have the slightest clue how to get rid of them.
Not only do bots not count as you said because of not loading JS
Some bots can and do read/see javascript, Googlebot is one such bot. See [webmasterworld.com...] or search google for 'googlebot reading javascript' and see the results.
The absolute majority of page reaping and spam bots will not load JS, lazy thieves and spammers don't need that level of sophistication, they prey of lazy webmasters, and there is no shortage in both. And as I said, Google is able to ignore such ad impressions and even clicks, I have no idea what my metrics would look like if I am not blocking crap, and have no plans for finding out.
Do scrapers and robots trigger JavaScript? My understanding was they didn't, so their traffic shouldn't affect either impressions or clicks.
Occasionally, I get a bot that executes java script though this is an exception.
I have been using bot traps for over seven years and I swear by them. I have never seen a valuable resource bot execute my traps and ban itself. Years ago I would have traffic spikes due to a bot visiting my entire site. I have not had a traffic spike due to a bot in years.
you're kidding right?
In case you're not, yes allow the AdSense bot.
hehe, you might have some serious problems if you don't
oh, you should also allow googlebot for the same reason
