Forum Moderators: martinibuster
When CTR on my sites drops, in some cases to almost zero after years of good performance, does that say my visitors' experience is being enhanced by adsense ads? Clearly, visitors to my sites are deciding with their mouse buttons, and speaking loud and clear. We don't like what we see. We don't want what we see.
And I wonder why. I've just hit the 200 max in my competitive filter, which I use to filter out the junk ads, and junk sites, and ad spammers. We've all been battling these for years, and now it's not worth it. Those ads RUIN the user experience for OUR customers.
...and I discovered today that the competitive ad filter isn't working anyway. At least five sites that had ads showing on my sites were in the filter, and had been in for months. I'm so tired of the unresponsiveness of google generally, that I can't even be bothered to contact google to tell them directly.
So, google, I understand market conditions sometimes can damage my revenue. I can live with some of that. But when you ruin the experience of my visitors, what am I going to do?
Well, I'm setting minimum CTR's for each of my sites. Actually, it will be around 2%, in case anyone is interested. I'll slowly go through, as I have time, and reduce the impressions by 50% each time, until I either reach a satisfactory level, OR, adsense is completely gone (replaced).
That's not my prefered choice. BUt since there are simply NO alternative solutions offered by adsense, and I can provide a better environment for my visitors this way, what choice is there?
I can live with the 50% loss in monthly income I've experienced so far, because I have been able to replace it through good planning. I will NOT ignore the voices of my visitors who are ignoring/rejecting the presence of adsense ads.
If they don't want them, and won't click on them, and the ads are irrelevant, offensive or just plain stupid (no, I don't think my visitors want to purchase bargain lawyers (to stuff maybe and hang on the wall?). Then I'll find something that DOES interest them.
Google, my visitors are as important to me as yours are to you. How about recognizing that, and finally dealing with the junk, AND providing us with tools to address OUR user experiences.
Or not. But do me a favor, google. If you see my impressions drop to almost nothing and my (and your) revenue from my sites drop to almost nothing, please do NOT bother to contact me to exhort me to put them back. Because it will be too late.
Fix this, help us fix it, or lose some of us.
Welcome to the team.
And yeah, factually you are spot-on. Google is unresponsive and even takes away some of the remaining spots of transparency (e.g. telling us how many impressions came from contextual and how many from placement ads). I never understood why they did not create a truly transparent marketplace with balanced power. That alone smells fishy. Anyway, I think you are right in removing Adsense from the underperforming sites. I do not bother too much with Adsense and competitive filter and stats. I focus on my B&M business, as this is a good way to take matters in your own hands. Adsense is just a side dish these days.
I have maybe 50 sites in the filter with the same luxux villa, yacht and luxury car, You have sure after working 2 years in a MLM scam.
So with a typical phrase from this copy and paste landing page,
I could filter all this sites with only 1 entry
Times are tough for a lot of people, and you can't squeeze blood from the proverbial turnip.
One thing to keep in mind: Google doesn't benefit from low clickthrough rates, either. If you're seeing more ads that readers don't want to click on, or if readers aren't clicking because they don't have money to spend, it's unlikely that Google is any happier about the situation than you are.
Or, I will go about improving my users' experience by removing things that are clearly of no interest to them. When 1/100 people click on a google ad, 99 people are saying NO to adsense, and that's not good for me.
I understand google can't work magic but it IS their job to provide relevant, clickable, attractive ads to my visitors, and if they can't, then they are defacing my site, and that's not good enough.
We're also beginning to close down our use of google admanager. Why? User unfriendly. Virtually no coherent documentation and proper examples. Too many glitches. NO support or responses to questions. We just can't get it to work the way we want.
Again, it's a business decision. I neither like or dislike google. When they keep up their end of the bargain, and do things over which they DO have control (like the quality of the ads, and targeting), we're good. I don't display popups on my site, and soon, I won't be displaying "find dead flies", or ads that a 2 year old knows lead to spam pages.
If they do what they are responsible to do, then fine and good, even if revenue is lower. I expect my business partners to keep up their ends. And now we pay the price in terms of CTR rates that are ridiculous.
PS. Thanks for changing the title of this thread. Much better.
