Forum Moderators: martinibuster
We've heard your feedback about how quickly filters take effect and the ability to block specific categories of ads... we're working towards filters in the future that will take effect in less than an hour. We'll also continue improving the Ad Review Center, giving you ways to block entire categories of ads in addition to individual ads. We are also working on ways for you to establish guidelines for the type of ads that will be acceptable to your users, so you can "set it and forget it," while feeling comfortable that users will have a good ad experience.
Is this something publishers will find useful?
I would like it if one of the categories that could be blocked was "all run-of-network" ads. IME, these are always terrible, and promote banner blindness due to their ubiquity on the Web. I want the ads on my site to be a unique blend of content, tailored for my site. That's always been AdSense's strength. Why dilute that with RON ads?
Thanks to the G team for listening and getting on this. It is much appreciated.
Is this something publishers will find useful?
In principle, yes.
However, the wording of the announcement does not look promising to me:
we're working towards filters in the future that will take effect in less than an hour. We'll also continue improving the Ad Review Center, giving you ways to block entire categories of ads in addition to individual ads. We are also working on ways for you to establish guidelines for the type of ads that will be acceptable to your users, so you can "set it and forget it,"
...in the future...
We have been requesting better filters for years. ASA again and again promised to relay the feedback to the responsible persons in MV. Apparently, our collective feedback has been ignored for ages. And now they start working on something? What a joke.
...Ad Review Center...
So the Ad Review Center will also take care of contextual ads. Until now I was under the impression that the Ad Review Center was for placement targeted ads only? (I opted out of placement targeted ads, so as a consequence the Ad Review Center is gone as well.) Some explanation is needed here. Are the improved filters just for placement targeted ads? Or will all publishers get access to the Ad Review Center, despite having opted out of placement targeted ads?
...establish guidelines...
I just hope they don't mess up this one. Again, this group has made several suggestions on how to implement such a filter, e.g. based on keywords (or even better: advertiser IDs). Please ask real publishers for their feedback prior to implementing the "guidelines". Please! Otherwise we might get another unusable feature.
And while you're at it, why not increase the filter size to, say, "unlimited"?
Over the next couple weeks, we plan to improve the speed of your filters...
Our automated targeting technology will never understand your users as well as you, so it's important that you have the ability to control their ad experience.
Looks like we can still hope to get more control over AdSense on our own sites.
Is this something publishers will find useful?
I think the devil will be in the details.
Will Google or the advertiser decide how an ad is categorized?
If a category is broad, a publisher might throw the baby out with the bath water when blocking a category.
If a category is narrow, it might require a lot of time to seek out and block all the unwanted categories.
And will the blocking be by site or account? I may not like some ads on my site 1 but love them on my site 2.
Our automated targeting technology will never understand your users as well as you, so it's important that you have the ability to control their ad experience.
Again, the devil is in the details.
Suppose I write Google and tell them I understand my users and they will click on ads for personal injury lawyers, cancer and all these other words on this high CPC list I have developed? Somehow I doubt Google will say, "OK. You know your users better than we do"
FarmBoy
As we've expanded to new forms of advertiser targeting, we've also added controls for the ads that can appear on your sites. Our automated targeting technology will never understand your users as well as you, so it's important that you have the ability to control their ad experience. For example, we mentioned earlier this week that tools such as the Competitive Ad Filter and Ad Review Center are designed for you to prevent specific ads from appearing on your pages.
To me, that sounds like they're just reminding everyone the Competitive Ad Filter and the Ad Review Center are the tools they developed for publishers to control ads that appear. It doesn't sound as if they are planning anything new.
As for when:
Over the next couple weeks, we plan to improve the speed of your filters, and we're working towards filters in the future that will take effect in less than an hour. We'll also continue improving the Ad Review Center, giving you ways to block entire categories of ads in addition to individual ads. We are also working on ways for you to establish guidelines for the type of ads that will be acceptable to your...
That sounds like they hope to speed up the ad blocking within the next couple of weeks. But for everything else, it's just "we're working on it."
FarmBoy
Your post is spot-on. I think they do not have anything significant in the works. Two reasons:
1) Google has no immediate need for improved filters. In a weak economy they will have no problems finding new publishers. For each publisher who leaves, there will be new publishers signing up. (The quality of these new "publishers" is a different issue.)
2) In the past, Google has made it a point to not implement additional tools for publishers. They have ignored our feature requests for several years, so why the sudden change now? Why now?
Indeed, the Adsense system is probably so screwed up that they simply cannot increase the filter size (uh-oh), or add new features like keyword filtering on ad copy or domain. You see, if they are sooo proud announcing that the blocking soon will happen within one hour (instead of seven to twelve hours) - that tells you something, doesn't it?
And blocking advertisers will probably never happen. They would be giving away too much crucial information.
Right now I don't even know what sites the ads are targeting in the Ads Review Center. The way it's set up, it's also difficult to just flip through pages and pages of advertisers without any kind of organization.
So yeah, the devil is in the details.
On the odd chance somebody with the power to make a difference over at the googleplex does read this a summary of how to give publishers more control over what ads appear:
More elaborate version over at: [webmasterworld.com...]
But I somehow doubt they care enough to actually implement it properly beyond a token measure to shut us up.
Negative keywords in the ad copy (e.g. "free")
You might not want to click those ads, but your site visitors may.
Negative keywords in the URLs (e.g. ebay)
You can block them in the competitive filter. Other than that, excessive filtering and blocking is going to result in less competition which depresses cost per click.
negative pattern matching: if the ad matches a regexp I don't want it (e..g 800 phone numbers)
Ads with phone numbers actually receive good CTR. There are several discussions about that in the AdWords forum.
ban by advertiser (once a bad advertiser, always a bad advertiser)
The definition of bad is too general to be meaningful. What is a bad advertiser? Ringtones may be inappropriate for many sites except niches like celebrity/photo/recipe/game sites. But that's a relevance/appropriateness issue.
But I somehow doubt they care enough to actually implement it properly beyond a token measure to shut us up.
Too many cooks etc. That list is a total hijacking of their algo. Has less to do with controlling offensive or inappropriate advertisers than it has for trying to squeeze more clicks from specific advertisers by excluding the rest of the market. But if you exclude the rest of the market and only allow those you think are good advertisers, those good advertisers are going to be paying less because you squeezed out their competition. Where is the percentage in that?
That list is a total hijacking of their algo.
Selling direct is an option, and while I had a few deals, keeping it all flowing is hard, that's why you want the market to be somewhat organized.
But ... living outside of the US there is little viable alternative (let alone that they would have a decent inventory of ads)
I'm fully aware they need to deal with publishers cheating the system, but they do have quite a lot of bad advertisers too, and they don't seem to be doing much against them but to artificially drive up the price of the ads (which is also a serious hijack of their precious algorithm).
I think of the current algo as a patchwork (landing page quality score, smart-pricing, ...) , not as something that is transparent and useful in setting a fair price due to it's utter lack of transparency. It's a algo that started in determining what to show next to/on top of SERPs. Google was the *only* publisher at the time. Opening it up to the rest of the world might be visionary of them, but they forgot to cater to our needs beyond giving us a (large) piece of the financial pie. But in the long run they'll need to cater to those other needs too if they want to maintain a good relation beyond sending us money every month.
For example, the font size. It is should not change erratically by the factor of 20. Keyword filtering is a must. This is about basic editorial control. I don't want certain kind of ads to appear on our site. Why should the only option be removing AdSense from our site entirely? Is that wise business-wise? And so on, and so on. If you improve the AdSense system, the publishers will soon make you more money than AdWords for Search does.
They have ignored our feature requests for several years, so why the sudden change now?
I don't know that there is much of a sudden change. A sudden response or acknowledgment, but not much change, not yet anyway.
Why now?
Based on what I've read here and elsewhere, I think that can be summarized in three words:
California Proposition Eight
FarmBoy
The feasible/correct way to do that is to block the advertiser by his or her AdWords ID.
[edited by: true_INFP at 6:16 pm (utc) on Nov. 9, 2008]
[edited by: true_INFP at 9:44 pm (utc) on Nov. 9, 2008]
I immediately put all 3 URLs in my filter. But I am not hopeful. Those pages are probably going to get moved back to YPN, as soon as I see what the AdSense replacement ads are. That usually takes about 10 hours - too long! Because of the long filter delay, once I move them, those pages will STAY with YPN, to prevent any further shenanigans. I will eat the loss in revenue. Happily. Unrelated, poor quality ads make my pages look like poor quality. I won't tolerate this.
Google has made some great progress over the last few months, getting rid of junk.
They are not done yet. Conniving schemers aren't going to disappear on their own.
.
[edited by: Sally_Stitts at 11:19 pm (utc) on Nov. 9, 2008]
<edit>Done! AdSense is great, but it requires A LOT of vigilance! Publishers need stronger tools, as martinibuster suggests in post #1.
[edited by: Sally_Stitts at 11:36 pm (utc) on Nov. 9, 2008]
I found the exact same 3 weight loss crap ads this morning, on multiple pages, NONE OF WHICH are about weight loss. You know, Jimmiesweightloss, Johnniesweightloss and Suziesweightloss (not actual, just fake examples). ALL THREE are pushing the same affiliate product, and look like they were all created by the same person.
Is this affiliate product converting and paying well enough to justify someone putting a lot of dollars into advertising all of a sudden or has someone figured out a way to get cheap clicks?
FarmBoy
AdSense is great, but it requires A LOT of vigilance! Publishers need stronger tools, as martinibuster suggests in post #1.
Unfortunately, it isn't that simple. Some topics or sites will always get more than their fair share of bottom-feeding ads, simply because there isn't enough inventory of attractive, higher-paying ads to meet publisher demand. (This problem isn't unique to AdSense: Look at late-night TV shows or cable channels, and you'll see junky commercials with annoying carnival barkers who are selling miracle absorbent towels or car-polishing kits.) If you feel compelled to spend a lot of time vetting low-paying AdSense ads, both locally and with the preview tool, AdSense may be more trouble than it's worth--unless, of course, you truly feel that there aren't any other revenue options available to you and you're desperate for the income.
Unfortunately, it isn't that simple. Some topics or sites will always get...
Defending Adsense is not very helpful in this discussion.
The original topic was NOT about filtering low-paying ads, but about filtering inappropriate ads, e.g. political ads or ads that do not comply with local laws.
