Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Is anyone else having this problem? The topic really isn't even related to my site very much.
- The user loses, for being presented with obvious crap and possibly buying into some sort of scam.
- Legitimate advertisers lose, as users develop spam-blindness for adsense units and adopt ad-blockers.
- The publishers lose, as CTR and eCPM plummet.
Which all culminates into the following:
- Google loses, due to all the above.
Everybody loses, except for some scumbag teen who's chuckling it for gaming the system. When can we expect some solid, public and formal action? There is major damage being done and when it comes to advertiser trust, some of this damage may be irreparable.
Even if being able to do a full audit means doing something as radical as shutting down the entire network for a few days (please, communicate...), so be it.
Speak for yourself. The problem that has been discussed here may be annoying to some publishers, but it certainly isn't universal, and throwing the baby out with the bathwater wouldn't be good for anyone.
throwing the baby out with the bathwater wouldn't be good for anyone.
Sometimes you have to identify the root cause of the problem, and if it is, in fact, the baby that is constantly fouling the bathwater, the only way to solve the problem is to get rid of both the cause and the results.
..or buy a cork, or something.
I have documented those "fat" ads that I have found using URLS that do not belong to them. I have notified Google and I have also notified the web sites whose URLs they are using. Hopefully Google will begin to check these ads before they are accepted. The destination root URL should at least match the URL that shows in the ad. Sounds like a no-brainer to me.
If you still have concerns about these ads after the weekend, let me know.
ASA
They've made a few changes on our end that should alleviate this situation as soon as possible. I won't be able to provide you with any details about the actions taken by the engineers (due to concerns over future abuse and privacy issues).
They tweaked the quality score algo for the advertisers, as expected.
Thanks Google!
If only I weren't one of the people whose site was effectively blacklisted just because I happen to be in the same niche, I would be very thankful for such quick resolve.
Good job taking care of the Acai sites... along with a bunch of innocent bystanders.
I hope it's now safe to clear out the filter, but I think I'll wait until I hear further.
bcc1234, don't necessarily consider yourself collateral damage as yet, but you may need to pay serious attention to rewriting your ads so as not to be tarred with the same brush.
azlinda - if I recall correctly, you have a recipe site, so you're probably always going to see some ads like this. I don't have a full recipe site, but I have some recipe pages that I'll probably never completely be able to shake the weight loss ads off of. It's a huge market, and I don't think whatever targeting algorithm AdWords/AdSense uses is always going to be that precise. I took it down to one ad block, and added other kinds of ads and aff stuff, and that did seem to help. At least I'm not getting more than one per ad block.
bcc1234, don't necessarily consider yourself collateral damage as yet, but you may need to pay serious attention to rewriting your ads so as not to be tarred with the same brush.
[webmasterworld.com...]
It happened exactly as I described it would in the beginning of the month.
How can I rewrite ads? They copy the best performing ads from other advertisers and use for themselves.
So as soon as I (or anyone else in that niche) come up with another winner (for their product/project), the Acai guys copy it. So I'll look like one of them anyway.
Thanks for the info, Netmeg. My filter is full so I cannot add any more to it. And all 200 are URLS for fat ads!
I have a large recipe section on a general food website and it had problems earlier in the month but is slowly improving. So I have to think this is a Google problem.
Are advertisers targeting your site? You could try renaming your channels to bust that up!
Taken from the Edit Channel page:
If you change the name, bids by advertisers currently targeting this channel will be lost.
Make sure you do some searches. I did a few generic searches and noticed a bunch of non-food retailers cluttering your results. Believe it or not, I'd block them before the diet ads. At least dieting is somewhat food related.
[edited by: Atomic at 8:46 pm (utc) on Dec. 20, 2008]
Money is up again, so I'm happy.
Netmeg, I've also saved my filter list as a text file and now it only contains one URL. My fingers are crossed.
I wonder if we're in the same business *smirk*
I did this at about the exact same time as you did.
If anyone wants the link, just PM me.
I know one of the forums. They have been joking about how the people who sign up for the free trials get dubious recurring charges on their charge cards. That's how they were making so much money to be able to afford buying up all of the adspace. Evidently it was a charge card scam as well as an Adwords scam.
Oh yeah, there have been long threads over there with some experiencing 'ethics' issues.
Seemingly they are now olden day issues
Basically people get billed something like $140 on that first billing. They end up kissing that money goodbye then after going through hell, end up feeling lucky that were able to prevent future billing by going through their CC to finally cancel it.
I've not personally been down this track. Why aren't the original charges credited back? Why aren't these clowns terminated at the gate by CC companies? Totally terminated? To me that's a no brainer. Then again I'm dumb!
Like it's not that they're inexperienced or stupid? CC Companies that is.
Or are they really?
[dopey typo -actually poor spelling]
[edited by: IanCP at 6:59 am (utc) on Dec. 22, 2008]
Why aren't these clowns terminated at the gate by CC companies? Totally terminated?
The credit card companies who are charging consumer rates of 11 - 27% when the prime rates is currently 3.25%? I don't think consumer protection is high on their priority lists.
There is a major antivirus company that pretty much does the same thing - bills people charge cards annually based on some fine print after you once buy their product. They have a small link somewhere where the default is to be billed into infinity. We got billed a year after we'd stopped using their product and deleted every trace of their software from all of our computers.
When it happened to me I searched the forums to see if this was a common practice and there were people getting billed who had never bought the product and some who said they didn't even own a computer. When I called the antivirus company's number to complain about the charge I was put on hold for over 30 minutes. It appears the charge card companies were going along with that scam, too, even though I'm sure they must have had thousands upon thousands of complaints based on all of the forum and complaint board postings.
They've made a few changes on our end that should alleviate this situation as soon as possible.
ASA - Just a note to let you know that the last problem ad has disappeared from my site and no new problem ads have reappeared. Earnings on my site that had been hammered with those ads are back to normal. Thanks! That is a great Christmas present.
I'm surprised there aren't more comments from the other posters that had been having similar issues.
That is a great Christmas present.
Stop spinning the cat holding the tail.
It is interesting that Google eliminated these ads early on after publishers here started complaining, but most of the other networks did nothing. Kudos to Google for taking action on this last year.
