Sudden increase in spammy type ads on our sites?

[blaketar]

Has anyone noticed a sudden increase in spammy type image ads? By spammy I mean the types of ads which have a lot of flashing "Winner" notices or appear to be designed using Microsoft Paint programs. It appears the targeting is WAY off the mark and I am not sure why they are being displayed on the site?

Do I need to block all 3rd party networks? Google claims this will "Harm" my revenue but I would rather loose all my revenue than loose my base of trusting visitors!

[Rockyou]

Turnoff Image ads, It doesn't increase your revenue anyway.Infact it will lower your earnings with it.

[blaketar]

Thanks Rockyou, do you mean turning off image ads for 3rd party (fastclick, etc.)

OR ALL IMAGE ADS, google and google-certified 3rd party?

[Rockyou]

All image ads, Image ads doesn't pay more than text ads.Its is just for google to know how much is your site worth, they just want to check if any other advertiser can pay you more.If nobody is interested than you can see huge fall in revenue.Turn off all image ads. You can keep 3rd party ads ON, i have not seen any problem with that,If suppose you major traffic is not search engine then you may turn that also off.it really depends on case to case basis.

[netmeg]

Uh, I would read further into this forum before making such a drastic change. Some of us have experienced a marked increase in revenue due to image ads.

[maximillianos]

A few years back we saw a spike in spammy ads that had nothing to do with the content of the pages they were showing up on.

After talking with our Adsense rep, we found out that our site was being targeted by these advertisers using "category" targeting. Apparently category targeting cannot be turned off by a publisher. We can control channel targeting, but our site is grouped by category as well, and advertisers can choose to run ads on our site if we fall into the category they are targeting. Regardless of our content or targeting settings.

The only way to turn this off or disable it was at the Gplex. They said it was a global setting they could turn off for our account on their end. We pulled the trigger on it and have not seen the problem since.

[Even_Steven]

Don't forget folks that Google keeps track of your web searches, and that AdSense will display ads relating to your searches. So if you find a lot of ads that don't relate to your content, it's often because the ads are targeting your personal browsing habits.