Adsense reminders

more blocks, more ads, more blocks, more ads

[SEOPTI]

Why do they always remind people to place more blocks or blocks with more ads on a site?

This does not make sense at all. Only the first ad is the highest paying ad. Do the math. If you place more ads or more blocks you will always lose money.

I have tested it over and over again. Just one single ad is the key.

[explorador]

I remember a few posts around here from members complaining on advice vs warnings. It's been discussed that there are diff depts in Google working separately and what one says might conflict with the penalties from the other.

I personally do what I think it's best, I don't mind what G tells me, most of it doesn't make any sense and to my knowledge, it's automated.

[JCKline]

I took their automated "advice" many years ago when they first started the 3 ad blocks per page emails, and the income dropped dramatically. After a month with no recover, off they went. If a page is full of text, I use 2, otherwise 1 has been best. I don't want a spammy looking site, I want a useful one. So I ignore the "advice".

[martinibuster]

SEOPTI makes an important point about general advice not being applicable to specific web pages. The variety of web pages makes it difficult to apply general advice. Perhaps the AdSense program should take this as constructive criticism for improving their outreach to more accurately help its publishers.

For example, the advice for more blocks, as someone already mentioned, makes sense on a long article page. On shorter pages then two ad blocks and a text link block at the bottom can be optimal.

The point about ad blindness is also true. I've experienced a drop in earnings caused by the addition of another ad (in this case an Amazon ad unit). So I removed the Amazon ad to restore the previous pattern.

[Lexur]

Yesterday I received another one saying I should add more ad units to have a increase in my income so big as 0%.
I should have saved it in PDF.

[IanCP]

@martinibuster

SEOPTI makes an important point about general advice not being applicable to specific web pages

I received a reminder from AdSense during the week. Apparently I had ignored a similar email a month earlier. As I did with this one.

It was the usual "put more adblocks" on your XXX number of pages, and yet this time included a .png file of one of my pages, depicting a hot spot where a 728X90 should be placed.

Right adjacent to an existing 728X90 ad block?

Far out.

AdSense never get the hang of the fact many of us have sites to serve our users needs and use AdSense as supplementary income. As opposed to people who have sites to generate AdSense income where, content comes second. I have a 728X90 centred above the fold, before content and another 728X15 at the bottom of the content.

And Google itself bang on about user experience? Want bad user experience? Go to recipe sites or, driver download sites and GNU software sites where sometimes it is almost impossible to distinguish between what you're really after and thinly disguised "download me" ads.

Phew!

[ember]

I have tested it over and over again. Just one single ad is the key.

I have tested and tested, too, and do not find that to be the case. On some pages, yes, but on others more than one ad works well. Depends on a lot of other factors.

[swa66]

Why do they always remind people to place more blocks or blocks with more ads on a site?

This does not make sense at all. Only the first ad is the highest paying ad. Do the math. If you place more ads or more blocks you will always lose money.

Your math is correct from your viewpoint.

But look at it from the viewpoint of Google: they have crappy ads to run somewhere - the advertiser is waving dollars at them to do it. They will sell out the best paying ads, but those lower ones need some extra help. So instead of all publishers in a certain niche just showing the the top 2/ top 4 of the best paying ads or so, imagine them all showing the 12 or so of the ads. The odds of a user (accidentally) clicking on some ad increases, and some of those clicks land on the lower grade ads, selling some of them too and encouraging the advertisers to stick around while at the same time not hurting the clicks and interests in their top advertisers as tehri budgets are used up by the end of the day anyway.

So more ads per page is in Google's financial interest, not necessarily in that of the publisher.

Long term the whole story changes even more: merely having ads hurts us as publishers (less good natural incoming links, shunning by some, ...) more ads is even much worse to our reputation.

That's in the end why I run only a single leaderboard on all pages. Even if the page is long and full of text. Anybody actually reading it is interested and I don't want them to run away for a crappy ad. I want to sell them some affiliate books and read more; or sign up for an account in the forum, or ...

I see adsense clicks as lost leads where I do get a small kickback for but I'd rather not lose really interested users as they're for more valuable to keep than hand off for mere pennies.

Luckily the lack of target matcting due to the interest based ads actually helps in this: those clicking their interest based ads are not my core target audience.

[AnAppleADay]

Maybe they should just give us our traffic back.

[Play_Bach]

> Maybe they should just give us our traffic back.

+1