An Analysis & Diagnosis of Google's AdSense Program

Silicon Valley Reporter Tom Foremski Sheds Light on AdSense

[snickles121]

I thought some of you would like to see how the adsense program along with the adwords program has been performing with Google for the last few years.

[zdnet.com...]

My take on this - My opinion is maybe all their penguin and panda updates might NOT be working for them like they thought it would. If website owners can't make money they can spend money on ads.

Reminds me how the U.S. outsourced all their factory jobs. That didnt work for U.S. consumers when they went broke and couldnt afford to buy anything, essentially killing the profits these greedy corporations thought they could make by hiring a cheap labor force.

When will they learn?

[jpch]

This ain't Walt and Jesse's RV, this is a whole bunch of Gus Fring's labs.

...Breaking Ad...LOL.

[swa66]

(Some of) the advertisers dislike it cause there's too much crappy publishers
(Some of) the publishers dislike it cause there's too many crappy advertisers

(Some of) the visitors dislike it cause they are haunted by interest based targeting for WAY too long.
(Some of) the visitors just dislike all ads as it all need to be free in their communist view of the world.

Essentially that's almost a chicken and egg situation. A hard spot to get out of for Google and it should be a huge opportunity for a competitor. Yet none comes close in my experience (I've tried media.net e.g. but they're far more lacking in transparency than Google and while they seem responsive they are not when dealing with an real issue.)

If I were running the Adsense/Adwords program at Google, I'd make sure to do a few things:
- weed out the publishers, not all in one go but make categories of them, some I'll like and asome I'll dislike. In the end size isn't the important part - on the contrary: the biggest ones are the those that will never be loyal - it's the smaller ones that can be loyal without resorting to extortion. What is important: honesty. Hard to gauge - but that's what I'd want from my publishers. Honestly making a honest website and not using any trickery anywhere.
Dishonest ones would get booted - no excuse as they'll only get better at hiding it.
My good publishers: give them more control over the ads/advertisers/subjects/... shown. If I keep the honest guys and am known to kick out trickery without mercy - they'll not dare abuse it and otherwise it's a tempting thing for teh dishonest ones, so I find them and can get rid of them.

- Same goes for advertisers: the more crappy the ads I send the publishers, the less I'll be able to attract the better publishers, and the more scammers I unite from both sides. But worse: the more the visitors will have genuine reason to hate ads. So any deception on the advertiser: sayonara!
Also I'd get rid of those pointing ads to software downloads, "free" stuff (there's no such thing as a free lunch) , ... the same ad (or a tiny variation) through many accounts, ... all gone. Yes that's money Id' cut away, but I'd do it to give users a better experience, to be able to attract the better publishers and get out of a downward spiral into more crap than I'd be in already.
Same here: give them more control over what publishers they want to advertise on.
If they select too few - give them some free ads on the other and tempt them to go further. (Yeah that's much like the dope dealer's free samples - but it'll work)

- Interest based stuff: A user is not interested in the same stuff for weeks in a row: if they've not bought in after half an hour, they're not going to buy it anyway. And it freaks them out.
So at least any such thing would only last minutes, never days. And that is if I'd let it live at all.

- privacy of visitors: kick it up a huge notch. Users dislike being tracked far too much and legislation will eventually catch up with me. It's easier not to freak the visitors out than to have to fight a loosing battle trying to prevent such legislation from being created. Worse: adblocking software etc, should worry me more than legislation - what if all browsers turn on adblockers by default - not the whole world is goign to use chrome - nor am I 100% sure even they might not turn it on one day.

- communicate: with my publishers easy, open channels - within my teams so that none of those supporting the publishers EVER dare to suggest anything my compliance team will kick out a publisher for. That's asking for problems. Also be more open ad transparant about it all. Eventually it'll leak anyway, so why not take the high road ? Sure the scammers will use the information - but I've better ways at killing them off. Than some secrecy that hurts the good guys more than the bad guys.

But then I'm not ... so who cares ?

[martinibuster]

But then I'm not ... so who cares ?

I care and I know Google does, too. They keep an eye on our forum because it's a boatload better than their own.

[littlecubpanda]

Here's a thought: put every publisher through an Adsense TRAINING PROGRAM before they get their hands on the code. Maybe two hours of training videos, and force them to sign up for a forum and participate in it once a month, and force them to review the TOS every month and sign it! Why not?

Make them do that, instead of indiscriminately banning everyone for every little thing.

And put together a decent support crew to handle Adsense issues.

[netmeg]

There would be privacy issues surrounding it, of course, but I sure would like to see Facebook start up an AdSense-like program for publishers. They have a lot better targeting info for advertisers, and they're probably the only ones that could do it and really throw the fear of <your-entity-here> into Google such that they'd have to really make some improvements both to AdWords and AdSense.

Well, a girl can dream, can't she?

[hannamyluv]

Well, a girl can dream, can't she?

I'll be there with you. Healthy competition is good for systems. While I am not unhappy with AdSense personally, it would be good for all if there were multiple options for publishers and advertisers.

[netmeg]

Another thing that might be having an indirect effect - I noticed as I hit my third site this morning that gave me all kinds of pop overs, drop downs, email splashes, fade overs for social likes, sliding toolbars - by the time a user has to navigate all that crap just to get to the content they were looking for, the last thing they want to look at is ads.

[paulfitz]

I'm surprised that nobody has equated the continuing decline of Adsense to Google's transformation into a "Knowledge Engine":

That's it. Also the transition to mobile which has much lower revenue.

Putting the boot into publishers won't help them. The problems are much deeper and imo the future is looking a little bleak right now.

[RedBar]

Also the transition to mobile which has much lower revenue.

The AdSense analysis of mobile and smart phones is very, very inaccurate therefore it is extremely difficult to comment about other than ostensibly I have a better CTR and EPC on tablets and a better CTR but lower EPC on smartphones.

Are your smartphone users from your country or are they foreign visitors who do not have desktop/tablet connections? I get a lot of these especially from China and India.

Interestingly I uploaded an updated responsive html5 site yesterday without its AdSense but I am considering a 320 x 50 at the top and 300 x 250 at the bottom. I've tested blank images of these and they fit nicely and still look ok on the desktop.

[eeek]

And I forgot ad targeting and relevance.

Google seems to forget about relevance quite often these days. Yesterday I was seeing women's fashions ads on pages dealing with the Linux kernel for ARM processors. Nice going, Google. I'm sure that got a lot of clicks. <snort>

[Arkanoid1984]

I thought some of you would like to see how the adsense program along with the adwords program has been performing with Google for the last few years.

[zdnet.com...]

Fascinating!

Yesterday, I stopped to monetize my videos on Youtube.
While, I own the rights to all my videos, youtube kept asking me proof thus I had to spend many afternoon putting together all my commercial licenses together and send them to youtube...It was very time consuming.
And I got rewarded with only a few cents per video. The youtube tax of %45 is too high and youtube is wasting people time asking them prove their own content.
Their new video frame detection scheme is a failure and a waste of everybody time.Many video have similar frames anyway.
Now,I'm out , I will use my videos to drive traffic to my sites where I can sell stuffs.

[jetteroheller]

Low CTR? No wonder. I started to search September 2013 for a printing company for my new book. I gave December 2013 the order to a Chinese printing company. Last week, my books arrived after traveling one month on a cargo vessel.

But all the time, 2/3 of Google ads on sites I visit are about printing books. Other ads are about other purchases, I did a long time ago.