What was your longest Adsense experiment?

[londrum]

I've been running one of those Adsense experiments for 55 days now, testing whether it's better to block 3rd-party ads on one of my channels, and it's still only at 83% confidence. It was up to 89% at one point, but now it seems to be coming down again.
It's registered over 4 million impressions so far.

before i pack it in, i was just wondering what your longest experiment was?

i've tested all of their settings apart from this one now, blocking stuff like personalised ads, enhanced text ads, expandable ads, animated display ads -- and so far every experiment has suggested it's better to leave them on.

[IanTurner]

I've given up on some experiments after about 6 months as they were sticking around the 50% mark - generally I have a lower number of impressions than yours.

Thanks for the heads up on your blocking experiment results - mostly I test ad colours and find that blues and purples work best.

[tangor]

I think for some of us adsense itself remains an experiment. Lucrative at times, but still experimental. :)

[Elsmarc]

I have never experimented, and when the Adsense person contacts me with suggestions I just tell them - I design my sites for people, not Adsense. Content is king as it always has been. To me ads should be very subtle, not attention grabbing.

[IanCP]

I design my sites for people, not Adsense. Content is king as it always has been. To me ads should be very subtle, not attention grabbing

Ditto with me - in fact my informational sites existed long before AdSense was even invented.

[ranka]

i've tested all of their settings apart from this one now, blocking stuff like personalised ads, enhanced text ads, expandable ads, animated display ads -- and so far every experiment has suggested it's better to leave them on.

Same. 99% of the time Google's default is the best option.

Experiments proving that trying something else is wrong most of the time and it's because Google have huge amount of data to find a best and optimal solutions which should work almost every site. That's how they implement/make their default options for fresh accounts.

Always leave all categories on, even if Adsense shows that there some % impressions but zero revenue. Same for ads - do not block them unless they are your competitors. You just lower ads competition and bidding on your site. Use same backgrounds, colors and fonts as your webpage, and you are getting best perfomed ads.

Also one hint to increase responsive ads value. Always use RECTANGLE format for horizontal ads. Adsense code data-ad-format="auto" replace with data-ad-format="rectangle"

[CommandDork]

@ranka -

Agreed 100% on ALL of your points. Those are the same exact realizations I've come to regarding Adsense. All this extra stuff people get tied up with, at the end of the day, just let it run on default values to get the most of what the program can give you. And the "rectangle" code setting change for adblocks gives a nice tall horizontal ad - so yah, I've been using that little change myself as well for years.