To ban or not to ban?

[Mikey85]

Hi,

I have 3 ads of concurrent sites displaying on my site and they get the most clicks of all.

Should I ban them or not?

[ncw164x]

Not unless your happy earning less money

[guillee]

I own a Travel destination site. The first add showing last week was a Malaria in Argentina. Get your the antimalaria drugs before traveling.

After thinking it for 2 minutes I banned the ad. It was the top paying keyword, but was also negative advertising to my destination. There is no malaria in the city that destination covers, nor in most of the country, so there is no reason to scare people who is coming. There is only low malaria risk in the northern border with Bolivia that no one visits because has no tourist interest at all. I prefered to loose some money from this doctor, than loosing scared travelers who change their minds after seeing this panicking ad. What do you think?

[Swebbie]

Sounds like a good call in your case. On a few of my sites where AdSense is not the main money-maker, I too watch the ads closely and ban those URLs that might make people leery about the products I promote. It's just a smart business practice.

On a related note, be careful about second guessing Google's ad serving strategy! I have a dog supplies site and was irked by a homepage full of dog clothing ads (I don't sell clothing). So I not only banned the URLs, I wrote to G about it. They were nice enough to "fix" the targeting issue, but meanwhile I was getting a big spike in income from those clothing ads! D'oh! I shot myself in the foot. From now on, I bow to the superior intellects over at the G-plex.