Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Although the targetting algorythm Google use is undoubtedly very good, it is flawed. It does NOT place highest bidder ads on your site - it places who Google *think* might ultimately be the best overall payer there instead. I.E. they will place an ad that bids $0.05 on your site as opposed to a serious advertiser willing to bid $.50 on the grounds they think that the $0.05 advertiser will get more clicks than the higher bidder. This in itself isn't necessarily a flaw - the flaw is the fact that whilst this approach may work for some sites, it is very detrimental for others.
I wouldn't like to comment if this works as intended on the majority of sites, but if you have a very specific niche, and your site is tightly focussed on it, it simply cuts out genuine advertisers, and lowers the profit you/Google make. The algorythm is not smart enough to consider this a possibility and target accordingly.
The problem I've had is that Google have been placing minimum bid ads on my site (mainly other webmasters buying traffic, and scrapers), and squeezing out people actually trying to sell goods and services to my specific niche. By dumping traffic buyers/scrapers I have seen a drop in clicks and ctr, but the increase in epc, ecpm and bottom line profit is substantially more. It's resulted in an increase in profits of at least 20%, and I assume that Google has benefitted by at least the same percentage.
The difficulty is that to remove the scrapers and badly targetted ads, you have to play the "Whack-a-mole" game - see a scraper and add it to the blocked list. I'm convinced there are better ways of achieving this.
Websites are very diverse, adsense publishers and advertisers are all equally diverse. Therefore Google should have some diversity in order to get the best out of the program. Currently we have ad selection based purely on an algorythm that whilst being far and away the leader of the pack in contextual advertising, is far from perfect. The main thing it's missing is the human touch from webmasters who know their sites a lot better than Google ever will.
There are two things I'd like to see trialled. Firstly, the option of ad selection based on bid price as opposed to what Google's algorythm *thinks* will do best financially. Secondly, I'd like to see the option
of minimum bid prices selected by the publisher.
I know - I can already hear the gasps.
What has been happening on my site is that Google has been selecting sites based on CTR/percieved value, and has been pushing out advertisers that probably bid considerably higher than the inapproriate ads they have chosen to show. As mentioned, by playing the whack-a-mole game I've managed to junk all the badly targetted ads that Google *thinks* are going to work best. By having selection based on highest bidder, all of the minimum bid adverts that don't work on my site are gone without me playing whack-a-mole. I know that this will mean a decrease in ctr, and possibly a decrease in earnings, but it's my feeling that as an option it might work extremely effectively on many sites, and increase earnings - especially with narrow niche sites like mine. If it doesn't, simply switch back to the default option of allowing Google to target ads based on it's existing criteria.
I'm sure that the argument will be that kicking ads is likely to lead to not enough ads to show. But I'm not sure the argument holds true nowadays. I started out with adsense in Jan '04, and the inventory was nowhere near as huge as it is today. I used to see PSA's half the time.
The inventory has grown a lot since then, and I never see psa's on my site. There is clearly no shortage of advertisers in my very tight (possibly obscure) niche.
I'm also sure that many will argue that kicking the inappropriate ads *will* lead to lower payouts, as they might be inappropriate but will give higher ctr thus higher earnings. Maybe on many sites that is true, but again, one size does not fit all.
Minimum bids. As far as I'm concerned, I'd much rather show a PSA than a 1c click. In fact, if these become a problem we are probably looking at Fastclick being a better earner. Nor do I really want the minimum bid advertisers that Google has been showing lately in place of advertisers that are willing to pay a decent amount. As far as I'm concerned, if an advertiser thinks a click from my site is only worth minimum bid then fine - advertise elsewhere. By setting a minimum bid price you are automatically booting all of the scapers, traffic buyers and are concentrating only on serious advertisers who have chosen to target your niche.
I'm sure there are downsides to both arguments. They may not even work in practice. It's my gut feeling that Google should allow webmasters more control over who appeas on their sites than the blocklist. I'm not the only webmaster to boot scrapers and boost profits, and I feel that the two tools above are worthy of consideration.
As I understand it, even if low-bid ads get ranked well because of predicted CTR, if the ACTUAL CTR doesn't work out, they will disappear.
What I've seen on my site is remarkable stability in ads. Every once in a while a new one gets thrown up, and doesn't stick.
A settable minimum payout is simply a requirement. Esp. with the drop of the minimum bid on the adwords side from 5 to 1 cent. Any market will allow the seller and the buyer to set a part of the price, not assume that the seller wants to sell regardless of the price. If some of the sellers want to, let them, but don't force those of us who'd rather have more quality than maximum expected revenue.
Filling up larger blocks with low paying ads: if there's at least a high paying one in the best spot, there might be discussion on wether to allow them or not (I'd vote for not), but again, leave it up to the publisher.
Worse:
I want to ban advertisers showign a URL different from the one where the link actually sends the visitor (most of the amazon and ebay crap does that)
Allow me to permanently drop the scammers advertising the typical ebay impossibilities. It makes my site look bad everytime a mole escapes my whacking.
Allow me to set negative keywords: if they appear in ads the ad will not be displayed on my site (ebay, amazon, ... and a number of 4 letter words will go there asap)
If others want them: fine keep them, if Google wants to be associated with them, fine. But I want to look at the long term and that makes association with scammers an imposibility.
