Forum Moderators: martinibuster
We all know about eBay.com, but what are some others. (Are there others that are generic enough?)
If I understand correctly, the ad placement is ranked by bid with the highest bigger getting the top position and the forth highest bidder gets the forth spot and so on.
If we ban the forth highest bidder won’t the fifth highest bidder move up a notch?
We could be shooting our self in the foot by doing this.
If I am incorrect, please educate me…
I also understand that the point of the url filter is to eliminate ads from competitiors in the same business as yourself....not to get rid of low paying ads....that won´t work...if you don´t see high value ads, they will not appear just because you eliminate other cheaper ones from further down the list....all you are doing is accelerating your slide to the bottom of the click value hill.
No clicks no money.
Best to lose any badly targeted adds.
Eg I just removed an ad for wedding dresses on an engineering site!
And all those shopping.com etc...
If you are getting crappy ads then that is because your content is attracting them via keywords.
Adjust your content / keywords to attract MORE ADVERTISERS or switch to a subject that has more competition.
If you have only 4 advertisers in your little nitch then it is unlikely you'll get a click worth more than 8 cents (5 + 3 for top spot). It is also likely that you'll get ebay, etc ads since they bid on every word in the dictionary.
More advertisers will push ebay, etc off the bottom of the list.
IMHO the only way to get higher valued ads is to have more competition for the slots on your pages.
Over all 15 or so of my sites Average is about half a dollar a click, but still see some ebay etc... Depends on the advertisers budgets that day I suppose.
I've only got Amazon to add to the list, on the basis that if I want to run Amazon ads, I will do so myself and get the full commission!
Regarding the wisdom of blocking these ads:
If you block most low paying poorly targetted ads you will start shoing your alternative ad block. If you've made your alternative ad block well it will be using the space a lot better than useless ebay clicks.
I sell a product, and I don't want my customers leaving my site for my competition. So, I end up filtering out the competitors. EBAY, DEALTIME, etc. are the only ones left for me. But, it's still enough for me to make $130 a day or so.
I guess what I am saying is that it really depends on your site. Are you selling a product, or just dishing out info.
P.S. If you're getting laughable and inappropriate ads as have been mentioned in this thread and others, that would also be a valid reason to ban them. I'm just not convinced they're bidding down at the 5c level.
So you have an ad that pays 5c per click, and an ad that pays 40c per click - which one gets placed? Logically it should be the higher bid, but adsense may well place the 5c ad in the block because historically it has a high ctr, and the 40c ad a low ctr. The bot may well take a guess that the 5c ad might get 9 clicks in the same time that the 40c ad would get 1 click, and place the lower bid ad. That's why you may well see low paying, poorly targetted ads when you think that you should be seeing better paying more relevant ads.
Now this may seem a bad approach, but there is sound reasoning behind it - most of the time it probably works correctly and does give the webmaster the most income.
Now I have a really serious gripe about this. My site has been online for 5 years, has got to the top position on most relevant searches, and provides quality traffic to advertisers in a very tight niche. To see scrapers and traffic buyers ads placed on my site when I know there are proper advertisers that pay well targetting the niche drives me nuts!
What I've been doing is to look at my site here, and via a US proxy to see what ads are actually displayed (adsense preview tool doesn't work well IMHO) and block scrapers, made for adsense sites and traffic buyers. My bottom line earnings have risen by 20%. My clicks/ctr has gone down by nearly half, but the price per click has more than doubled to compensate. And I'm seeing quality ads on my site.
I have been doing this for best part of a month now, and watching my stats like a hawk. I have no way of being certain of this, but I have a gut feeling that the improved click price, and much better targetting has fed back through the system to up the bid price marginally.
The problem with the blocklist is that you can go too far. As an experiment I blocked all ads not totally relevant to my site to see what happened. The income dropped again. By going back to blocking just the scrapers, made for adsense and traffic buyers the income has peaked again. So if you can get the balance right then it does actually work.
I did start a thread suggesting that adsense introduce a minimum bid price feature purely in order to improve the targetting of ads, and adsense advisor has kindly going to suggest the idea to the development team at Google.
If I was an advertiser, I would expect to have to outbid my competitors for placement in a niche or specific site. I would NOT expect that having outbid my competitors, my ad was dropped in favour of an ebay affilliate claiming to sell new and used dead popes! Yet that is exactly what happens. I feel that an option to exclude minimum bid advertisers would help advertisers, google and us. It won't work on many sites, but if you have a tight niche I'm sure it would be a positive benefit. We have to await developments - if any.
My advice is to use the blocking tool to block ads you actually see on your site, but use it SPARINGLY! Make sure that you know your stats inside out so that you can guage the results of any changes.
low-paying domains
The problem is not low paying.
The problem is, that they annoy visitors and reduce CTR.
They waste valuable ad space for more relevant ads.
They destroy the idea, that the ads could be valuable.
So nobody with MLM, pyramid games, scrappers or companies selling Italians, Vaticans or used dog cake is allowed to advertise on my site.
But I don't know if eBay are in that category. I remember when I was advertising on Overture, eBay would would bid themselves up to the top of lots of categories. They have deep pockets and an insatiable appetite for traffic
Anyway, last week I finally decided to block those nonsense eBay ads and since then my earnings are higher than ever. Although I must note I made a few other changes but blocking eBay definitely helped.
If it were the display url, ebay affiliates would be easier to block.
I'd like the diplay url blockage as a feature.
ebay.com
ebay.co.uk
I haven't seen an ebay ad for a very long time. I would say that changes to the blocklist take a while to be seen on your site. I asked Google, and they said about 3 hours before you'd see any changes in action. But I have seen it take over 24 hours on some occasions.
