Forum Moderators: martinibuster
From the Inside AdSense:Tip 2: Don't believe the myth about blocking 'low-paying advertisers'
Our auction system automatically selects the best performing ads for each page to help you earn the most possible money. This is especially true with our new expanded text ads. By filtering ads you think are low paying, you could actually be cutting out the most optimized ads and decreasing your revenue potential. Each ad that is filtered is one less bid in the auction, lowering the price for the winning ad on your site. You benefit most when there is a larger pool of advertisers competing for a place on your site. Additionally, when we calculate the auction, we take ad clickthrough rates (CTR) into account - an ad with a $0.25 cost-per-click (CPC) with a 5% CTR is more valuable than an ad with a $1.00 CPC but a 0.1% CTR.
From the AdWords Help "How are ads ranked": [adwords.google.com]
Keyword-targeted ads are ranked on search results and content pages based on their maximum cost-per-click (CPC) and Quality Score. (For the top positions above Google search results, we use the actual CPC.) The Quality Score is determined by the keyword's clickthrough rate (CTR), relevance of ad text, historical keyword performance, and other relevancy factors.
Ad Rank = CPC X Quality Score
Having relevant keywords and ad text, a high CPC, and a strong CTR will result in a higher position for your ad. Because this ranking system rewards well-targeted, relevant ads, you cannot be locked out of the top position as you would be in a ranking system based solely on price.
Do the people who write this stuff live in the real world?
Google *should* be aware that blocking in fact DOES increase income for many of us, hence the official blurb is misleading, and innacurate.
It's interesting that they are admitting that they don't target ads based on bid price - something that has been said in this forum repeatedly. Many people believe that Google targets the highest bidding ads. Google don't seem in too much of a hurry to correct this misunderstanding.
The other point is that the data they use on ad performance is how the ads perform ON THE NETWORK AS A WHOLE and NOT how they perform on your site - a massive difference IMHO.
The difficulty that Google's targetting algorythm causes is that it often removes ads it thinks are low paying, and replaces them with ads it thinks are high paying. These decisions are based on performance on OTHER WEBSITES - not yours! If your website is about bright orange widgets with stripes, then logically ads trying to sell bright orange widgets with stripes would be the obvious choice. However, as they don't perform well elsewhere on the network the chances of you seeing them are lessened - despite the fact that they may perform very well on your site! And if you DO see them, the chances of them being removed and replaced by something irrelevant are high!
Many of us here have highly focussed websites, and many of us here are experienced webmasters that know where our traffic comes from, why they come and what ads might or might not appeal to our visitors.
We know that having ads that are highly irrelevant will not work for either advertisers or us. However, the target bot gets it spectacularly wrong quite often. For example, my website is aimed at middle aged family men, and Goole has been targetting acne cream adverts. Therefore we block wrongly targetted ads.
So what ads do Google replace the good payers that work on YOUR site with? Yup, you guessed it - scrapers mostly.
Scrapers do have a higher CTR than genuine advertisers selling goods and services, therefore they do well in the quality score. However, they are of no use to anyone because they don't pay well. They can't! What they are trying to achieve is siphon traffic off cheaply, and get visitors to click on more expensive ads on their site. Ever noticed that scrapers very often block other scrapers from appearing on their sites? Google's algorythm allows them to do this by placing their higher ctr ads instead of real advertisers selling goods and services.
They did it to me again yesterday. One of my regulars was removed and replaced with a site having an adsense block, an adwords block and another adsense block just to make sure! In addition, it had a big ebay ad offering new and used vasectomy reversals. Content? Scraped. These ads DO NOT pay well - remove them.
What Google aren't saying is what the long term effect of allowing their chosen placements of scrapers does. EPC will slide, and smartpricing will downgrade your site for the good payers too. Therefore, an advertiser that is willing to pay well for a quality lead THAT YOUR SITE IS PROVIDING THEM WITH only pays marginally above minimum.
By keeping scrapers off, my EPC has risen sixfold over the last two months since I have been blocking some of the stupid placements and all made for adsense sites. Bottom line income is up by 30% plus and rising. I'm seeing genuine advertisers, and although they don't have such a high CTR as the scrapers, they pay WAY more, and smartpricing now thinks my site is worth a lot more than it did when it was carrying the scrapers and junk adsense chose to place.
[edited by: Jenstar at 1:23 pm (utc) on Sep. 26, 2005]
I don't want the highest eCPM, I want the highest eCPM that is compatable with my longterm goals of continued growth.
Exactly!
publisher - common sense - manual review - site based figures
I have ads which have appeared consistantly, and are a close fit to my content, however they are not close enough to get any clicks. An ad which might pay $100 per click is fun, however if nobody clicks on it, than it qualifies as a low paying ad.
Normally, I can spot the low conversion ads quickly, I always give them a few days to see how they effect my overall earnings.
I beleive that the "competitive filter" was meant for more than to eliminate the competition from advertising on your website. The competitve filter is also used to ensure that the most competive revenue producing ads are avalible for your visitors.
2) I have some sites where it is direct to surfer sales. I consider all similar products competition. All similar items blocked - all. Related industry items only.
3) Yet, other sites are portals. Here G can do what they want. The only one where I accept the eCPM argument.
In my businesses, it's about efficiency. One click for $10 is always better than 10 clicks for $10. I'm not brand building here, impressions don't mean squat to me as an advertiser. It's ROI per click - for BOTH the Publisher and Advertiser. IMHO.
Nevertheless, if Google thought this through, they would fix it all by themselves. They are providing less value by letting the scrapers in I will give you a generic fictional example.
Imagine that internet browsers were for sale. And imagine there were affiliate programs selling them and Made For Adsense (heretofore, MFA) sites.
The real driver for adwords is that merchants want to get consumers. So they are willing to put up money to get at them. The money is so big that it allows for arbitrage among skilled webmasters and marketers.
So affiliate programs and MFAs are in effect the middleman. In this model, affiliate programs are not as bad as MFAs. Like the stock market, they bring liquidity to the market. Some merchants are willing to pay only on the backend, that is, once they're already sold the product. Thereby mitigating risk. Affiliate programs are willing to spend money to obtain that commission. Although still inefficient, it does bring some ad money to the table from merchants unwilling to gamble on adwords.
MFAs on the other hand, are 100% leeches. Why? Picture this. Microsoft bids $1.00 per click. Opera bids 75c per click and FF bids 50c per click. Those are the 3 revenue drivers. But now in order to make money, MFAs need to bid a lot less, because quality sites generating the real traffic need to be paid, with Google getting half. That has to leave enough money on the table for the MFA to earn more than they bid. So they bid 20 cents. 10c to you, 10c to Google. To make back the 20c they need to earn 60c at least for user attrition, and google will take 60c there too.
End result, Google is the short term winner, getting two clicks out of a user who could have gone directly to MS/Opera/FF. The MFA is a winner too. Stealing the money that would have gone to the quality website.
The user is a loser, wasting time at useless sites. The publisher is a loser...giving out money to a middleman underbidding in his category. The merchant is a loser too. He's competing with the MFA for clients. And some of those clients never get to him because instead of clicking on an MFA instead and never "finding the way".
The quality of the program suffers. People learn that google ads are often about MFA sites rather than real merchants. CTR goes down across the board. Publishers have to compete with websites on SERPS because they have monetized SEOs with crappy incentives.
In an efficient and ideal market, Google wouldn't even allow the MFA to exist, or at least fight him with every algorithmic tool in the book. It would be better for it's index, better for the merchants and better for the publishers.
I hope that made sense. Just want to add that aff. programs are not that good for the system either. But theoretically they are bringing their merchants business and they are putting cash into the system that might not otherwise be there. The reality? Maybe not so good.
For example, I want www.website.com to show their ads, but how to I prevent the affiliates for www.website.com from showing theirs?
I don't want to block www.website.com and block the actual merchant's ad, just the affiliates. Any help would be appreciated.
Excellent analysis. Completely buy that.
However, you answered the question all by yourself - Google seems to be interested in a short term win-situation ONLY (looking at the next quarterly earnings report), so they seem to forget about the long-term-effects of letting MFA sites in to the program...
Sometimes I wonder how a Product Manager at Google might feel when he clicks an ad on a quality site and arrives at a crap MFA site. It could be a frustrating experience, if this guy is interested in the development of the World Wide Web. Of course, if he's "just" interested in the wealth of Google, which is completely okay (but unlikely), he might feel satisfied (like, "ahh- another Adsense ad").
But I honestly doubt it. If he's interested in quality, he will feel sad about the MFA sites. And frustrated that he can't do anything about it (due to the financial constraints of G).
[edited by: mzanzig at 7:00 pm (utc) on Sep. 26, 2005]
1. Use mouseover or "Ads by Gooooogle" link to determine the home-URL of the advertiser.
2. Some sites' home page looks like "good" site, but landing page of the Ad is made to display their own Adsense ads only, and no real products. These are the ones you want to filter. Use Google search to determine real landing page on example.com, syntax:
site:example.com keyword1 keyword2
where keyword1 keyword2 - words from Ad Title
If the page displays lots of Adsense in most prominent places, and not much else - definitely filter their home URL (example.com).
If there is no Google-indexed page on that site featuring keyword1-keyword2, page is probably hidden/orphaned which is good indicator that something is fishy. Filter the example.com .
Warning - this is only my limited experience, and may not work for everybody, but looks like 30% increase of total earnings during 2 months for me.
R
All of this just goes to show that G's algos - although very cleverly programmed and probably excellent at handling multiple multiple near realtime inputs of data and achieving staggering empirical results cannot interpret more fuzzy (for want of a better word) data better than a pair of eyes and a brain.
And that is where the real problem is that G has - they have to wait for performance data to make a judgement call on the quality/relevancy of an ad - people can spot them a mile off and disable them.
sorry if i missed this. but how to tell what ads are low paying?
You are never going to be able to tell this - Google doesn't want you to know. But it seems there is a general feeling here that made for adsense site's are low payers. The business model dictates that they can't be good payers. If they advertise on adsense, they have to be able to convert the traffic they get into clicks on their site for higher value - therefore they can't possibly pay much for clicks. Google places them based on ctr mainly.
so as a publisher how should i weed out the lowest paying ads?
so as a publisher how should i weed out the lowest paying ads?
Google doesn't want you to weed out the lowest-paid ads. Google wants you to let it decide which ads to display. (If Google wanted you to second-guess the ad-matching algorithm with the blocking filter, it wouldn't refer to that filter as a "competitive ad filter," and it wouldn't warn that "filtering sites may decrease your potential earnings.")
Note that Google doesn't explain why filtering sites may decrease your potential earnings. One obvious reason is that excessive blocking may reduce the number of available ads, but who's to say that an "overoptimization penalty" might not also apply? (If I were running AdSense, I'd be inclined to give bigger rewards to publishers who didn't try to game the system. The honchos at Google might not be doing that--we just don't know--but building incentives and discentives into the compensation formula certainly wouldn't be unreasonable from Google's point of view.)
1) Filtering ads that affect earnings regardless of quality
2) Filtering spam ads that may or may not affect earnings but based on trying to better match Google advertisers with the publisher website (i.e. my site is a quality site I want quality advertisers)
I know that is simplistic forgive me. However, the problem with coming from the point of view in number (2) is that a vast amount of Adword advertisers are gaming the system - ebay ads have been mentioned more than once - scrapers etc. The "extreme" broadmatch nature of the adword system is that on the whole for more niche content crap is served because these guys have massive keyword lists and bid on everything (and the system helps them).
That is a problem - however as you start to filter these out you will start to see CTR increase up to a point. All industries are different, however there is a "critical mass" of "real" advertisers (quality i.e. relevant complimentary ads from businesses) in each one. You will all find this threshold is different depending on your site topic - but go outside the big industries and you will find the bidded "quality" listings deplete rapidly.
I know this because I am a publisher and an advertiser.
With this in mind there are obvious steps to take to remove low converting ads - many posters have talked about this - however removing ads excessively will have the effect of increasing click through but reducing CPC significantly.
This raises the issue of PPC vanity - for the poster that talked about wanting advertisers that are for the good of "my websites longterm goals" that is clearly not in line with Google (the advertiser provider) and without working with the advertisers directly quite impossible to have any element of control. That is the point - you don't have control, you get a revenue share from a third party that can do pretty much what they want (including terminate the ads at any point). If you want this type of agreement use something like adbrite.
Adsense is a short term technique to monetise your traffic - I don't believe Google have argued otherwise (I may be wrong but we don't have the multi-year contract that Ask Jeeves has). So many factors influence earnings - smartpricing is one (quality can be a killer if volume is too low). Finally, without anyone really knowing the algo used for publishers it must be unwise to over-ban ads - if quality of ads was so much of a key factor to Google explain the thousands of rubbish ads that are live every day receiving clicks (without review).
Summary - get rid of low "earning" ads (that is what it is there for) don't just leave vanity ads - you might be smart priced tomorrow.
Don't treat Adsense like a "please choose from a list of related links for more information"
i.e. Hand selected links that pay - using the filter list to do this will take up all your time, reduce your earnings - better to take money direct from advertisers if you have the time.
Think about it: they are going after more of the same advertisers whose ads should have been displayed on your site, right?
The techniques used are very clever. Some of them appear to be real sites, but when you click around there's no outside link other than googleads, right above the only other place to click.
As a webmaster, it temps you to use the same techniques. But if you have a site with a purpose, then it would make your site suck.
This whole thing makes me mad. Google is ruining the web. Google could solve this overnight.
When you want to advertise on the content network, you should declare upfront to google if you are an affiliate/MFA. If so, fine, but let content networks opt out. And if you miscategorize yourself and are reported on, Google should do something about it.
Nobody is suggesting that people can, or should try and second guess what advertisers pay most. For example, trying to guess if Steve's car repairs or John's car repairs is the poorer payer is impossible so shouldn't be attempted. Likewise, deciding if London hotel bookings or book a hotel in London is the best option is equally impossible and stupid. If people try this then the penalty is that they are going to lose money. This is what I believe Google is advising, and rightly so.
However, we are NOT talking about trying to cherry pick between genuine advertisers - everybody put that thought out of your minds right now. What we ARE talking about blocking are sites that DO NOT CONFORM TO GOOGLE'S PUBLISHED TOS. Google doesn't seem able or willing to enforce the TOS on publishers, so the only option is for webmasters to block them as we see them.
The problem is that Google's algorythm routinely removes ads it KNOWS historically are good performers on your site, and replaces them with sites it *thinks* will work better, based purely on data from elsewhere. In most cases these ads are from scrapers / MFA sites. Quite frankly that's an insane thing to do, but they do it all the time. I've blocked about 3 more this week.
Blocking these sites isn't "Vanity" but sound financial sense for Google, publishers and other (genuine) advertisers. The effect of having them there for a while is that smartpricing downgrades your site as a whole, and clicks from genuine advertisers will only get you minimum amounts. By improving the quality of advertisers by rooting out the TOS violators, smartpricing will re-value your site upwards, and genuine advertisers will pay you more.
There should not be a penalty imposed for enforcing the TOS where Google won't, but there is a reward - higher earnings in the long term.
To be honest, Google seems in complete denial that there is knock-on effect on webmasters of placing these sites. Hence my original point of starting this thread.
I'm all for your idea that banning these sites should improve smart pricing. I just wish we could hear a consensus from people who have successfully done so.
>The problem is that Google's algorythm routinely removes ads it KNOWS historically
>are good performers on your site, and replaces them with sites it *thinks* will work
>better, based purely on data from elsewhere. In most cases these ads are from
>scrapers / MFA sites.
David, this is an interesting point - that the performance of ads on scraper sites may be outperforming those on your site and causing the swapping.
Looking at it from another perspective for a moment (trying to make an opportunity out of a problem) could it also suggest that there is further potential for optimisation on your site?
For comparison, I've not seen the ad-swapping problem on our sites despite the fact that there are scraper sites in the topic area. We only have two blocks in place: one a competitor; the other an ad that we didn't feel fitted with our ethics/image. There are some advertisers that have appeared regularly and over a long period of time, and most new ads seem to be well targeted and appropriate for our pages. We typically get what we think is a good CPM - good click through rates and a medium CPC - and our pages are tightly focused on particular topics, within specific niches.
Perhaps we don't experience the swapping problem because our sites are sufficiently optimised to take the performance of ads on scraper sites out of the equation. So, if the ad swapping problem occurs on your site, one solution (if it is possible) might be to try and improve further the optimisation and CTR of your pages?
David, this is an interesting point - that the performance of ads on scraper sites may be outperforming those on your site and causing the swapping.Looking at it from another perspective for a moment (trying to make an opportunity out of a problem) could it also suggest that there is further potential for optimisation on your site?
To be honest, I think the site optimisation isn't the problem. A little more info:- The scrapers I see tend to be good ones - hence their placement based on ctr elsewhere. The sites typically will have an ad that is correctly targetted to my niche, and the ad lands on a page optimised for it. Hence Google's placement - as it can't tell a scraper from a real advertiser. However, typically that page will be two adsense blocks, an adwords block and possibly some scraped content if I'm lucky!
My overall point is that although the ads are correctly targetted, they DON'T out-perform the genuine advertisers ads. Leaving the MFA sites on for a while has historically caused smartpricing to penalise my site as a whole - heavily. Google *should* know what ads historically do and don't work on individual sites, and *should* use this info in the algorythms. I think what works on an individual site should be given a LOT more weight than ctr based on other sites.
The more I think about it, the more a possible solution surfaces:-
If we are blocking sites on the basis they don't conform to the TOS (in our opinion) then maybe Google could use this to their advantage. Have two lists.
1) the existing competitive ad filter for ads that are competitors and genuine mis-targetting etc.
2) have a list of sites you are banning based on the fact you believe they don't conform to the TOS. Google could then look at these lists and where a site is listed by X number of publishers, that triggers an alert at the googleplex to look at that site. Neither advertiser or publisher should be penalised by Google for using / being on the list. It would just trigger an alert that X number of publishers think it needs looking at.
Google's algorythms are never going to develop fast enough to deal with the problem of MFA sites. Nor are Google ever going to go down the road of full manual review. By having this type of feedback from publishers, they may well be able to utilise manual review by publishers in a hugely positive way.
How about suggesting this ASA?
Yes, I think we should definitely make some noise with ASA. But not just suggesting this as a solution, but bringing the entire issue to his attention. And I also don't see why they don't encourage reporting those types of sites.
Google now has a relationship with the webmaster. They have sitemaps mapped to a name. They are feeding the webmaster traffic. They are offering adsense. If the owner fears reprisals from Google and there is an easy way to report MFAs and the google management actually respond to the reported urls (unlike now, where they send you a form letter and the site remains in SERPS), webmasters would be scared and police themselves.
The best thing adsense every did was be brutal to the webmasters when they first started testing the system...kicking them out seemingly at random. People got scared of getting kicked out and that made them comform better than anything else, even though Google later stopped kicking people out (except worst offenders).
One more note, remember when they made a big deal out of not calling attention to the ads in fear of attracting bad clicks? Now it's like a circus the way Google itself mangles the ad on your site with no way to opt out. I've seen some very weird layouts and it doesn't look professional. Things change huh?
The best thing adsense every did was be brutal to the webmasters when they first started testing the system...kicking them out seemingly at random.
What evidence do you have to support that claim?
People got scared of getting kicked out and that made them comform better than anything else, even though Google later stopped kicking people out (except worst offenders).
Again, where's your supporting evidence?
