I've been gradually going through and putting what I assume must be low paying advertisers (MFA sites mostly) in the competitive ad filters, and for some reason I'm making less money than I ever did. I've gone from an average and steady $25cpm to around $15 since I've started filtering ads. Earlier today I decided to remove the filtered ads (there were only about 40 or 50 in there), and my cpm so far has jumped back to $25 again. Makes me think that by filtering out assumed low paying ads, maybe they're being replaced by lower paying ads. Anyone had any similar experiences?
its a double edged sword. Even as you get rid of the low paying advertisers, you reduce the overall number of advertisers who are interested , therefore they can then pay less to get a high position on your site
Google should just make a minimum price for ads. This way no one can get ads on your site for 1 cent a click. I filter ads and make more. Google says i filtered ads that made me more but i make more per click everyday after i filtered them.
i've been filtering the mfa garbage for a long time, and it's resulted in a higher epc. it also makes for a better user experience, if you care about your visitors.
my revenue actually improved by getting rid of the filtered ads altogether.. So in my experience, they don't work..
Well, the thing is that if you use competitive filters, you will reduce the adwords ads which would have a chance to appear on your website. Doing this may help show the higher paying ads but in the end what is important is what appeals to your visitors. If the higher paying advertisers do not have relevant ads or ads which appeal to your visitors, you probably ended up with less clicks. In the end, it is a question of putting higher paying ads or allowing your visitors to have a wider variety of ads. Like you when I had the competitive filters, I got a lot less clicks and a lot less income. I have since removed it. Incidentally, the competitive filter as the name suggest is for you to add sites which are your competitors URLs in to prevent their ads from appearing. It was not envision as a means to weed out low paying advertisers. Low paying advertisers can offer low because their keywords may not be saturated so in the end, they may actually be more relevant to the visitors. Advertisers may bid higher because their keywords is overly saturated.
The ads I filter are the MFAA sites which "coincidentally" don't pay crap. I improve the visitors experience by doing so because these sites have nothing to offer. As I've said 27 times before in other threads, these MFAA sites are writing very good ad copy so I get a lot more clicks, but the visitors come right back a few seconds later when they see the site. Think about this...what does that do for me in terms of conversions at the advertisers site? Absolutely nothing. Does that increase my chance of getting smart priced? Yep. There are plenty of valid advertisers in my "niche" because it is real, not some keyword-of-the-day site trying to capitalize on high keyword-clicks. So I filter the worthless POSs and improve my earnings and enhance my visitor's experience. You can't eat/spend CTR.
I did not know that MFA websites advertises their sites on Adwords, I always thought they are just made to put Adsense ads. Thanks for the info.
Lot of them try the Arbitrage technique (thus MFAA) and pay very low for clicks, hoping to get your visitors to come to them and click THEIR ads and get just a bit more for their clicks. If they get a lot of traffic, this pays off for them. Totally worthless sites, potholes on the information superhighway etc, but their ads eventually start to infest your sites and have to be exterminated.
My cpm has dropped on one of the sites and increased in the other. Well Guess its time for Split Test . Will split test and keep everyone updated on this. This, is gonna be interesting . All Success, ~G
An update. It seems to have shifted back to the previous values. I guess I'll continue filtering results, or I may need to redesign my pages so I only have the one Adsense ad (at the moment there are 2). That way there'll be less chance of more crappy ads showing up.
I had the same experiences as the original thread, I used adsense blacklist and initially saw a huge rise in earnings about %10 increase, but this started to drop off over March and April, I got the Adsense team comments about removing the amount of filters I had in place. I removed them all and my earnings have gone up again. I agree about the adsense sites not paying well, particulalry if they are in a high paying niche, they have no choice but to match the on topic sites in order to get seen, so to say they pay crap is not totally accurate.
Consistently paying $0.01 in a normal paying "niche" is crap no matter how you spin it. The one thing people have to learn about these filters is that they are just like websites. You don't create them and forget them, you create them and MAINTAIN them. Keep checking your site to see if new bogus ads show up. Occasionally drop your filter completely and rebuild it with the new ads that appear so that you stay current with the garbage that shows up.
I started out adding the foolish Ebay and similar ads to my filter. I then noticed that while Google for Search has my pages properly indexed, Adsense often uses alternate definitions and was giving me literally hundreds of irrelevant ads. (I ran out of bans long before I ran out of irrelevent junk.) If I search for these alternates, I am nowhere to be found - as it should be. A few examples, all from a programming tips website: An article on changing link styles = (diaper) changing tables Marquee tags = Marquis hotels, LED signs, and party tents in England (who knew they called tents marquees over there?) Marquee tags behavior attribute (a few lines within a large article) = behavioral analysis (not even near where the attribute is discussed) Now in my account they email me telling me that I might be filtering higher paying ads. Yeah, they might be higher paying, but no-one from my site is going to click on them. I just wish they would update the Adsense algorithms to better match the ads or better educate the Adwords users on how to match, then perhaps the competitive filter could go back to being just that - a tool to prevent advertising your competitor; instead of a tool to block the MFA garbage and irrelevant ads that will never get clicked.
the adsense blacklist can't possibly know exactly what ads are showing up on your particular website. so using the adsense blacklist is not a valid test of anything. you have to make regular checks for the mfa garbage on your website... sometimes the adsense preview tool can help, if you have the geographical targeting set up to match where the majority of your traffic is coming from.