Adsense Tip: Removing Placement Targeted Ads - Increase Your CTR

Hey everyone-

Just wanted to share my most recent discovery on improving my Adsense earnings and performance.

If you find your ads are not targeting at all, and in fact start to look spammy, the problem may be related to folks running "placement targeted" ads on your site.

You can run an advanced report in Adsense to see if you are being targeted, and how much these ads might be costing you!

I had mine turned off and my CTR instantly went up as my ads went back to being purely contextual.

If you are interested, you can read more at my blog...

Be sure to check your reports! In some cases the placement ads may be doing well for you. In my case they were not, so it benefited me to turn them off.

Sockmoney

 

Interesting find Sockmoney. Will have to do some testing and see if this changes anything on my end.

I wonder if the reverse of this works BETTER for some sites…

 

To save that setting when you check mark it, what do you need to do? Just log out?

 

This is the problem and we have to contact the adsense to get the placement targeting disabled. However, I did not encounter such problem and if there is one, I will simply filter it

 

Excuse my ignorance, but what is placement targeting?

 

I did try to filter them. But my list of advertisers using placement targeting was in the hundreds to maybe a thousand. I never saw all of them because the AdManager tool kept freezing up.

Plus new advertisers were being added to my list for placement targeting every day. I did not want to manage and review/approve every one. So for my situation, having Google disable was the right way to go. For others who may do well from these ads, they may not want to disable them.

Best thing to do is to run the advanced report as I described in my post and see for yourself if it is worthwhile.

What is placement targeting? Simply put, it is when advertisers select your site or your site category to target their ads to. This means your site will now show both contextual ads and ads from specific advertisers (likely unrelated) in your ad slots. So a company can run ads on your site even of the ads have nothing to do with any of your content. In my case this meant lower paying ads with extremely low click thru rates were starting to show up in my ad slots. Which I did not want.

 

Well I did tried before emailing google about removing the placement targeted ad but seems that they haven't reply up till today. Any specific google email address that you use which you can get in touch with them?
My competitive ads filtering list is almost full now, that's why I'm looking into this option. Maybe you can help.

 

Nice finding and totally agree with you. Myself also blocking the placement target advertise on adsense to avoid some niche marketer placing their lower cost ads on my side.

 

I find that contextual advertising works so much better than banner adverts. I think that visitors have become immune to image adverts and are less likely to click on them

 

i think the reason is the image ads dont have anything to attract visitor interest. on the other hand, text ads can display up to 5 different ads and i think at least 1 will interest them.

 

thanks for the info, never checked this before.
my contextual ads are 150,000+
against 300 or so placement ads. so i guess i dont need to cahnge anything.

 

yea i agree with you it changed my earnings about %20

 

Yup, in your case it doesn't make much sense to turn it off. But I would go back in a check the report periodically. Mine seemed to climb from just a few hundred impressions last winter to 20,000-30,000 impressions a day by this summer.

 

CTR went up? I am trying to understand the reasoning behind that. In my case, the targeted ads are text ads that look the same as any other text ad on the site, so I wouldn't think that removing them and replacing them with similar looking ads (contextual) would change the CTR at all. The average ePC of the site should go up definitely, though, since if someone clicks the ad you now get paid.

I suppose CTR would go up if (as you say) you had spammy looking placement ads. But in my case with the contextual and placement ads looking not much different from each other, I suspect I would not see any change in CTR, eCPM, though, I might see a change.

This may be a YMMV situation and if it worked for you, then it's a good coup for your site and your earnings and I'd sure continue what you've done.