I was building a page on my site and saw an adsense ad on it for "Free Online Games". I was bored and thought "Hmm, might as well play a few online Flash games", so I decided to visit the site (by typing in the url manually and not clicking, of course). The page that loaded was the worst page of spammy looking piece of crap I've ever seen. Then it made me wonder that if surfers get sites like these when they visit Google Ads, I wonder how long it will take before the reputation of a Google Ad is associated with spam and there is a huge drop in clicks for Google Ads in general. It could have been an isolated incident though.
It's not isolated at all. I've clicked on a few Google ads over the past year on other sites because they advertised for what I was looking for, but when I got there it was just an irrelevant page - like a search thing for ANYTHING. I actually came across 3 of these while looking for something the other day - bloody annoying, and I can see why people may get put off clicking Google ads if they become just totally irrelevant like that, but then I don't click on Google ads that much. I can't even remember what my search was now, but yeah it happens a lot from my experience. T'aint good. A little more quality control from the AdWords team wouldn't go a miss. Pete
Yeah, I've seen an add going around a few sites targeted to Irish Browsers and it's a real con. They have a load of adds that advertise "FREE [Keyword]" and whatever one of the (seemingly hundreds of) keywords that have been listed by them is added. Some of the pages advertise free music, other ones free games, others for free books, they seem to have listed tons and when I eventually clicked on one of their links (not on one of my sites of course) I got a "sign up for our free newsletter" page..
Hmm.. Interesting.. I've just trusted AdSense but now I'm thinking I should start monitoring what advertisers show up on my ads. I'll just have to weed out junk advertisers if any. I really don't want to be associated with or pointing to any low quality advertisers.
This is the whole problem with people trying to play middelman with adsense and adwords. It hurts the entire program and worse it turns off visitors and leaves a bad taste in their mouth. If the average person's experience with clicking on an advertisement that says google on it is that it just takes them to a worthless page that is trying to get them to click on another ad, they are going to be annoyed, and eventually they are going to stop clicking on these ads. In my opinion people who play the middle are parasites on the system. There is no need for people to take adwords traffic and convert it through adsense. The other advertisers and publishers can find each other just fine without people trying to arbitrage the middle. I know google doesn't really seem to care about this, and perhaps even condones it to a degree, but I think they need to look long and hard about people who feed traffic this way, because it is bad for the entire long-term dynamic of the program. A site whose ENTIRE purpose is to take ad traffic and redirect it to new ad traffic is going to create an adverse experience for the end-user. This is BAD BAD BAD.
I can usually tell from how well the ad is written whether or not it's going to be a crappy site or not. I've bought numerous products from companies I found through the search and content networks. The ones that write quality descriptions usually have decent sites in my experience. I think that Google ads are getting more clicks now than they will in the future though. As people become more used to them, they'll probably click less. However, as I mentioned, I know exactly what the ads are, but still find myself clicking on ads while doing searches, and have bought many products through them.
Personally, I think the same way that Google approves Adsense publisher sites, they should approve advertiser sites...or some type of filtering system. It might weed out some of the crap sites that could possibly end up driving the program into the ground.
Personally I never click on adword ads when I am seeking information. If I want to buy a product or service, usually I don't use search engines for that. yellow pages, for instance, is a better choice. What I suggest is that every site that contains adsense should be approved by google not only the main site used to open an account. I am sure many of you won't like the idea but I think this is the best way to eliminate crappy sites publishing adsense
That's not true. Google AdSense ads are okay. The problem was with your manual typing. Usually URL shown in Google Ad is a shortened URL. You should've clicked on the ad itself to find out where it really was pointing out.
Are you telling me you have never seen made for adsense sites ? what the added value of these sites? nothing. Looks like adsense is going to be the most regulated spam program. google should do something.
when a company goes public, and has some of the most fierce sharks in the VC industry behind them - bottom line means everything. you can expect the quality to continue to decline, as they lower the bar to gain more advertisers. when you're playing with Wall Street, that hippy dippy nonsense of 'do no evil' goes out the window.
What do you mean by "lowering the bar"? Adwords prices, in a lot of cases, are actually getting more expensive. If anything, I would say they are raising the bar.
he meant the quality of publisher sites they are approving, or at least the sites they use with the same accounts
I think this is exactly what needs to happen as more webmasters realize how valuable their traffic is. This eliminates the bottm-feeders. It seems low-value advertisers produce low-quality/low-value sites.
Targeted site (through contextual) advertising will soon eliminate all this crap. Everything comes full circle.
What I was initially talking about was that the advertisers using Adwords are going to kill the Adsense program. Google Adwords is allowing spam sites to advertise with Adwords and in the end, the reputation of Adsense ads will suffer as a result. I actually don't mind clicking an ad for tips on using adsense and finding a nice clean informational website that is only there to get clicks on their adsense ads. It's more the sites that have this "in your face" spam banner crap or sites that say in a bold heading "START MAKING MONEY FROM HOME NOW!!!!" when you click on an ad for "games" or "car stereos".
I don't think so. You say that without the advertisers, there is no Adsense. Well, without the clicks, there's no adsense either. If Google continues to support the advertising of junk sites through Adwords, then it will eventually build a negative reputation and nobody will ever want to click on Adsense ads anymore.
If these publishers were not approved in the first place into the adsense program there wouldn't be this problem of middlemen. Adsense is meant to be an additional space for advertisers not a source of revenue to publishers. When you talk about reputation you should consider adwords not adsense. G should start filtering the publishers, when this is done those spam advertisers won't exist no more since they won't have an adsense account.