As you all know by my numerous posts and whining lately about, low earnings since sept 1, will after I found out a huge amount of the drops were do to me adding adsense to blogs. I got the idea to try something else that I havent messed with until 2 days ago, filters....... I thought man I will try filtering out all advertisers that pay 20 cents and less. By checking what campaigners are paying for on overture etc, since a lot of them do campaigns on google also, etc.. ok, I filtered out a lot of the ads that paid 5 cents, 10 cents etc for my site(s) keywords..... I figured when I get clicks now they would be high ones, lol will it kinda worked, but my clicks per day dropped by 1/2 the amounts the days before the filters started , and my total daily earnings have dropped a couple more dollars per day LOL so far anyway............
Trying to filter out low paying ads is a really dumb thing to do, that is not what the filter function is meant for, and it will only hurt you, as you already found out. And believe me, if you are filtering out the ones that pay 20 cents or less you are filtering out almost all of them!
and why may I ask filtering low paying ads hurt? or is it something you feel without any data to substantiate? really? I have 4 websites that fetch me 40 cents+ per click, I don't think filtering out ones that pay 20 cents or less is going to make any differnce.
Now correct me if I am wrong, but what you are saying is that you don't want people to throw 20c in your hat? You only want them to throw .40? I find that strange!
I dont believe in major filtering you will see a fall as the only advertizers that are left might leave or change. However, I myself have done filters for 2 websites, and I am not sure about how well they pay, I just hated badly their ads.
That is what filters are for, to get rid of non-related ads, I have filtered many ads because they had nothing at all to do with my site, I was even getting some in Spanish on an English site
I think when the ads are displayed, the one with the highest pay is shown at the top and it would take the highest attention and the highest probability to be clicked so maybe filtering wouldn't make much of a difference
fryman is right, filters are meant for removing unwanted ads not to maximize CPC. Personally I think its a waste of time and effort to check what each advertiser is paying. same time spent on site development would yield much higher dividends.
When AdSense shows ads on a page, they are showing the highest paying ads available at the time for that page - they are in the business of making money too, and it makes sense they are going to show the ones that will pay the most. If you filter out those ads, AdSense will have to show ads that are paying even less than the ones you filtered, since you have already filtered out the highest paying ads available for those pages.
And also, don't forget that blocking URLs can also result in blocking that advertiser's entire inventory - so while you see one ad they are running and think it pays low, so you block it, that advertiser could also be targeting other keywords that have a higher CPC, which could be appearing on other pages in your site. But if you have blocked the URL, you have blocked all their ads, including ones that they might be worth $1 or more, not just the suspected 20 cent ones. Very few advertisers bid the same amount across the board when it comes to their AdWords campaigns, most have huge bid fluctuations, even when advertising the same URL.