I would like to make an economic argument for giving contextual ad publishers the ability to filter their ads by keyword.
Today I am feeling really sad about the contextual ads that have been showing on one of my websites. I am getting ads with titles such as "Afghanistan Sex"..."Pakistan Girls"..."Pakistan XXX"... I am also getting ads with content such as "Locate Bars and Clubs." I really like contextual ads, but when they arrive with this type of content I feel a twisting pain in my gut.
I'd like to become responsible for all of the content on my site - including the ads.
I spend almost all of my time and energy trying building a good site on a wholesome subject and attract visitors who appreciate that type of content. However, when ads like these arrive they completely undermine the theme that my site stands for, and without a doubt have my visitors backbuttoning out and shaking their heads about me. The average visitor to my site probably doesn't understand how contextual ads work and how they are delivered. Instead, many of them think that I have some direct affiliation with these advertisers, approve of their content, and that they are paying me directly to run those ads on my site. It is also damaging to my "brand."
Perhaps more important is the ability to filter such ads so that children who visit our websites don't see them, or worse...click through to the pages where these ads are pointing.
I've done a lot of ad filtering to stop ads like these, but I am unable to police every page of my site and every ad that appears on it. However, if I had the ability to filter about a dozen specific character strings, I would feel a lot better about my ads and my site might be more successful.
I am willing to bet one month's pay that some visitors to my site have seen these ads and have done at least one of the following....
- Questioned my sincerity
- Questioned my integrity
- Used the backbutton
- Left my site
- Doubted the reliability of my content
- Decided not to link to my site
- Formed a bad impression of my "brand"
If these ads do the damage listed above, then they are hurting the success of a website and thus the income that it produces for the website owner and the income that it delivers to the provider of the advertising. Perhaps these ads are getting clicked enough to be among the ads served, but I think that the income that they bring to me is more than offset by the potential response of my visitors. They also change the way that I feel about what I am doing, and that is more important to me than the money.
In many of these cases, keyword filtering is more valuable than the ability to filter a domain. The reason: Many of these ads are coming from some of the biggest names on the web - domains that also have LOTS of excellent ads that display on my site. So filtering the domain is not the most economic way to deal with this.
I hope that there is an easy way for providers of contextual ads to give small publishers the ability to filter their ads by keyword. If that is hard to do, then maybe they could give us the opportunity to select an option in our account that will enable "safe ad filtering"...maybe landing page filtering could be added, too?
Egol: I am sure you have heard of section targetting right? Have you tried it? I have used it a little bit. On my blog right now I do not have it running but I have it on some of my other sites and it seems to work.
Thanks! That is a great idea. I have used section targeting to isolate content on other pages but not on the pages that are delivering these ads. I am going to rerun the template today. Good suggestion.
Np - I hope it fixes it. I know how big a pain ads can be. Maybe someday they will be perfect :P
EGOL: You have inspired me to write a post about the issue as well. Lately, I have been having issues on my blog with the contextual ads - As soone as the keyword 'adsense' appears anywhere, any somewhat relevant ads get blown away for 'Get Rich Quick with Adsense!' ebooks, and MFA template ads etc. which none of my readers would ever click, and indeed have never clicked.
Perhaps if more people blog about it, we might get the Adsense team to implement it.
Adsense Should Allow Contextual Ad Filtering by Keyword
I agree that there should be a better way to control what kind of ads are displayed. After all, it would allow better ad targeting (leading to increased revenue). However, from ad networks point of view, it could pose some serious issues/risks like gaming the system (filtering low-paying keywords for example).
One solution for publisher is to abandon (large network provided) contextul advertising and find other ways to monetize site content (some affeliate programs provide contextual text ads)
I run *ADSENSE* ads on one of my most successful sites. It is a PR7. Occasionally I run *ADWORDS* for the site to attract business. When I run adwords, clicks that are highly placed are expensive, generally around $2-$3 per click. When I play the adsense game, I average receiving around 40-50 cents per click.
That was until last week, some advertiser started placing ads that were/are making less than 1 cent per click from a sitewide ad. As this thread points out, I don't know who is running the ads. Google will not tell me. Also there are a very large number of clicks to the ad, which makes me think that the advertiser is artificially enhancing the CTR for the ad by clicking on their own ad.
As I said, I don't know who is doing this, but I just noticed doubleclick is running a bunch of ads thru adsense on my site and those ads are for my competitor. Could it be doubleclick? It probably is, but I don't know. But if it is, that is a creative way to get around the "competitor filter", isn't it? And doubleclick is paying one cent to google and probably charging my competitor $2.
Well, now both are blocked in my "competitor filter": doubleclick and my competitor.
I’ve found that another commercial website in the education field see their own ads.
Something perhaps related is the way Adsense targets pages it doesn't know yet (or has forgotten about). I have one site that gets a lot of regular queries for something really odd (some large company-name + union, it ranks above the real company's website :-)). Whenever someone opens a more obscure page, Adsense still targets "companyname+union" instead of guessing based on the keywords in the URL. "companyname+union" is not even close to the main focus of the site, it's just one of the terms used a lot by visitors.
If a lot of visitors want a specific kind of ad, why does it have to skew the ads shown to everyone? If Adsense knows nothing about the URL, wouldn't an empty block be better? (or perhaps the webmaster could specify that, something like "don't guess at unknown content")
Great subject EGOL. I have two educational websites with in links from schools. I'd like to be able to make money off of the next educational website I build, but I could not tolerate such kinds of ads. I've found that most of the commercial websites in the education field sell their own ads for a monthly fee. One of the most successful educational sites around is https://www.eslcafe.com which is owned by Dave Sperling. My current sites are non-commercial, but when I do build a commercial one, I'll probably try selling my own ads for a small monthly fee. Your post helped me in this decision. Of course, even then I'd have to be extra diligent in who advertised on my sites. It's difficult to advertise when students are your target.
Excellent point of discussion, EGOL. Have you run both YPN and AdSense? Which of the two did you experience problems with (or both)? Have you used other, third-party contextual ads?
And, last, is this phenomenon more or less likely to make you consider running evil paid link ads as a monetization strategy? :)
As for evil paid links... I am staying away from them even though those folks email me often. However, I have suggested the site targeted ads to a couple of advertisers and they now have nice ads running on my site.
I decided to post this here because in May I posted "What I want for Christmas from Adsense" and they delivered a couple of my most wanted items already.
I'm hoping someone is going to help me out here, because I'm confused.
Given that AdSense is contextual, just how are these adverts coming out of the content in the first place?
"However, when ads like these arrive they completely undermine the theme that my site stands for, and without a doubt have my visitors backbuttoning out and shaking their heads about me."
Clearly not too many are leaving feeling anything negative towards the website:
"Perhaps these ads are getting clicked enough to be among the ads served, but I think that the income that they bring to me is more than offset by the potential response of my visitors."
My first port of call would have been Google, without any hesitation.
I would have wanted some clarification with regards to the targeting and then have them do something.
If I wasn't clear on the issue of where the earnings were coming from, or that I'd detected a correlation between the dodgy adverts and an upward trend in earnings, I'd pull the plug until the issue was resolved.
However, I do whole-heartedly agree with the idea of a more complete set of filtering tools.
At the very least, something that makes use of the Rating meta tag, which would solve a lot of problems with very little hands-on messing around...