Tracy and I need Your Help
The promise of interactive ads, delivered by Adsense, is:
"AdSense for content automatically crawls the content of your pages and delivers ads (you can choose both text or image ads) that are relevant to your audience and your site content--ads so well-matched, in fact, that your readers will actually find them useful.."
Your readers will actually find them useful - that is the pitch that keeps the Google money machine running.
The problem for any consumer/business protection site is that the ads are "not useful" but rather examples of the various scams and frauds that exist. (This is one way I keep up with what is going on -since the vast majority of frauds no longer appear in the print newspapers' classified section.)
Tracy Coenen details her frustration with this type of adsense fraud.
"A few weeks ago, I wrote about my experience with Google's new Ad Review Center. This tool enables you to block advertisements from certain advertisers. When you use this feature, advertisers who want to bid on your ad space must be approved first.But it's not quite that easy. There are a lot of advertisers who aren't going through the bidding process, so they can still end up on your site without your approval. To block them, you need to use the competitive ad filter.
Initially, this whole process was appealing to me, because I had advertisements for a lot of scam "business opportunities" showing up on my sites. This process helped me eliminate many of them. It's not a foolproof process, and there are still plenty of scams that can easily pop up on my sites."
So what would you recommend?
Comments
How's it going for you, Michael? I have to admit it's not going all that well. I HAVE been able to cut the number of scam-type ads, but haven't been able to eliminate them. In terms of usability of the ads, I know that's improved because my number of clickthroughs has stayed up. But my per click rate has continued to drop, and I can only assume that's because I've put so many limits in place.
There has to be more Google could do, they just don't want to. Too much revenue this way.
Posted by: Tracy Coenen | May 13, 2008 10:25 PM
Tracy, I am in the same position that you are. I try to ban crappy ads, but they continue to show up.
I don't really know which ads are getting clicked on - despite using adsense channels.
The promise of helpful information being automatically delivered by google adsense is a mirage. (Don't get me started on their ridiculous adwords click fraud program, however.)
It is really too bad, because I had faith in the model. I will probably move to direct advertising, pitching to companies who offer services that I think are valuable. We should probably do a cross promotion.
Posted by: michael webster | May 13, 2008 11:44 PM