Yes, Esilou,

At least you are one of those who work within the flow of change. Not necessarily by trying this experiment but by doing (and Daring to do) whatever you can to improve your site(s) standing and earnings. And of course, the goodness of heart to share your findings and results with others.

Hooray for you! I wish you and others like you the best of luck no matter what you dare to do to help your situation.

Ann

I've noticed Google applies smart logic to ads having channel assigned. I'm almost sure Google analyses all the clicks on channelled ads, and then mostly shows ads of the same thematic/keywords. This means channels may produce poorly targeted ads. For example if I have webpage about bicycles, and first few click were on poorly targeted ads (lets say about gas or petroleum) then such ads become Google's priority for these channels. This may be the cause of lower payout on channelled ads. IMO.

More creative thinking!

You could have a good idea there...Keep brainstorming. :)

Ann

Hey man, I'm not trying to be negative, I'm just saying I've been beat into submission is all. I enjoy watching others trying to break the system, and I thank Ann for bringing this out and helping me confirm speculation around certain aspects of channel data.

In truth, I'm the hockey player in the penalty box watching and not allowed to join the experiment. Hate me if you will for not trying it, but do know I despise all of you for having the flexibility give it a go because I can't (too many battle wounds)... Again, thanks for the valuable thread Ann!

You're welcome, and of course nobody hates you.

You forget positive thinking? :)

Ann

Yippee, no hard feelings :-)

Yippee, no system to break here. :) It's simply a test to verify whether using custom channels is OK or not, due to an alleged possible bad effect in earnings, etc. Personally, I still think it's most probably OK to use them.

There seems to be three different groups among the testers, who get good, bad or no effect from removing custom channels. After almost four weeks I'm in the third group, no effect, with the normal ups and downs as always.

There are several theories, but I think we can group them in three, according to the effect attributed to the removal of custom channels:

Theory A: No effect. The changes experienced by several testers must be caused by other reasons. Ann now admits this is indeed a possibility. BTW, this is the theory that AdSense Support seems to think is the correct one.

Theory B: Sometimes good effect, sometimes bad effect, sometimes no effect. There is in fact a group of theories here: Google data mining, site re-evaluation after a change, low/high performing channels affecting negatively/positively, etc.

Theory C: Always good effect from the custom channel removal (due to a possible bug in the AdSense algorithms), unknown effect from other possible factors. This was the initial theory in this thread.

I was thinking that possibly the test results would be inconclusive, and this seems to be the case until now. But if we talked about opinions, in my personal guess about the correct theory, the approximate probabilities would be the following: P(A)=90%, P(B)=9%, P(C)=1%. Of course I can be 91% wrong, for example.

Anyhow, it would be indeed interesting to know the real causes of the different effects, like Ann's earnings increase, particularly if they are long term.

I found what joelgreen said above to be true when I implemented Ann's test conditions (although for a while I thought I was imagining it).

I have a set of 60 some related pages that I've been having difficulty in achieving successful targeting for the past year... even with the use of a variety of section targeting and content tweaking formats. A week after deleting the custom channels and removing the channel information from the ad blocks... I finally started seeing the selection of ads I had been trying to achieve. No other changes were made to the pages ( the current section targeting concept was still in effect, however).

For the first time I am starting to see earnings build as the ads are finally what I always expected my visitors to be interested in. I have even returned content to the pages I had removed thinking it may have been the source of 'crawler confusion' (I just coined that :-)) and the ads have held steady. I was also able to remove over 30 URL's from my filter as those sites (simply WAY off target) no longer appeared!

However, since it's the "off-season" for these pages... I have another month to wait to see how they will really perform.

Kind of a side effect of the test... so thanks again Ann!

Chapman

Jaun_G,

Very good summation although the jury is still out on a lot of those ideas. :)

I am still avidly reading all posts to better help in my efforts to return to my former highs and you people are helping tremendously, not just me but everyone who reads these posts.

The ads are holding up and so is the income. Now I am on a meta tag hunt. Boy, on some of these pages I must have been sleepwalking when I put them in! Spent many all night and all day stints to learn and get the main site up back in 1997. I forgot to say I am a workaholic. When I get started I have a one track mind and don't want to stop until the task is done :D
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Chapman,

I am so pleased at your success and your on going efforts. I have a feeling it may keep up for you because of the better ads. Please, keep us posted.

Ann