I have a friend who sells blue widgets. Her site only sells blue widgets, has absolutely no advertising and has absolutely no competition. Her domain name is bluewidgets.com. However she was asked to pay £5.50 a click for the keyword blue widget. When she phoned Adwords they also agreed that there was nothing she could possilby do to make her page or advert more relevant, so how come they were asking for £5.50? Its not even as if anyone else is bidding on the term. The QS algo as it is sucks. IMHO!

Therein lies one of the problems with the existing model.

A while back there was a thread in the adwords forum where a few members contributed to an experiment. The idea was to have a bit of fun testing the bid prices Google offered on a non existant keyword. The keyword was ridiculous, could never exist in a million years and there were no web pages appearing on Google when users did a search for the keyword.

Yet despite this, because people started to bid on it, the keyword bid rose dramatically.

That was how the bid pricing algo worked a couple of months back - I guess that QS hasn't improved the situation from your example above.

Don't get me wrong - the whole concept behing adsense / adwords is great and should work well. I think the problem is that with all of the constant tinkering over the years, Google themselves (whilst having an idea of how they want it to work) don't really have a clue of what the huge bloatware that is adsense / adwords will do under any given situation. All of the upgrades are not improvement as such, but patches to fix unexpected happenings.

Basically they should cease developing the current model and scrap it.

Operating systems and applications get developed until such development is unsustainable and it's better to scrap it and start again with a new version. That's the point adsense / adwords reached some time ago. The experience over the past years has shown Google what people are going to do to milk the system, and it's also shown Google where they want to go with the system.

The constant patching of the leaking ship doesn't, and cannot achieve this. Now is the perfect time to cease bothering with the old ship, and let the thing sink. Build a nice, shiny new one that works properly, doesn't leak and will suit the purpose better.

Hi david_uk,

Perhaps you are right, and G is furiously building the new version in a (large) windowless basement somewhere, keeping the old one afloat until the new one is ready...

(ASA presumably gets taken there occasionally, blindfolded on the way in and out so as not to let out the secret of where it is all happening, just to get a feel of the soul of the new machine, deus ex Googleplex...)

Actually, what I would do in their circumstances, is abstract the UI and other external interfaces (eg actual ad serving) as far as possible, then scoop out the rotting entrails and plug in the new insides when done. Less colourfully this is "refactoring"!

Rgds

Damon

[edited by: DamonHD at 10:03 am (utc) on Sep. 16, 2006]

"MFA = a site that gives you 3 cent per click or less."

IMO a MFA site is a site made by a good programmer wich is capable to rank well in an ad unit for low CPC (1-3 c ) becouse of his quality landing page score.
In his pages this site show ads from real advertisers with 0.20+ cents CPC.

The profit = what get in adsense - what pay in adwords

[...Don't get me wrong - the whole concept behing adsense / adwords is great and should work well. I think the problem is that with all of the constant tinkering over the years, Google themselves (whilst having an idea of how they want it to work) don't really have a clue of what the huge bloatware that is adsense / adwords will do under any given situation. All of the upgrades are not improvement as such, but patches to fix unexpected happenings.]

******
I agree, the current model is not scalable, because it did not and can not evolute to meet the ever-changing market environment.

[edited by: GoldenHammer at 12:57 am (utc) on Sep. 17, 2006]

To be honest, as a publisher I don't worry all that much about the "pure" MFA (the site that was Made For Adsense).

I worry a LOT about the scammy advertisers offering either traps for my users, "free" software [think it through they PAY to advertise to give away free ... yep... spyware or just plain lies come to mind], used popes, ...

the problem is that 200 slots is not nearly enough to block them all and the more you block the worse they get it seems.

Adsense desperaterly needs better advertisers.

We've suggest numerous times easy to implement scemes. My favorites:

- minimum payout (I don't want any sub 0.05 cent clicks, I'll happily show alternate ads if they have nothign better to offer.) Allow us to set it per page, or even give us a campaign like interface to make it smart regarding time of day etc. Basically allow google adsense+adwords to become a marketplace: you have (maximum) bids on one hand, and (minimum) offers on the other hand. Match them and let the business roll.

- wider tools for banning ads
- ban based on keyword in url
- ban based on regexp
- ban based on keyword in ad copy
- ban based on advertiser
- ban based on display URL differing from actual URL
- allow wildcards/regepx in the above
- lift the 200 limit
- review advertisers that get multiple bans from publishers as suspects of evil doing

- give us a preview tool that works beyiong MSIE on windows

But I guess unless the premium publishers get on the bandwagon, it'll all be moot what we want or need to keep our sites from being associated withthe scamming advertisers.

>>>When she phoned Adwords they also agreed that there was nothing she could possilby do to make her page or advert more relevant, so how come they were asking for £5.50? Its not even as if anyone else is bidding on the term. The QS algo as it is sucks. IMHO!<<<

that problem of seldom-used keywords costing a fortune has been documented out here before, i don't think that it has anything to do with the qs of the landing page.

in other words, the price is absurd regardless of what the landing page looks like.

"MFA = a site that gives you 3 cent per click or less."

Because that's what I get and that's what matters most. OK, may be I should just call them MF (must filter) sites. And most of them are MFA anyway.

In order of filtering priority:

1. sites that contain Adsense ads
- pure MFAs, sites with minimum content and maximum ads
- sites with original content that rely solely on Adsense as source of income
2. sites that only contain search results otherwise known as search MFAs (although they don't put Adsense ads)
3. sites with original content that rely on ads (other than Adsense) as source of income. Mostly magazine or information sites.
4. sites that sell small value items (e.g. ebooks)
5. sites that beyond the topic of my site or sites that sell dubious items.

I can't really tell which site earns me 3 cent clicks or less. But I do can tell that if didn't filter them, my earning goes down. Not really sure with sites #5, but they ruin my site's image, so they're goner anyway.

As the advertisers pay up to 2 US$, naturally I put sites #1 - #4 into the filter list.

And as the list grows reaching 200, sites #3,#4,#5 are dropped from the list. While hoping that sites #5 somehow won't show up anymore.

Finally the list reaches 200 URLs, and sites #1 and #2 are keep coming anyway. So I compare the last 200 URLs (3 months ago) with current 200 URLs. Results in 45 common URLs. Put the 45 URLs back into the filter list. Prepare for the next unusually high number of 3 cent clicks.

Repeat.

Today, as I do once a week, I looked at every one of the 60 out of 100 pages on my site that have AdSense ads. Since I'm already filtering about 190 junk domains, I found only one ad that I wanted to block. (It was pointing to one of those lame pages that is just a list of poorly-matched ads that claims to be a directory.) That's just one bad ad out of the almost 240 ads on the whole site. That's pretty good.

I forgot to mention that while I was checking all of those pages, I was once again impressed with how well-matched the ads were to the topic(s) on each page. Some of these niches are quite specialized, but Google has a really diverse group of advertisers.

By the way, the other day I looked around on the Tribal Fusion site. There's a section on there where you can look at sites that are examples of their publishers' sites. After some digging, I found the category that was closest to my site, and I looked at four of the sites that Tribal Fusion has links to as examples. Every one of them had AdSense ads.

Yep, just did my daily check no new offenders to speak of.

Filter is full, I actually have about 20 direct competitors in the filter I could let back in if I need to. The only thing is I give away pretty much the same thing they sell so visitors don't click on their ads. Their ads end up being a dead ad slot for me and drives eCPM down. Who wants to pay for 700 widgets when you just got 700 for free?

I don't object to 3 cent clicks. They're 3 cents more than I had before someone clicked on them. As mentioned by some above, I care about the scammers and the fake directories and the pages that offer free stuff that isn't really free or just leads to an advertising abyss that you can't climb up out of. Those are the ones I filter out.