Reduce the number of ads showing.

Put the ads in a different place on the page.

Try Link units, especially on pages that don't have a focused topic and/or get untargeted traffic.

Try different colors.

Review the ads you are getting and put the worst MFA and similar offenders in the filter.

Of course. Already tried all of these. No noticeable positive affect has been shown.

What's your total income like? That's what I'd be looking at. If AdSense is down but your other advertising channels are more than making up for it, well, you don't really have a problem.

I have gone four ways with CPM ads.

1: Letting them all run if they made it through the Adwords/AdSense system and ended up on my site.

2: Changing my prefs to text only. Eliminates most cpm ads.

3: Using the Ad Review system very sparingly.

4: Using the Ad Review very aggressively.

The only thing I haven't tried is having AdSense turn off CPM ads on my site completely.

In my niche, collector cars, and on my site, it seems like letting the ads run full steam ahead works best for my income. Also I have actually seen very few of the more questionable ads appear on the site, but who knows what other people in other areas or other times have seen.

My overall impression is that even if the ads are competing, very few of the questionable/off-target/whatever-unwanted ads actually ever see the light of day, while at the same time they seem to prop up the overall eCPM for the whole site CPM and PPC.

That said, since the Ad Review thing rolled out, I've become almost obsessive about reviewing the ads, and I disallow most of them. Most meaning probably 80 - 90%. Most are just so far off the mark I don't even want to take a chance on they being seen on my site.

I don't know if the quality of the CPM ads has gone down lately or what. But most what I'm seeing in the review center just won't fly with me.

The aggressive rejection of CPM ads looks like it may have cost me 10 - 15%. But when I tried just setting all ads to text only the cost was more like 25 - 30%.

But here's the thing, and why I don't want to turn CPM ads off entirely.

Some CPM campaigns can add big percentages to a months income, at least in my experience.

We do over 4 million page views a month and have been using adsense for several years. That ought to give you an extremely rough idea of what our income "might" be. We only run text ads. Our site is a .NET Developer portal with a ton of Microsoft oriented content. It has always been difficult to get decent ad targeting (ie an article about JavaScript cookies can often return ads on baking cookies). These days it is really getting bad. We are starting to see a significant increase in ads that deal with restaurants, insurance, travel, etc. (with nothing noticeable in the content that would trigger such ads) that just don't do well when someone comes to our site looking for a technical solution to a problem.

We've removed AdSense entirely from about half the site since the other half was still performing well enough to make it worthwhile.

It may be that previous advertisers in our niche have just given up on AdSense altogether.

Are you also saying your page impressions and unique visitors hasn't gone down at all?

No, they have both gone up significantly. And yes, it is real traffic and not false numbers due to bots or otherwise.

If you've tried all those ideas...well...

Your site must be very well put together then. Users click ads mainly for two reasons...#1- the ads are more interesting than what they're currently looking at and #2- when the ads are blended so well into the site they look like part of the content.

Obviously you don't want to reduce the quality of your site so your best option is to move ads around so they merge into articles; link ads are great for this. If this doesn't work that's all I got, if you've said filtering types of ads has gotten you nowhere then don't waste much more time with it.

We only have one block of ads per page and they are merged into the page content. For the first few years, this worked relatively well. These days, I'm certain it is ad quality (matched to our content) versus some other layout issue. I've spent a fair amount of time over the last couple of months paying attention to the ads that were shown. It ain't pretty.

I was just curious if others had seen the same thing and whether opting back into CPM might help us in some way.

Surely you have contacted Google AdSense! What do they have to say? With your size and volume you must have some clout!...KF

Of course I've contacted our rep. You always get the same old response from these guys that you get from normal support. The only exception is that you are treated like a human being and get a more timely response. These folks don't get you any more insight on the subject (or any other subject) than just reading the help files.

We do over 4 million page views a month and have been using adsense for several years. That ought to give you an extremely rough idea of what our income "might" be.

Nope, that says nothing about what you should be making off AdSense because high impressions are not fundamental to earnings potential. But now that you told us what your topic is we can zero in on the fact that you have a poor topic for AdSense ads focused on selling products.

It's not Google's fault that a page for JS Cookies returns baking ads. What would you sell on that page? What affiliate program would work on that page? There aren't many if any products to sell well on that page, and probably for the rest of your pages. Do you see ads on a search for Javascript cookies [google.com]? I don't. So why waste your energy being upset at Google if it's obvious there is nothing to sell and no advertisers naive enough to try to sell something on pages related to JS Cookies?

If you can't sell anything with your site topic then the main benefit of your site to advertisers is branding, and for that you have to enable the CPM ads.

The most basic rule about AdSense: Sites whose content can sell products and services will do far better than sites that do not- regardless of how many impressions per month the site generates or the age of the site.

Ok, thanks for the useless post martinibuster. I would have been more helpful if you had information relevant to my original post instead of just another "adsense 101" reply.

I used the JavaScript example because people here would be familiar with it. Ads for JavaScript plug-ins, editors, obfuscators, etc. "used" to come up frequently. Our site has done reasonably well with AdSense which is why we have used it for so long. The direct ads we run today are quite similar to the adsense ad categories that "used" to be prevalent. Our own direct ads that focus on selling direct products do quite well. Naturally, we continue to try and build that business and look to continue to reduce our dependency on AdSense.

My original post (that only one person saw fit to actually try and address) dealt with a current analysis of whether getting back into the CPM rotation was a good idea. Was also looking for feedback on direct ads buys via adsense. I didn't really need the same old replies about how adsense works, how to analyze our site in regards to direct advertising, or even looking ad other advertising options.

My post directly addresses your original post and explains why despite millions of impressions the returns are not satisfactory, and explains why your site may do better with site targeting turned on. Sorry you took offense at me pointing out the reasons why, no offense was intended, my post simply explains in detail why site targeting may be a positive option for your situation.

Ads for JavaScript plug-ins, editors, obfuscators, etc. "used" to come up frequently.

Right, agreed, those keywords and topics appear to be no longer viable. It's the weekend in the U.S. so there may be more ads during the week. But a healthy niche will have scores of ads, even on the weekend. So while the following may be AS 101 for you, it may be instructional and helpful to others:

JavaScript editors
2 ads

javascript obfuscators
0 AdWords Ads

javascript obfuscator
0 AdWords ads

javascript obfuscators
4 AdWords ads

JavaScript plug-ins
0 AdWords ads

JavaScript plugins
0 AdWords ads

As far as shake up ideas, I've found that (after enabling site targeting) putting the large rectangles below the fold attracted what I feel is the most kinds of ads, and consequently the most vigorous competition. This may be a solution for those in your situation to consider.

Placing large rectangle ads at the top of the page, just above the content will shake up (usually positively) the amount of earnings per page, however there's a tradeoff in annoying repeat visitors. However the feedback I've received from loyal site visitors is that they don't care because the information is worth the scroll. I tend to not like doing that so I'm knowingly taking a hit in earnings by not placing the ads above the fold. Placing them below the fold, even beneath the content, is a decent compromise between putting the ads in your visitor face and encouraging the most competition for ad space on a site.

Now, I feel stupid. I'm not sure how I missed this sentence:

"If you can't sell anything with your site topic then the main benefit of your site to advertisers is branding, and for that you have to enable the CPM ads."

Long week and the brain is a bit fried. My apologies for being
a little bit of a jerk. You did address my post and I just plain missed it.

I'm beginning to think along the same lines regarding CPM and permitting advertisers to try and target those specific areas. The old days of relying on basic adsense functionality and ad targeting to get us by are clearly over. I haven't heard good things about advertiser targeting but perhaps it will work better for us.

We have done the rectangle thing in the middle of content since day one. Have recently experimented with other formats and locations to no avail.

Looks like I need to see about creating channels based on content type (which is not as easy for us as it might sound) and try to let certain types of advertisers.

I would recommend revisiting the large rectangle because that's where dynamic flash based ad units show up, and it also allows the AS system to place more ads into the space, increasing the odds that at least one of the ads may be relevant enough to induce a click.

Imo there seems to be more competition in the large rectangle simply because you can put different kinds of ad units in there, increasing the pool of available advertisers.

The combination that works best for me is to have the large rectangles and 728x90 ad units together on a page. The idea is to encourage competition from as large a pool of available advertisers as possible. Those two ad units together have worked well for me.

it is real traffic and not false numbers due to bots or otherwise

Don't be so sure about that.

Many bots look just like real visitors, you'll never know it's not human.

I've got something attempting to crawl my site right now that has requested 4160 pages claiming to be "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows NT 4.0)" yet the bot trap stopped it after a couple of pages.

Sure, that looks real good on your stats but it's not real.

Just offering an alternative explanation because you can't see most of the bots as bots.

It's not Google's fault that a page for JS Cookies returns baking ads. What would you sell on that page? What affiliate program would work on that page? There aren't many if any products to sell well on that page, and probably for the rest of your pages. Do you see ads on a search for Javascript cookies? I don't. So why waste your energy being upset at Google if it's obvious there is nothing to sell and no advertisers naive enough to try to sell something on pages related to JS Cookies?

I can think of a million and one software packages which deal with "Javascript" & "Javascript Cookies". Webmaster related ads etc. is another example for ads that should have been displayed. The notion that there are probably no ads for "Javascript cookies" is incorrect!...there must be 100's of them.

It is AdSense targeting which is WAYYYYYYYYYY OFF and LOOOOOOOOOSY.

Just my 2 cents.

[edited by: Web_speed at 6:39 am (utc) on May 12, 2008]

Nice theory but a search on Google for "Javascript cookies" returns ZERO ads.

[edited by: incrediBILL at 7:04 am (utc) on May 12, 2008]

Nice theory but a search on Google for "Javascript cookies" returns ZERO ads.

Not for me. I just did a search for "Javascript". Got 9 ads on 1st page & then 5-7 on next pages. "Javascript cookies" yields +- similar results.

I just did a search for "Javascript" and got five ads in total.

Javascript cookies had zero ads.

There's clearly a shortage of relevant ads for the topic.

All this talk about Javascript cookies is making me hungry. I wonder if Google can direct to me some ads on the topic, because I would surely click them.

Someone must be using a different Google than I am as "Javascript cookies" has nada.

Obviously javascript has plenty of ads, but the other term didn't.

Besides, in every case of horrible targeting of AdSense ads the bottom line has always been horrible SEO because AdSense is nothing more than an extension of how Google perceives your web site in the first place. If AdSense doesn't understand your website then neither does Google and your targeting for both ads and SERPs will be off.

You can always use the AdSense targeting code to fix the ads, but that won't help you fix your SERPs in Google.

Once upon a time I had similar issues and fixing my site to properly target AdSense also resulted in 3x+ boost in traffic.

YMMV

I just did a search for "Javascript". Got 9 ads on 1st page & then 5-7 on next pages. "Javascript cookies" yields +- similar results.
============================

Are you using Google search to find the ads? If you are then the ads may be running on Google but not the Publisher Network. Those same ads may not show up on web sites because they have chosen to not run their ads on web sites, only on Google.

Mike

incredibill, we are typically in the top five in google for just about anything we write about. While I'm certainly open to suggestion, I'm not sure SEO is our problem. That said, what did you do to properly target Adsense?

That said, what did you do to properly target Adsense?

I was in the top 10 for many things as well. After tweaking the SEO to make AdSense happy now I'm #1 for most of those same terms. In some cases it's the subtle difference between being almost spot on, which leaves room for interpretation, and absolutely spot on.

Check Google's Webmaster Tools and see "What Googlebot sees", it might give you a clue what's going on with your site.

FYI, if nothing obvious shows up it's probably worth your while to send AdSense support a quick email because often when I've gotten stumped and write to support it's suddenly mysteriously fixed.

[edited by: incrediBILL at 8:09 pm (utc) on May 12, 2008]