Personally, I would remove the adverts from that section. I have already removed adsense from over 2000 pages because they were either (high percentage of) off-topic, adult orientated, poor CTR and/or earnings.

Personally I like to think that all traffic is good and not all traffic should be judged for its ad value. Many visitors will get to know a new website and might come back later or add a link or recommend it to someone else.

Personally I've blocked whole nations from my site in the past. One of them had more than 1 billion inhabitants.

While that was more an anti-spam measure I didn't notice any drop in Adsense metrics as a result. If it was easy on a Windows server I'd do it again.

What would you do?

Are any of those people finding their way to areas of your site where they are clicking on ads?

FarmBoy

eCPM/CTR aren't as important as the income metric. Raising the eCPM by banning those visitors is only going to affect the statistic, not your earnings. The eCPM may go up, but that's because it's measuring less visitors. The earnings will remain the same.

I'm with skweb. Although some visitors may not click an ad they may still be of value in helping to popularize the site via citations from other sites, including forums, blogs, etc.

Personally I like to think that all traffic is good and not all traffic should be judged for its ad value. Many visitors will get to know a new website and might come back later or add a link or recommend it to someone else

Exactly my sentiments also.

I happen to believe my web sites are to provide information, not to make money.

I just happen to make money because of good content.

The bottom line is what counts, not just the metrics.

Cut out some segments and you will likely find your revenue may well drop 10%. I'd rather that 10%!

Are any of those people finding their way to areas of your site where they are clicking on ads?

Yes, those visitors arrive directly to the area of the website that contains ads (picture galleries). Actually, this area is the most profitable area of the whole site for visitors from another countries/sources.

eCPM/CTR aren't as important as the income metric. Raising the eCPM by banning those visitors is only going to affect the statistic, not your earnings. The eCPM may go up, but that's because it's measuring less visitors. The earnings will remain the same.

Of course, I understand that very well. But I will not lost very much. Of course, there are others advantages from such traffic, like new links, etc.. it's why there is solution 3: just don't show ads to those visitors.

Probably I'm totally wrong, but I don't know how adsense works, so I fear that those visitors affect how adsense measures the performance of my whole website: things like conversions, ctr and bounce rate. If I hide ads from them my overall performance measurements will be better and, probably, the earnings from other traffic will rise due to less smartpricing.

>>>due to less smartpricing

I've done a number of experiments, including removing a low earning section of a couple hundred pages. I removed it for about five months. Added it back. No difference. I've also permanently removed adsense from entire sites and swapped Yahoo ads on them instead. No difference in earnings for sites remaining with adsense. The only thing that made a difference to the overall site and to that specific section was to change the ad unit. Earnings snapped back up.

I think there are more important metrics, particularly concerning what happens after the click. After all, a bounce rate says more about a web page's relevance to a keyword phrase used to find the site, or even how pretty the site is, than it does about how likely it is to convert once someone gets around to clicking an ad.

The bounce rate from an advertisers site, now that's an important metric.

Also, what might appear as smart pricing can also be a poor niche or site format. Or in the case of the above mentioned section that performed poorly, suboptimal content for clicks and the wrong ad unit.

I agree the ad format is very important, I tried many of them and see that some works much better than others.

The bounce rate from an advertisers site, now that's an important metric.

People come to look at pics. I'm sure most of them don't even understand the language nor are in the right "niche". I don't know what adsense shows to those foreign visitors, same ads that I see or something else. If it shows same ads it could result in bounces from advertiser site and invalid clicks.

Maybe it would be interesting to try different ad formats for different countries?

The bounce rate from an advertisers site, now that's an important metric

Very much so. I've often wondered how many visitors I've lost because you can't open the AdSense ad click in a new window and my vistors have found the advertisers landing page to be total rubbish compared to their expectations of relevance.

you can't open the AdSense ad click in a new window

You can with Ad manager, but I find that sometimes the adverts do not show at all (IE6)