Image Ads Gone Wild

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Image Ads Gone Wild

disabled site wide again

incrediBILL

4:24 pm on Jan 10, 2011 (gmt 0)

When AdSense suggested I enable image ads to improve income a few months ago I did, and got a small boost.

However, after the holidays, I've noticed wildly off target ads, mostly in my skyscraper unit, from everything from Tivo to Vegas hotels.

No rhyme or reason to the ads, not nearly enough blocking options (50?) in "Allow & Block Ads > General categories" to control the situations. I only need on general category really, "Hobbies & Leisure", which pays over 80% of the site earnings. Unfortunately, all the other crud which isn't earning is too much to disable in that stupid interface.

Therefore, I shut the image ads off AGAIN this morning since the text ads still appear to be on topic and earning well.

It will be obvious in 2 days, maybe even by the end of the day, if this has solved the problem.

I'm considering opening the site back up to image ads again, but I'll do it on an individual ad unit basis and probably not allow the skyscraper to ever display images again.

incrediBILL

11:53 pm on Jan 11, 2011 (gmt 0)

Earnings seem to be returning to normal without the images.

I'm thinking this might have something to do with the new AdSense allow & block ads not giving me as much control as the AdSense reps have had in the past and I caused my own problem.

snickles121

3:29 pm on Jan 12, 2011 (gmt 0)

I just disabled mine to.

londrum

3:36 pm on Jan 12, 2011 (gmt 0)

i reckon the text ads can be just as off target sometimes, but we are less likely to notice. if the fourth ad in a block says "buy some timeshare in the sun", we will just skip by, but when you see a big image of a girl slapping sunscreen on her face it is more obvious.

incrediBILL

5:14 pm on Jan 12, 2011 (gmt 0)

Problem is that skyscraper image could've been 4 mostly on topic ads instead of one big zero earning disaster, which is why I went back to no images.

Shame really because before the holidays I was getting some really good image ads.

snickles121

5:23 pm on Jan 12, 2011 (gmt 0)

We never had problems with image ads until Thanksgiving. Now they seem to be off target. It could be due to less advertisers. We will have to wait and see I guess.

netmeg

5:51 pm on Jan 12, 2011 (gmt 0)

Interesting; I haven't noticed any different ads on my sites myself, and revenue, while low compared to other times of the year is quite a bit better than last January. Since I put image ads and text ads on different channels, I ran some reports and saw that image and text were running about neck and neck for eCPM and earnings the last few months through December, but image ads solidly tanked in January. Post holiday ad overload? I dunno. I'll turn em off on a few pages and see what happens.

snickles121

6:33 pm on Jan 12, 2011 (gmt 0)

Like somebody said before, I wonder if the off topic image ads have to do with that new catagory filtering. I just blocked all unrelated topics earlier. Didnt they just come out with that around Thanksgiving?

netmeg

7:01 pm on Jan 12, 2011 (gmt 0)

I don't filter.

szetela

12:58 pm on Jan 13, 2011 (gmt 0)

It's quite possible some of the off-topic ads are due to AdWords Remarketing.

netmeg

1:36 pm on Jan 13, 2011 (gmt 0)

True David, but I for one didn't see the precipitous drop until recently; remarketing has been around a while.

incrediBILL

3:17 am on Jan 14, 2011 (gmt 0)

I'm seeing some rebound after whacking the image ads but the CTR is still about 1% lower that pre-December average, eCPM is about the same, so getting CTR back up should bring it back to normal.

Time to go check for junk ads to block and re-evaluate my ad categories one more time.

indyank

5:29 am on Jan 14, 2011 (gmt 0)

nice experiment and thanks a lot incredibill...and i hope you do one more as soon as we see image ads getting better :)

guess we should try turning it off now and turn it on when things get better...

incrediBILL

3:28 am on Jan 21, 2011 (gmt 0)

After fixing a few issues that may or may not have contributed to wacky image ads, I just turned them on again to see what happens.

Keep all y'all posted ;)