Cut Off Dead Wood In Adsense to Earn More
For many bloggers, Google Adsense is going to be one of the primary ways of monetising a blog - possibly the only way.
While Adsense is a great system and has been the entrepreneurial blogger’s best friend for a few years, it is still not a perfect system and can be improved with a little human help.
There are a couple of things that a blogger needs to be aware of with Adsense and needs to adjust for in order to maximise the profit potential of their blog.
Adsense Smart Pricing
Having low quality advertisers on your site (ie. in Adsense) can be a big problem for a blogger.
When a reader clicks on the Adsense ad of a bad site, there is a much higher chance that they will immediately hit the back button on their browser.
While this is not your fault, if it happens too often, the Adsense system may think that you are sending out junk traffic.
The way Adsense combats junk sites running contextual advertising is to “smart price” them. That means that for the site sending the junk traffic, the payout per click will be reduced.
That can obviously impact your earnings.
Beat Smart Pricing
Luckily Google offer a fairly easy remedy to this problem.
The “Competitive Ad Filter” in your Adsense account is your best friend in this situation. It allows you to block up to 200 advertisers from advertising on your Adsense blocks.
But how do you know who to block?
Luckily, many other people have experienced this problem. Many lists of low quality, low paying Adsense advertisers have been found and put on appropriate black lists by bloggers and site owners.
There’s a good list compiled by Mark Cook for example.
Just log into your Adsense account and go to Adsense Setup >> Competitive Ad Filter and copy and paste the above list. Hit save and you are good to go.
Now, you will want to try to keep that list up to date from time to time by adding to it yourself and finding other lists (they are regularly mentioned in discussions about Adsense on webmaster forums for example).
But doing this simple thing will stop most of your worries about this problem and also maximise your earnings from Adsense.
Technorati Tags: adsense, google, smart pricing
I disagree with the main point of your post. Smart pricing has nothing to do with your competitive ad filter. Having MFA ads on your site will do nothing to effect smart pricing. Smart pricing is calculated in a relative way.
Lets say Site A is advertising. His ads run on two sites - Site X and Site Y. If site X sends traffic that converts at 30%, and site Y sends traffic at 2%, site Y will get smart priced. If site X and Y both send traffic that converts at 2%, no smart pricing will be in effect.
So even though an MFA is a low converting site, having them advertised on your site will not get you smart priced.
Another counter point to you argument - MFAs actually have a HIGH CTR. They have very good conversion rates. That’s how they can buy AdWords ads and make money from AdSense. If Google calculated smart pricing based on straight conversions, MFAs would be good for your site
June 13th, 2007 at 3:42 pmThanks for stopping by Toivo.
You know, I think you have a point, but I don’t think it applies accross the board.
Either way, using the competitive ad filter will get low paying advertisers off your site, so I still think it’s a decent idea.
Will research this a little more.
June 14th, 2007 at 1:10 pmHi, I’m Mark that wrote the original article. The post was taken a bit out of context. The list is a specific list to the niche site I was giving instructions on how to build. Those sites perform badly in chosen niche. They should be used across the board.
Cheers,
July 12th, 2007 at 4:06 pmMark