Adsense Ads - A New Look
November 23rd, 2009 by John Dilbeck
A few months ago, I removed all the Google Adsense ads from this blog and some of my other sites.
Today, I decided to take a new look at how Adsense might perform on this blog.
There were a couple of reasons I removed them.
1. I could earn more from affiliate sales.
2. I didn’t like all the Get Rich Quick junk being shown in the Adsense ads on my sites.
When I put the Adsense Ads back on my blogs, today, I took a couple of steps to overcome the two items listed above.
1. I logged into Google Adsense and clicked the Adsense Setup tab. Then, I clicked on Competitive Ad Filter and entered the domains of the sites that I saw advertising my best-earning affiliate programs.
I’m sure this will be an ongoing process, but it’s not hard to do and takes little time.
2. Then, also in the Adsense Setup tab, I clicked on the Ad Review Center.
This was a new feature to me. I don’t know how long it has been available, but it was just what I was looking for.
They list a number of category filters and I selected seven of them (out of the maximum 8 that we can choose). One of the categories I filtered out of my ads was “Get Rich Quick.”
Since one of the things I keep writing about is to watch out for all these GRQ things that are all over the Internet, I didn’t want to be a hypocrite and have bunches of their ads on my pages.
So far, so good. I’ll keep watch over the types of ads that show and see what other tweaks will be necessary to show only, or at least mostly, the ads I want on my sites.
I got to thinking about this a few days ago, because - even though my affiliate marketing earnings have gone down this year - Adsense has continued to produce income on a daily basis. Not as much as I would like, granted, but I can’t earn if I don’t show the ads, can I?
I used to get a nice check from Google every month. This year, I’ve been averaging a check once every other month. I’d like to get it back to where I receive a nice check from Google every month, again.
I’ll be monitoring the performance of Adsense over the coming month or two and I’ll be tweaking ad types and placements to see if I can earn more on a regular basis.
It will be interesting to see how this works.
What about you?
How are you doing with your Adsense ads?
What have you been doing to improve the performance and therefore your income from them?
Act on your dream!
JD
This entry was posted on Monday, November 23rd, 2009 at 5:31 pm and is filed under Advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
November 23rd, 2009 at 6:43 pm
Hi John,
I don’t so all that well on my blogs from Adsense, but one of my niche sites does really well, and I’ve just started making a little bit of money from my newest niche site. I’m at the check every other month point, but one never knows, right?
Mitch´s last blog ..How I Write Blog Posts
November 25th, 2009 at 9:59 am
Good morning, Mitch.
Your experience is the same as mine.
My blogs don’t do well with Adsense ads, but a couple of my niche sites do pretty well.
My newest niche site isn’t appropriate for Adsense ads, because I have paying advertisers there and I don’t think it’s fair for them to have to compete with Adsense ads on the same site.
I’m not sure if adding the ads back to a couple of my blogs will make any difference. I’ll give it a month or two and the stats will tell the story.
As we’ve discussed before, it’s all about trying something and then testing the results, right?
Here’s hoping that both of us get back in the Google “check every month” club.
(No, it’s not really a club and I’m not going to start a paid membership site to tell you how to do it.)
Act on your dream!
JD
December 10th, 2009 at 5:20 pm
I’ve never had much success with Adsense.
I think it’s because I don’t like trying to become an authority site. I’d rather spread myself around the internet with ‘mini sites’.
December 25th, 2009 at 8:32 am
Filtering Google ads is a hard thing… Personally I find that new terms pop-up every month to describe get rich quick programs. You can never filter them all. But I think that you can also ban URLs with Google Adsense. And Im almost certain that their is a tool where you can choose which websites you want advertisement from. Unless I confusing myself with Adwords…
December 26th, 2009 at 5:11 pm
Good afternoon, James.
I will admit that I’m not an expert on using either Adsense or Adwords and there may be tools that I don’t know of that can help us to better target the ads we want on our sites.
I don’t know of a way to filter out ads by keywords using Adsense. If there is a way to do that I’d love to know how it works.
I have filtered out a few domains I don’t want advertising on my sites and I’ve used the Categories Filter to filter out the sites that Google considers to be Get Rich Quick. I don’t know how they make that determination, but I’ve seen better ads on all my sites as a result.
I don’t know of a way to select which sites I want advertising on my sites. You may, indeed, be confusing that with Adwords. I haven’t done much with Adwords for several years, but I think there is a way to specify which sites you want your ads to show up on, but I don’t think the converse is true.
Thanks for joining our conversation.
Act on your dream!
JD
January 18th, 2010 at 11:22 am
Those are some good points that you bring up. the filter really does help a lot! It can allow you to block sertain URL’s and categories. I use it on my blogs.
January 18th, 2010 at 4:04 pm
Hi D.
(I have a comment policy that requires commenters to use their real names instead of keywords, so I abbreviated your greeting since I don’t know your name.)
I agree. I’ve seen a big differece in the quality of the ads on my sites since filtering out categories and URLs I don’t want to advertise on my online properties.
Act on your dream!
JD