Adsense Ads – A New Look

November 23, 2009 by John Dilbeck · 7 Comments
Filed under: Advertising 

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

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I will not participate in Google’s interest-based advertising

March 13, 2009 by John Dilbeck · 36 Comments
Filed under: Advertising, Opinions 

I received an email from Google about a change in their Adsense advertising program.

Here is a brief excerpt from it:

We’re writing to let you know about the upcoming launch of interest-based advertising, which will require you to review and make any necessary changes to your site’s privacy policies. You’ll also see some new options on your Account Settings page.

Interest-based advertising will allow advertisers to show ads based on a user’s previous interactions with them, such as visits to advertiser website and also to reach users based on their interests (e.g. “sports enthusiast”). To develop interest categories, we will recognize the types of web pages users visit throughout the Google content network. As an example, if they visit a number of sports pages, we will add them to the “sports enthusiast” interest category….

I am totally opposed to this.

In the past, I have really liked Google Adsense, and one of the main reasons is that they analyze the pages with ads and try to serve the most relevant ads that match that content.

I don’t think they put cookies on visitors to those pages, but I’m not certain of this. In fact, I really didn’t think about this until they emailed me about this new interest-based advertising.

Now, however, they will be tracking visitor browsing and I don’t want to be a part of it.

In the past, Google had a mantra of “Do no evil.”

I think they’ve just crossed to the dark side.

I went to my Google Adsense account and opted out of this. I do not want to show any of their ads based on user interest categories.

I don’t care if it means I’ll earn less money from them.

There have been times when I’ve depended upon the money I make from their ads on my sites and I’ve always been happy to deposit their checks.

As long as I have a way to opt out of this new method of advertising they’re going to use, I’ll continue showing Adsense ads on my sites.

If they ever make it mandatory, I’ll close my Adsense account and remove their ads off all my websites, no matter how much money I’ll lose.

I am totally opposed to this and will not participate in their interest-based advertising.

Bad Google!

Act on your dream!

JD

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