If you’re a publisher and use AdSense on your website, you’ve probably noticed that you sometime get irrelevant ads or that you get some worthless clicks. In both cases, this affects your income. While there are multiple reasons for that, let’s look at two major causes: badly targeted campaigns and “Made for AdSense” websites.
Badly Targeted Campaigns
When advertisers create a new site-targeted campaign, they must bid on keywords. When these keywords appear on a publisher’s website, an ad from this campaign may appear. Unfortunately, some advertisers will bid on keywords related to their product or service but they will not make use of negative keywords.
For example, let’s look at one of my other websites, HomeMusician.net (http://www.homemusician.net). I’ve got a MIDI file section at http://midi.homemusician.net. MIDI files are songs in digital format but I won’t go into details about that. Just keep in mind this is a music-related site. So, I was looking at what kind of AdSense ads was being displayed and here’s an example of what I saw:
While it’s not impossible that some visitors may be interested in traveling, I highly doubt that this is what they are looking for when visiting my website. Now why does this happen? Well it’s simply because the advertiser bided on the keyword “midi”. By adding keywords such as music, midi controllers, guitar to their negative keyword list, they would have avoided their ads from being displayed on websites such as HomeMusician.net. They would also lower their advertising cost.
Made For AdSense Websites
What are “Made For AdSense” websites? Most of the time, it consists of a single page loaded with text ads with little or no content at all. Those pages are created with the only intention of making a quick buck. This technique can be referred to as “arbitrage” or “arbi”.
The concept is pretty simple: find a niche where you have a lot of inexpensive keywords you can use for advertising, build a single page with just enough content to get some more profitable ads from Google AdSense or whatever network and your profit is the difference between the publishing revenues and the advertising cost.
Here is an example of a “Made For AdSense” website I’ve found:
It doesn’t matter where the visitor clicks, the publisher WILL make money. There’s no valuable content on this page so the visitors just want to get out of there fast and clicks on an ad. Google has banned a lot of AdSense accounts for this kind of practice but there are still a lot of MFA websites out there.
MFA websites are a reason why AdSense revenues dropped a lot: advertisers foundout that the traffic coming from these sites is of very low quality and doesn’t convert well. MFA is a total plague in my opinion.
How To Filter Out These Ads?
Until lately, the only way to filter out these ads from your website was to add their URLs in your “Competitive Ad Filter” in your AdSense account. It worked pretty well but it had limit of 250 URLs. Another downside to this is that at some point, my CTR and PPC had gotten very low so I sent an email to Google’s support team. Their answer was that I filtered too many advertisers…
Lately Google has implemented their “Allowed Sites” feature to AdSense. Publishers can now select which advertisers are allowed to display ads on their websites. While it can be a pain to list all advertisers there, it still can be a lot easier than to filter out all the MFA and untargeted ads. If you know your visitors well, and this is important, you can profit a lot from this feature by allowing ads that are relevant to your content. Chances are your CTR will increase and you will earn more for each click.
To find more information about the “Allowed Sites” feature, visit https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/topic.py?topic=11446
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