Filtering Adsense Ads

Arieanna has an interesting experiment going where she is filtering Adsense Ads in the hope of increasing CTR. She writes:

‘Relevance has a couple of points. First, relevance to your content. Second, relevance to your readers. So, if I talk about a new blog innovation here or over on Blogaholics, we’ll get all the ads to start your own blog, write content, etc.

However, experience and knowledge has shown me that a good many of my readers here, and most on Blogaholics, are sophisticated bloggers already. Or, at least, already have a blog. So, these ads are relevant to the content I am writing about, but not to my readers.

So, my solution was to watch daily for those ads and to block them using the Competitive Ad filter. Yes, this is not the purpose for the filter. And perhaps would annoy some advertisers. But, seriously, they were not getting clicks anyway.’

This is a good experiment and one well worth trying – Arieanna is finding that it works well and her CTR is on the up and up.

However before we all start blocking ads left right and centre be aware that this will not work on every blog. One of the reasons for this is that Google Adsense ads can be geo targeted. The ads I see on your blog from here in Australia are probably quite different from the ones others see in the USA or Europe. So filtering ads might help for those of your readers sharing your location, but might not help too much on a global level.

It’s still something worth trying – just keep in mind the geo targeting and realise that Google serves the best paying ads to your site – so even if you increase CTR you might also notice a slight decrease in your earnings on a per click level. You might also find that if you block too many ads that Google runs out of ads to serve completely – so monitor it and track the result – and then come tell me what you find!