Curt
Joined: Eons Ago
# Posts: 3736
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Posted: 2007-Jan-29 08:21
I am beginning to think that software people are using like Stupid Norton's ad blocking software is adversely hurting ad impressions. I took a look at December 2005 year's stats for adsense versus this December 2006 stats and the “ad impression stats” for 2005 were more than double that of 2006. And it also translated into a loss of about 50% earnings too. That hurts. Here's the kicker: our page views from December 2005 and December 2006 do not differ that much (pretty close the same for that month in both years).
Anyone that doesn't think that stupid Norton's adblocking software (as well as other software that block's legit contextual ads like AdSense) doesn't hurt info sites better start to rethink their stance. I cannot think of any other thing that would make sense that would have the actual page views remain about the same while AdSense impressions are cut back 55% or more. It must be the wide-spread increase in use of this crap adblocking software.
Log into your own account and run comparisons between your adsense impressions and your site page views and see if you see a dramatic drop in percentage of ad impressions.
For example (not real stats, but for illustration purposes to get the picture across) this is what I'm finding:
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Year 2005 December:
AdSense impressions: 400,000
Server page impressions: 600,000
Year 2006 December:
AdSense impressions: 180,000
Server page impressions: 550,000
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This is the kind of ratios I'm noticing. Something is wrong and I wish I knew exactly what was causing this problem. Am I being messed over by the idiots at Norton, etc., or is Google messing up?? I'm left wondering what's up with this.
Between thiefware adware, anti-spyware software (yes I mean the spyware remover software), and adblocking software, we affiliates are getting screwed at every angle.
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SportsGuy
Staff
Joined: Aug 30, 2002
# Posts: 3600
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Posted: 2007-Jan-29 14:02
Might be topical Curt. 
Granted my stats don't show a full year on one of my main sites yet, but I'm not seeing the same trend - but I'm discounting that to "not a full year snapshot".
Now, could the issues be caused by:
1 - more publishers in the same space - basically the avenues to show the ads are outpacing the advertisers looking to advertise?
2 - do you typically see repeat users or new users? repeat users have a habit of "tuning" out ads, thus reducing clicks (I know it's not explaining the drop in ad impressions v. visitors, but it's brainstorming time...)
3 - Could this stripping of ads be happing at an ISP level? I recall an awful lot of TV ads from big ISPs saying they are not offering Norton as part of their basic packages - could this be responsible if these software apps are sapping ad impressions?
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Curt
Joined: Eons Ago
# Posts: 3736
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Posted: 2007-Jan-31 01:20
So, basically there may be too many AdSense publishers taking away the ads. I wish there was a way to detect if that was happening. If so then AdSense ads are being thinned out across too many web sites and that ultimately means we are slowly going to starve for ad dollars or find our sites displaying those 10 cent ads of which there is not much money to be made per click.
That's NOT good!
I never figured on that, but that's a good point. Dang, scary thought.
REPEAT USERS:
Repeat users have nothing to do with how many times ads are displayed. They may ignor ads, but the ads should still be displayed. I'm talking about the number of times ads are being displayed versus actual page views. The ratios are diminishing since last year around the same time. It use to be somewhere around 2:3 ratio of ads displayed to pageviews now it's more like 1:3 ratio. That's half of last year's ad impression number.
However, I'm still wondering about the software issue of stripping out AdSense, Yahoo, MSN ads.
If google is indeed running out of adverts to display, I need a way to detect this so that I can choose to display Yahoo ads instead in the place of the pages displaying Adsense ads.
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Curt
Joined: Eons Ago
# Posts: 3736
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Posted: 2007-Jan-31 14:21
Now, what I would like to do is prevent people from seeing my site that turn off JavaScript completely and/or use ad blocking software to block ads. After all, I'm not providing my web sites for free (since it is my source of living).
If people want to see sites and benefit from them in some way, then they got to allow the ads too. I don't believe in overwelming the user with ads, but these freeloaders think they should get info without any sort of cost. If they don't want the ads, then they should pay a subscription fee to see the sites. Otherwise pay up by allowing the ads through.
Anyone know of script/server strategies to stop these ad blocking freeloaders from seeing sites that rely on ad revenue to survive?
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SportsGuy
Staff
Joined: Aug 30, 2002
# Posts: 3600
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Posted: 2007-Jan-31 14:58
Could it be tied into the browser type?
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searchmob
Joined: Mar 17, 2004
# Posts: 14
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Posted: 2007-Feb-01 06:03
"Now, what I would like to do is prevent people from seeing my site that turn off JavaScript"
You could always try
[code]<noscript>
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="1;url=http://www.yoursite.com/whatever">
</noscript>[code]
and just direct them to a page which explains they should turn javascript on.
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Curt
Joined: Eons Ago
# Posts: 3736
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Posted: 2007-Feb-02 00:13
Useful idea searchmob.
The only thing that has me concerned is how SE's treat that particular method. At one time, engines seemed to penalize meta refresh redirected pages due to SE spammers using them to rank back in the old days (pre 2000 era) when ranking was super-duper easy (too bad I didn't know then what I know now about ranking and top positions).
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Curt
Joined: Eons Ago
# Posts: 3736
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Posted: 2007-Feb-03 00:09
I'd also like to detect Norton ad blocking software and related ad blocking tools too. Any ideas on how to do that?
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searchmob
Joined: Mar 17, 2004
# Posts: 14
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Posted: 2007-Feb-04 00:10
Good question, not sure if the SE's would even catch that. Better to be safe and just put a comment instead of a redirect though. Or an even better solution might be to replace the adsense ads with static ads if js is turned off.
Yeah, there should be ways to detect ad blocking software...give me sometime to figure it out and I'll let you know.
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Curt
Joined: Eons Ago
# Posts: 3736
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Posted: 2007-Feb-05 04:56
searchmob, if you can figure it out, you'll be the man! 
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mdvaden
Joined: Mar 07, 2004
# Posts: 119
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Posted: 2007-Feb-06 16:18
It's interesting isn't it.
I started last October or so, with a solid 3% rising to November with a solid 4%, and in January rising to a fairly solid 5%.
I see there are surges. I'm on the west coast in Oregon, and notice surges or impressions about 8 in the moring, 1pm and 6pm our time.
Always fairly consistent.
The first week of December was the slowest time, and the SuperBowl. Even Christmas Day was reasonable.
I wouldn't expect that Norton or pop-up blockers could affect this much. But I'm not that brilliant with this stuff.
Were you thinking about the ads that toss in a small image rather than the ones with just text and a colored table?
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Curt
Joined: Eons Ago
# Posts: 3736
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Posted: 2007-Feb-07 17:34
mdvaden,
Norton and similar ad blocking software erases text link ads too (AdSense text ads, Yahoo & MSN text ads, etc.,). Popups & Image ads were the first to be targeted, but these stupid software companies saw fit to remove all ads everywhere. I have a feeling that Norton (and other like software) deliberately protects (where possible) it's own ads that show on various sites.
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Curt
Joined: Eons Ago
# Posts: 3736
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Posted: 2007-Oct-30 23:23
Here's an interesting “BLOCK the AdBlocker” tool. Check it out.
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g1smd
Staff
Joined: Jul 28, 2002
# Posts: 10445
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Posted: 2007-Oct-31 01:10
Nothing gets round having this in the HOSTS file:
127.0.0.1 pagead2.googlesyndication.com
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Curt
Joined: Eons Ago
# Posts: 3736
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Posted: 2007-Oct-31 03:25
Shhhhh, don't be telling people about that.
We have a hard enough time getting our adsense to get through. Seems the only thing that would defeat the HOSTS file would be to use SSI to serve up AdSense. Google really needs to offer a SSI PERL script solution.
[ Message was edited by: Curt 10/30/2007 09:31 pm ]
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Quadrille
Joined: Nov 15, 2000
# Posts: 1064
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Posted: 2007-Oct-31 11:10
Why do you say they are stupid, but then castigate them for being 100% effective?
Is it just that you don't like them, or are they really stupid in some way?
Sorry if I'm missing something, but 'stupid' just doesn't seem to be the word you are looking for.
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Curt
Joined: Eons Ago
# Posts: 3736
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Posted: 2007-Oct-31 21:44
Quadrille said:
Is it just that you don't like them, or are they really stupid in some way?
You ought to be able to figure that one out 
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Quadrille
Joined: Nov 15, 2000
# Posts: 1064
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Posted: 2007-Nov-01 11:38
No worries 
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Prowler
Staff
Joined: Aug 14, 2000
# Posts: 1795
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Posted: 2007-Nov-03 07:18
>>Google really needs to offer a SSI PERL script solution.
I don't see how it is going to change the equation here - as long as Google serves the ads from a specific domain, "stupid" software can block that domain - unless they serve it from the primary domain name - Google.
There might be a way out of this without going to the elaborate technique of encrypting the page given in your example.
Use an ad server which will sniff for JS blocking and if JS is blocked in the client's browser, it sends a static ad - but it adds more instances of the ads all over the place with a specific message that - these sporadic outburst of ads will stop once they enable the JS in their browser.
Just a thought.
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g1smd
Staff
Joined: Jul 28, 2002
# Posts: 10445
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Posted: 2007-Nov-03 20:52
SSI would build the HTML page on the webserver, using various parts, before sending the completed page out to the browser.
That is much different from the current situation where the browser pulls the various parts of the page from different servers.
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