Google Emailed Me Wanting Me To Do This

[Craig McPherson]

Never had an email from Google Adsense before but I got one the other day telling me to put 2 more ad blocks on one of my websites.

I have about 15-18 adsense sites and this is my highest earner making over $18 a day for months now.
It has one ad block on each page. (336x280 on about 40 pages)

They told me to put 2 more blocks on it and an ad unit. They sent me the heat map to guage the best place to put them also.

Usually I wouldn't be concerned but I found it wierd they only suggested it for one of my sites and my biggest earner to boot.

Have you ever had such an email?

Has having more than one block affected your CTR?

Has it improved your bottom line?

They even gave me an example website to show me how this site imrpoved it's profit by 200% simply by adding more blocks and units to it's site.

I would love some opinions etc

Cheers,

Craig

[gittar1122]

Yes I received such emails 6 months ago. One email suggesting to use Image Ads along with Text Ads as I was using Text ads only. Second email suggesting to increase the no. of ads unit on my site as I was using 1 block of ads.

You can proceed with suggestion if you have no problems of less amount of content. Because they do provide suggestion but after sometime they may realize that your site has limited content with lot of ads, so decide carefully

Thanks

[Trivum]

Yes, I've had them, and I got one the other day.

You might want to watch and make sure your traffic doesn't go down after that.

See a post I just made here: How Google Defines "Quality" after Panda

[ghoti]

I've gotten them, but trusting Google is like trusting a psycho girlfriend. She'll say she wants one thing one day, and then stick a steak knife in you during breakfast for doing the same thing the next day.

In the case of Google, some human-drone or computer is writing to you to maximize the ads you are showing. Whether this is right or not for your site, only you can say. Sometimes increased adblocks even means decreased revenue.

On top of this, there is another human-drone/computer in another room at Google that is looking for reasons to permanently ban your account, and any reason at all will do, as they don't like you or your little sites. They don't like ads, either - even though that's what pays their salary.

Bottom line: think for yourself. Work with Google if you must, but never trust them or take their advice unless you 100% agree with it. Experiment and split test, but always keep one eye out for that steak knife in the back.

[tonyalves]

Yes, I did get an email from Google back in February of this year (2011) with the following subject line: "Make more from your existing AdSense ad units on (my highest earning site)"

The headline of the email was: "Give more advertisers access to your site with text & image ads"

I followed their suggestions and my revenue increased by over 20%.

[timpears]

No reason not to test it for a couple of weeks or so. Don't be too quick to follow Google's advice though. It isn't like Google to be looking out for your interests. But with this if they make more money, so should you.

[Adam Curry]

I get these emails every now and then. Tested it once and found my earnings decreased. Now I just ignore those emails from Google

[guarino1235]

it's pretty suspiscious, you could get flagged for a high CTR increase. Just think of it

[gtk29]

I also received an email saying that I should use both text and image/flash ads. Lets see what happens.

[Fraggler]

Originally Posted by guarino1235

it's pretty suspiscious, you could get flagged for a high CTR increase. Just think of it

Who cares if you get flagged? Your site should be able to survive a manual review regardless of the CTR.

If your site won't support the extra ad units due to amount of content, theme, or otherwise, then just don't put the extra one on.

Google isn't out to entrap you.

[xylement]

I've been receiving emails from adsense as well nowadays, but it's more like a newsletter to me teaching me how to do this and that... not like a private email.

[paulgl]

Originally Posted by guarino1235

it's pretty suspiscious, you could get flagged for a high CTR increase. Just think of it

That's nonsense. Complete nonsense. In fact, just the opposite. They normally
send those emails to owners of sites that MORE advertisers want in on.
If you have only 1 ad block, it limits the amount of bidders, hence money
they make. You put 3 ad blocks, now you can have more people targeting
and bidding for your site. It makes them more money, hypothetically, if
more people are bidding. You get the most bidders by using 3 ad blocks and
text/image.

If you have only text on a highly targeted site, you are blocking many
bidders.

Google is out to make money. They make more money from more
ads. They make more money from image AND text, not just from one.
They want everybody bidding and targeting, if possible.

Google only suggests these things. They have no idea if you will actually
make more money. If you make more, obviously they make more.

Google's mentality is, the more the merrier.

But I have to be honest. They are severely lacking in the microeconomic
department. They just don't seem to be care what ads are placed on what
sites. If they did, I would not need to use that friggin' "competitive" ad
filter on an hourly basis.

Blocking urls from image ads can be impossible. If they are flash, you
cannot find the url to ban.

If google did a better job of placing real, honest to goodness targeted
relevant ads on people's sites, man that would be great. Unfortunately,
this option is only available to premium publishers.

If you add image/text, you up the bidder pool, but you also up the
irrelevant ad pool as well. Google does not seem to care.

The sad thing is, I block ads daily that are targeting my site. It pisses
me off that people do that. I mean, come on. Some ads are just crazy,
as if the person targeting the site has not even visited it!

Sorry this thing morphed waaaaaaaaay off topic.

Paul