Adsense Should Allow Contextual Ad Filtering by Keyword
EGOL recently made a post on the SEOmoz blog about one of the major shortcomings of Adsense: the lack of a feature to set negative keywords for the contextual ad matching. In short, EGOL is having a problem where many of the contextual ads showing on a few of his sites are not family friendly, leaving him with a poor image when people associate him with these ads.
EGOL’s issue is that while his sites are family friendly, some of his ads are not. Since most visitors do not understand the nature of contextual ads, they would have no choice but to consider him personally responsible for the smut ads Google is giving him. I also see a use for functionality such as this; most SEO types who would be visiting this blog probably aren’t to motivated to purchase ‘Get Rich Quick With Adsense’ ebooks and MFA templates. Knowing this, I could probably largely increase my Click Through Rate by eliminating these ads altogether.
Domain filtering can only go so far; I am sure that I could spend all day placing domains in the contextual ad filter, and I would never be able to remove all the Adwords and Adsense oriented ads showing up in the units to the right of this page. Yet it would be helpful if I could just set those as negative keywords in the Adsense control panel, and not have to worry about them.
What do you think? Would this be a useful feature? I am curious to hear from more people on this. Perhaps if enough people ask for it, we may see the Adsense team implement this type of functionality.
I would like that so much. There are so many types of somewhat related, but not really products/services that I would be able to filter out.
Great point. I´d go one step beyond your suggestion and advise Google to start integrating tags into their AdSense, AdWords, and search results. There are so many sites with relatively high quality tags (flickr, youtube, Technorati) that should be used to generate ad and search results. Simply using keywords is not focused enough.
Interesting suggestion, Mitch.
I would think though that so many Web-2.0 implement tags in so many different ways, it may be hard for them to find a way to algorithmically determine what is and isn’t a tag.
At any rate, since clicks from properties like Youtube / Google Video are proven to convert worse than the average, I like to try to forget that occasionally our ads show there at all!
Thanks for the comments, guys!
Absolutely. This feature would be much better than the near useless competitive ad filter.
Brian, I agree that when Google indexes content and meta tags, it does not have the understanding of what is a tag and what is not. However, with open APIs for these sites, Google should be able to access the tags and focus on their importance. If the very scrappy (in a good way) http://tagbulb.com can - one site at a time - use open APIs from those sites to access tags, Google should be able to do the same.
I guess that would be a good way of doing it. I wonder if they would find that effective, or whether API access at all those different services would slow Google down…
I think the best way to implement this would be for them to come up with various categories that you could click on to include/disclude within the ads. For instance, safe surfing ads (no porn), No Games (maybe you have a work related site), etc.
It sounds like a neat idea but implementation of that might be rather difficult. At the very least, Google should definitely not let the porn stuff show up in ads.
G-Man
I know for a fact that Google is testing with negative keywords like that, since I have been testing it myself
Joost - that’s great to hear? Care to tell us any more about features and what not? Also, have they mentioned a release date?
I can’t tell to much, except that i was given the possibility to give a series of terms for which they broad matched and didn’t show ads. And no, no release date…
[…] About a week and a half ago, I wrote a post ‘Adsense Should Allow Contextual Ad Filtering by Keyword‘. In it, I made the suggestion based upon an article posted by EGOL at SEOmoz that in order to prevent certain types of ads from showing, Google should allow us to set negative keywords for the Adsense ads on a site. […]