Ineffective Google Ads Leads to Low Clicks Low Earnings – Google Adsense Alternatives

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While Google continues to refine their Adsense policies with recent announcements of Interest Based Google Advertising & retiring Google Video ads, many publishers continue to report poor quality of Google Ads lately.

Our prior articles on Drastic Drop in Adsense Earnings & our recommendations to publishers to adopt a more competitive & effective Google Adsense alternatives received a lot of support from publishers.

We have monitored all our Google Ads on Pro Media Blog, as well as our other websites & blogs, for 3 months – a good time frame to make certain positive conclusions on our statements. The issues we noticed with Google Adsense lately are 3 folds:

• appearance of non-contextual ads, often showing Google’s own products wherever there are possibilities of showing other high paying competitive ads
• extremely low CPC ads – often as low as less than a cent per click
• incorrect reporting of clicks & impression counts – now we no longer believe in what Google is reporting in their Adsense manager dashboard

Appearance of non-contextual ads:

Blogs that write about products or services that also has a Google product in that area, Google has been showing their own products. As an example, if you write about photography (like we do on Photo Duniya or Journal Image), 7/10 times the Adsense Ads showed Google Picasa or Google Desktop ads. These products are so well known that no one would click on a Google Picasa Ad any more, leading to a loss of click.

On Pro Media Blog posts on possible alternatives to Google Adsense or how to make money from blogs, 8/10 times Google showed their own Adsense ads or none at all. The situation became so stale that we finally removed Adsense from our prime spots. We are now replacing them with other Adsense alternatives.

Low CPC rates:

The click rates are low & the cost per click is even lower. In our 3 months of monitoring across our sites, posts that often fetched as high as as 50 cents a click now give us less than 10 cents. We have seen large number of clicks that cost less than a cent.

This could be due to the economy, but what is worrying publishers is the fact that other ad agencies like the ones we have mentioned in our alternative suggestions, are fetching either as much CPC or close. So either Google is not able to get good advertisers or simply are not able to show the right ads.

Incorrect Page View, Ad Impression & Click Reporting:

This is a more terrifying situation where the publisher has no clue what is working & what is not. We all understand if this happens once in a blue moon, but Google kept on making these reporting errors very frequently.

Google has continued to make so many errors in reporting lately that we can no longer trust the Adsense dashboard information on ad views or the ad clicks. As a small publisher, we have no option but to suck-it-up quietly. We are left at the whim of the Adsense team to report any issues or simply ignore the whole incident.

We have kept this in mind when we have designed business CMC themes for Wordpress. Instead of depending on the Adsense plugins that source ads only from Google, we have kept a modular design on the Business CMS themes so that publishers can display non-Google ads or better still, make ads compete for the highest CPC CPM rates for the ad spaces.

You could see these great Business themes either on Business-CMS Themes site or on ProMediaBlog Themes.

Although we have retained Google Adsense in some of our blogs, we have started to implement other Google Adsense alternative ads in many of them with good results. We are monitoring our conversions & click rates to decide how much of our Ad spaces should be given to Google & how much of it should be given to other competiting alternative ads.