The Disadvantages of AdSense
Posted: Friday, July 22, 2011
by Liz Canham
http://www.internetmarketingwithliz.com
Even though AdSense is probably the most popular Pay Per Click advertising program with publishers, it still has flaws and disadvantages which should be taken into account by new publishers.
One of the major disadvantages of AdSense is that the ads are now instantly recognisable by anyone who uses the internet regularly. This can have one of two effects; either the website visitor is distracted from the content and the main product on sale or they ignore the AdSense ads completely because it's so obvious what they are.
Another of the disadvantages of AdSense is the revenue or lack of it. It's true that some publishers make so much from AdSense that they hardly need to sell anything else but these are in the really hot niches where advertisers pay large sums per click. Internet marketing, weight loss and the like can earn big numbers but other niches earn little. For example I have a website called Authentic Curry Recipes. It gets quite a high amount of search engine traffic and often several clicks a day on the AdSense ads. The only problem is, because "curry" isn't a hot topic (no pun intended), each click is only worth a couple of cents.
One of the disadvantages of AdSense from an advertiser's point of view is click fraud. Encouraging clicks in any way or clicking ads on your own site is strictly against Google's publisher terms of service but unfortunately it does happen when publishers try to boost their AdSense income. The result is that advertisers have started to look elsewhere meaning fewer advertisers, less competition and ultimately lower earnings for publishers.
A problem that I personally find with AdSense is that the ad targeting is very inaccurate. I run a site called Asian Food and Cookery. Well, I would have thought that the food and cookery aspect would at least attract food related advertisements and to an extent it does. However, the word "Asian", presumably because it comes first in the title, results in totally unsuitable advertisements for Asian girls and dating, which I find something of an embarrassment. This can be overcome by filtering adverts but this means that the actual target website must be entered into your AdSense account which is rather tiresome. There is a Wordpress plugin for better AdSense targeting and it works reasonably well but there's no solution that I know of for non-Wordpress sites.
Despite the disadvantages of AdSense, it remains the most popular with publishers because it still attracts a huge number of advertisers.
Liz Canham has takes a keen interest in the disadvantages of AdSense being a publisher herself and has lots of information about AdSense on her website AdSense Tips and Tricks.
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