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Do You Know What Your Google Adsense is Promoting?

Yesterday I was reading Aaron Wall’s Google as the Invisible Hand and something curious came to my mind. How many Google Adsense publishers have any idea what their website is promoting, linking to, or being associated with?

I would guess very few - because the system is designed for you not to know.

Google Adsense terms of service forbid the site owner from clicking their own Adsense ads on their own website - their policy is very stringent about this.  So by design, you cannot know if you are promoting garbage or quality sites through your own website.

Why does this matter? It’s about reputation and brand. The websites you link to are associated with your brand. If your Adsense ads direct your visitors to spammy garbage sites or sleazy ebook offers, then your site will inevitably be associated (even if loosely) with those sort of “neighborhoods,” which will devalue your own brand and trust.

Google Adsense needs to institute a filter or publisher-cookie system that enables site owners to click their own ads without fear of getting banned. Since they are very good at catching “self-clickers”, why can’t they just make that into a feature? Or could it be that they don’t want people to know what they’re advertising?

Guy Kawasaki posted his Adsense earnings at the beginning of this year, which were so low, even CNN Money wrote a piece about it. I bet if you ask Guy who he was sending all that traffic to, he couldn’t answer you. What about you? If you have Adsense running on your blog, do you know what sites you are promoting and associating yourself with?

I’m guessing no - and that’s the way Google wants it.

April 10, 2007 · Filed under marketing

Shane said,

April 19, 2007 @ 4:09 pm

You can right-click the ad, choose “Copy URL” and then paste it somewhere so that you can pull out the destination URL. Admittedly, you shouldn’t have to do that, but I’ve had to use that technique many times to visit sites that were advertising on mine.

Tony said,

April 29, 2007 @ 9:30 pm

Our site is in a pretty defined niche so I routinely look at the ads and type in the URL in a separate window (like what Shane does). If I notice a made-for-ad site, I put the URL in the Adsense “Competitive Ad Filter” list so that the ad never shows up on the site again.

Additionally, when I see a store advertising cameras, I go to that store’s site and look them up on http://www.resellerratings.com. If they have a poor rating, I also put their site in the “Competitive Ad Filter” list so that people who visit our site don’t get driven to these scam artists.

It takes a bit of extra effort but it’s the right thing to do for people who visit your site.

If more people did this, maybe there’d be less of these horrible, waste of space, made-for-ads sites.

Markus said,

April 30, 2007 @ 8:34 am

Hey Tony. That’s a great way to ensure a positive experience for your site’s visitors. That sounds like a lot more effort than most adsense advertisers put in.

Amith said,

February 10, 2008 @ 7:06 pm

I am using adsense filter in my web designing site http://www.mizhy.com .I check the site URL in seperate window by looking the URL shown there or through copy URL by right click.

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