Chew on these funny forum posts about Adsense while I go try and melt my iPhone by running the latest update.?

Future Of Advertising In Danger???????
hmm… Someone went to school to figure that out.

Google is cheating publishers
Hang on while I call my lawyer

My idiot friend clicked 3 of my ads.
Either shake his hand or kick his ass

Adsense 1 million Doller !!!
Lost in translation I guess

Does traffic really increase your adsense earnings?
Yes! It’s like Viagra for your website

What Is Wrong With My Adsense?!
It’s Broke

Am I allowed to have Adult content
Sounds like a morality question to me.

Can you tell people to click?
Is that a question of ability or permission?

Oops. I accidentally clicked an ad.
In some countries they chop your fingers off for that.

Do you earn money if people visit your site?
Did you use all your brain cells thinking up that question?

Hacker put his adsense on my site for months
Sucks to be you!

Am I earning to much?
Yes, now go away!

Does Adsense Waste Time?
Depends on your perspective of Time!

Adsense doesn’t work are the golden days of adsense over?
Works on my machine so I guess not!

Anyone know use RSS to improve traffic?
Nope! I searched Google and not one person had a clue, sorry.

Is there a clear-cut answer?
Yes, but it’ll cost you $47.00 to find out how to get it.

Did this ProBlogger Really make $100,000.00 a month from AdSense?
He said he did didn’t he? Why on earth would he lie?

Why not getting paid for clicks?
Google hates you and wants to do nothing but cheat you out of everything you make.

Around 1,000 uniques a day, how much should I be getting?
That too will cost you $47.00 to find out how to get the answer, but for free I’ll tell you how stupid you are for asking that question.

Who to believe, adsense or adlogger?
Why would either lie to you?

10,000 uniques aday! and only $82 Normal?
Apparently for you it is.

When is the best time to put google adsense in your site,
Now!

Banned from AdSense - whats the alternatives?
Death!

How to get accepted
Try begging, maybe even protesting. In fact, why not write a blog about it then you’ll have the answer.

Redesign destroyed my earnings… thoughts?
Your design abilities suck!

Adsense cancelled in Brazil…what if it was in your country?
Move to another country. Duh!

Can you have AdSense and gambling ads on same site/page?
Again, is this a question of ability or permission?

Im getting scared about even STARTING adsense
Google can help you find a good therapist

HELP! I think i have to be accepted to adsense FIRST to be a newb?
But you don’t have to be accepted first to be a dumbass.

Important Newbie AdSense Question!
Search is your friend.

One of the biggest complaints I see about Adsense is the lack of targeted ads being displayed. It’s important to display ads that are relevant to your site because your visitors will be more likely to click on one if they are interested in what the ad might be about or is selling. If you have a site that’s dedicated to all things fishing then displaying ads for computer hard drives might not get you very good results. If your site is highly targeted, say for all thing X-Box 360 then pulling relevant ads won’t be much of a problem, but it can be improved, just as it can be improved for a more generalized site that may be less specific, like Gaming in general.

While Google doesn’t provide us with a way to target specific keywords, they do provide a way to tell the Adsense spider what portion of a site to crawl or not to crawl when trying to determine what ads to display. The process is called Section Targeting and it can greatly enhance the quality and relevance of the ads your site displays. Using Section Targeting is pretty easy, you simply enclose portion of your site content with the appropriate tags and the Adsense spider will either give it preference or ignore it completely.

To highlight a section of your site that should be emphasized use:

<!? google_ad_section_start ?>

<!? google_ad_section_end ?>

To highlight a section of your site you wish ignored use:

<!? google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) ?>

<!? google_ad_section_end ?>

If you use Wordpress you simply wrap the various template sections with the appropriate code and that’s it. The sidebars can be a big source of irrelevant content so wrapping the entire side bar or significant portions of it with <!? google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) ?> can keep that content from impacting the ads you get. You should also wrap the content output in the index.php, single.php and probably archive.php as well to ensure the content of each post is highlighted. For index.php you’d do this:

<!? google_ad_section_start ?>

<?php the_content(’Continue Reading ?’); ?>

<!? google_ad_section_end ?>

If your running a forum that use vBulletin this is even more important, because the nature of forum posts, ads can be very random and sometimes stray from the overall topic of the forum so you want make sure the ads within each thread are relevant to that topic of discussion. In vBulletin you would edit either the postbit or postbit_legacy theme and replace $post[message] with:

<!? google_ad_section_start ?>

$post[message]

<!? google_ad_section_end ?>

When implementing Section Targeting remember the changes are rarely instant so you should give it a week or so to begin to have an affect. Once the spider learns what content your site is about, you should start seeing ads that are more relevant and worth more.

Here’s an interesting turn of events for all of us Adsense publishers out there. For now it seems to be just another beta test but the details behind it are pretty interesting if not a bit disheartening. I tried the CPA network when it first went into beta and had zero luck with it, so I stopped using it after about a month. Seems now, Google wants to integrate CPA ads in the current mix of CPC & CPM ads. The email below was sent to a publisher (not me) and it reads as if his account has been “drafted” into participating in this test. Check it out.

Dear Publisher,

Your account has been selected to participate in a limited test of an exciting new targeting feature for AdSense. In the next few days we will enable cost-per-action (CPA) ads to compete in your AdSense for content ad units on a limited portion of your traffic, 5% or less of all ad impressions. These ads will look identical to your current AdSense ads, so there will be no visible changes to you or your users.

Your account has been selected because we believe that you’ll earn more by having these additional targeted, high-quality ads competing in your ad units .

Rather than generating earnings for a click or impression, you’ll be paid a larger amount for each conversion with these new ads. A user who clicks on your ad must complete an advertiser-specified action, such as a purchase or a lead, in order for you to be paid. Remember that these ads do compete with cost-per-click and cost-per-thousand impression ads, so a CPA ad will only win in an auction when we expect it to perform better than a CPC or CPM ad.

You won’t notice any change to the way that your earnings are reported. Revenue from CPA ads will appear just as any other contextually targeted ad revenue is reported.

As a reminder, all information about this test is Google Confidential Information under the applicable Google AdSense terms and conditions.

If you have any questions about this test or would like to opt out of this experiment, please email us at adsense-support@google.com.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

Ok, so this is probably not as drastic as it sounds and 5% isn’t that big of a deal but is it really fair to not give the publisher the choice on whether to participate or not? The up side is obviously more money for the publishers, but that means the CPA ads have to be worthwhile, because no matter how you slice it, 100 click worth .01 cent is worth well more than 1,000 CPA clicks that don’t convert to anything. The downside however is just that, how can Google honestly determine what would perform better on a particular site? Maybe a site that’s been doing fine with CPC ads, gets nothing but CPA ads that “should produce better” but don’t produce, what then?

One thing is for sure, this is one change that’s definitely worth keeping an eye on. What do you think? Would this be a good feature or not?

via: DigitalPoint

Ahmed from Performancing has a list of the 10 Things People Hate About Google Adsense. He thinks most are silly and ridiculous but admits a couple are valid concerns. I’ve done similar lists The Most Annoying Adsense Questions Ever and 15 Signs You’re A Paranoid Adsense Freak and I’ve thought about a haters list but since Ahmed did one, I decided to just comment on a few of his.

9 - Google allows AdSense ads on scrapper sites

Ahmed suggests: Google needs to do manual checks both at the point of application (maybe introduce minimum conditions for joining - such as site age, traffic, etc) and at any random time every 6 months (or 1 year).

To get the scrappers out of the system sites need to be checked manually - although this raises another nasty problem where personal bias on ads can mean the difference between a site being seen as heavily optimized and blatant spam.

I think the random site testing is unrealistic, Google does this today (see How I Got Yellow Carded ByGoogle) but I’m definitely a proponent of the having each and every site that runs Adsense approved before they are allowed. This alone will eliminate a number of the MFA type sites. Not all of them, some people will be willing to go to the trouble to make an acceptable site then change it after approved but not all, many are in it believing they’ll make a quick fortune, those will get eliminated.

7 - Doesn’t pay enough

Ahmed suggests it’s: A problem of expectations and nothing to do with Google or Google AdSense.

AdSense is usually a function of traffic - if you have low traffic you might want to head the TLA way and push your PageRank up.

I completely agree here. Poor performance of Adsense is largely a case of mindset. Take the Adsense forum on Digital Point for example, what used to be a great resource has turned into a whining convention about how little Adsense pays and how crappy it is. Sure, it’s not what it used to be but that’s the reality of things. Advertisers are smarter so publishers must become smarter. If you spend all your time on someplace like the DP Forums it’s easy to see why someone would think Adsense sucks.

5 - Don’t allow arbitrage

Ahmed says: Losely translates into:

Don’t allow us to cheat by going against their TOS.

I’m all for arbitrage, but you have to make sure you don’t get caught :)

Arbitrage is allowed and there are plenty of sites still doing it. It’s the implementation that Google has a problem with. Affiliate marketers use this with great success. Using Arbitrage to push a product is one thing, using it to push a bunch of Made For Adsense sites is another matter entirely.

4 - Dont allow banned accounts to be reinstated

Ahmed says: Never had an account banned (touch wood) so I can’t say much about this. If it really is a zero-tolerance policy then it’s not necessarily a bad thing - although accounts that are wrongly banned for suspicious activity should be reactivated once the mistake is discovered. Google will only get better at detecting fraud though, so the number of false positives should decrease.

Again, anywhere you go people are whining about this or they’re paranoid because they spend all their time reading forums that have become havens for the Paranoid Adsense Freaks out there. Point of fact there have been numerous cases where accounts that were banned for the dreaded “invalid clicks” and have been reinstated after being investigated further by Google (Google Loves Me Again). I do agree that over time Google should get better at detecting false positives and the collateral damage should decrease everytime there is a new culling.

These are just a few of the points Ahmed brought up, read the rest of them at Performancing.com