Use the Google AdSense Allowed Sites Publisher Whitelist
A couple of days ago, I logged into my Google AdSense account and added my domains into the textarea box for "Allowed Sites". I was seeing too many impressions versus clicks and couldn't figure out why.
Search Only
A while back, months in fact, I used the "Who Sees Ads?" plugin to restrict AdSense ad displays to search engine visitors only. It worked well until I found out that Windows Live was using some funky search JavaScript-enhanced robot. I mentioned it in my article about reducing AdSense impressions from robots.
After doing it the .htaccess way and not liking it, I created a small amount of code and added it to my theme file that displays single pages. I also wanted to be able to cache the files and inserted some code into the Hyper Cache plugin to allow for two different cached files, one for non-search and one for search visitors.
I thought I had the problem licked until I continued seeing more impressions than searches. I have AdSense on a few blogs now and I needed to find out what was going on before it got worse.
Allowed Sites
I logged back into my AdSense account today and found there was one IP address belonging to uk.search.yahoo.com showing my AdSense ads.
If I didn't use the "Allowed Sites" option, I never would have realized that Yahoo displays the AdSense ads from their cache. How many clicks from the cache do you think I was getting before this? I doubt I was getting any at all.
Luckily, neither the impressions nor the clicks are counted when AdSense ads are served from sites that aren't whitelisted.
My Google AdSense CTR
While I can't tell you what my actual CTR is, I've been lucky enough to have it remain above 5 percent despite the added impressions. It should seriously increase now that unwanted impressions are not being counted.
I don't know why I didn't use the "Allowed Sites" option before this. Maybe it's because I never saw the problem before. I've been using the meta content of "noarchive" for the Google robot, but I haven't been using anything for the others. Looking at the percentages, 70 percent of my search visitors are from Google, 25 percent from Yahoo and 5 percent from all the others combined. Before I started using the HeadSpace plugin, the Yahoo visitors were within that 5 percent.
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Grats on having 5% CTR that's very respectable. I am still stuck on 3%. You should write an ebook or something on your conversion sectrets
Correction, Craig. Above 5 percent. I'm not too keen on writing ebooks or I probably would've already done it.
It doesn't matter too much, though, because all of my secrets are splattered throughout the advertising and marketing categories.
OK, this doesn't make an awful lot of sense to me as it's a bit over my head. But I do remember Vic saying that he blocks MSN impressions using OpenX because MSN tends to send junk visitors or something. Anyway, my CTR is well above 5% for all my sites so I'm not at all worried.
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This is somet valuable information, thanks. Also a good reminder, as I haven't logged in to check my AdSense account for awhile. I appreciate the information you've shared here.
I have been using the Sites Allowed feature and find some sites which are displaying my adsense ads however instead of the urls of these sites, digits are displayed.
I tried to google them to find the sites without success. Does anybody else has the same experience? And what are these sites or how to find their urls?
I have been looking for a plugin that allows me to only show Adsense to SE traffic. Thanks for that.
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