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Adsense Wishlist

Although Google Adsense is the defacto contextual advertising tool, I often think there are things that Google could do better (pay more!), and things that annoy me about it, so I’ve had a brainstorm and thrown down a few ideas as to how Adsense could be improved. Here, in not particular order, is my Adsense Wishlist:

• Ability to filter stats - With many web stats packages it’s possible to filter out your own hits (e.g. by specifying an IP address to ignore). This could also be used for ignoring ad clicks, so that publishers could see where ads on their site are leading to, without fear of creating fraudulent activity.
• Easier to filter advertisers - At the moment, if you want to exclude advertisers using the competition filter, you have to view the ad, work out the URL that is being used and then add it to the competitive filter. Couldn’t Google simply show you a list of advertisers that have appeared on your site with a checkbox next to the that disables their ads? You may also have a better chance of picking up competitors advertising on your site this way, rather than relying on seeing their ads whilst browsing your own site. I think Google need to realise that they’re using our sites to show their advertising, and we should know exactly who is showing up on our sites and being shown to our visitors.
• More comprehensive reporting - this is probably on every Adsense advertisers list, but it would be good not to have to rely on third-party click trackers for data on which pages generate the most clicks, from which referrers etc. Can anyone explain why this data is so important for Google to keep secret (or at least make it awkward to find)? Hourly and weekly trends would also be nice. I think greater transparency is needed all round with Adsense reporting.
• Option to have “collapsible” ad units - When Google cannot find an ad for a page, it would be nice to have an option for the ad to “collapse”, rather than have a gaping hole in the page.
• More layout options / flexibility - I understand the reasons for not allowing publishers complete control over the ads (this could easily be done through CSS, if it were allowed), as it would no doubt lead to many dubious implementations of Adsense ads. But surely it would not be too difficult for Google to ad a few font choices and a bit of control over the font size.

What would you like to see added or changed in Adsense? Realistic suggestions only please…

This entry was posted on Monday, January 23rd, 2006 at 1:44 pm and is filed under AdSense, Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.