Adsense Competitive Ad Filter will NOT help you to earn more!

This was a test running for a long time and now I decided to stop. The reason is that my earnings from AdSense dropped considerably.

I manage a lot of websites and only two of them doesn’t use AdSense for monetizing; all the rest is monetized with AdSense. About three moons ago I’ve read on a blog which actually states that it’s managed by “AdSense Experts”, that filtering some ads (suggested by them), will boost the AdSense earnings.

One of the top level domains on the list was blogger.com, thus entering in the filter list blogger.com will block any advert which has as landing page specified any blogger sub domain. Basically I will potentially block hundreds of thousands of adverts coming from bloggers who advertise their website via AdWords.

Back to my test. AdSense suggests to keep the competitive ad filter short as possible because it can ruin your earnings. I had 15 top level domains, some of them suggested by the so called experts, some of them from a website called AdsBlackList.com. I activated the list on 10th of August because it takes 2 days for the filter to be active. Now it’s 13th of October, that’s two months, and the list was cleaned yesterday.

I can’t tell what’s my daily earning with AdSense since it’s prohibited by Google, but I have high CTR mostly because all the pages are optimized for adsensea and they are blended in the page. The high CTR gives me some cool earnings every day.
As soon as the list was activated, my earnings started to drop. Slightly going down every day until I reached a level with about 10% lower than the usual. I thought that this is just because I got different type of visitors who don’t seem to like clicking ads. Then the days passed and the earnings were still low.

Until today: I decided to end my test and cleaned the competitive ad filter list. I don’t filter anything now and today my earnings got better, slightly moving upwards.

Just a coincidence? What do you think?