Two Unrelated Advertisements Questions

[iacas]

I have two simple questions about advertisements.

1. How are the advertisements sorted in the Advertisements screen in the admin page? They don't seem to be in any real order. You can choose a sort order, but every time the page reloads, that's gone, and the ads appear to be in no discernible order. It's not by any of the columns, it's not by the database row ID, etc. How are they sorted? Can this be manipulated so that they show up in a certain order all the time (when a column header isn't selected)?
2. I found the titles of the ads in core_sys_lang_words, but there are also eight older ads (the titles for them) that I'm no longer using still there. Can those rows be deleted in the database? Why are they still there if the ads are deleted?

[Daniel F]

8 hours ago, iacas said:

found the titles of the ads in core_sys_lang_words, but there are also eight older ads (the titles for them) that I'm no longer using still there. Can those rows be deleted in the database? Why are they still there if the ads are deleted?

Thanks, I have fixed this for 4.5

[Morrigan]

Newest created to oldest is how they are listed.

[iacas]

14 minutes ago, Morrigan said:

Newest created to oldest is how they are listed.

By the dates specified (like their start date)? Because mine, by ID, are: 32, 31, 1, 6, 22, 5, 26, 27…

[Morrigan]

Mine have always shown based on creation date. Newest one created is at the top of the list.

[VaBeach_Guy]

How accurate is the 'impressions' that are displayed in the ACP? I enabled Adsense on the 18th of this month, it's showing me that there's been almost 18,000 impressions (according to the ACP).  But on Adsense, they're only showing 3,800 impressions. 

[Morrigan]

I'd trust the ACP more than Adsense. Remember that Adsense has more cookie rules to adhere to as they are a third party than your site will. So if people are using privacy in any way they won't report to Adsense where-as IPS will report every page load it sees.

Edited May 25, 2020 by Morrigan

[Morgin]

17 hours ago, Morrigan said:

I'd trust the ACP more than Adsense. Remember that Adsense has more cookie rules to adhere to as they are a third party than your site will. So if people are using privacy in any way they won't report to Adsense where-as IPS will report every page load it sees.

It’s one of those situations where both numbers are accurate in terms of the specific metric they show.

ACP shows page hits, and that’s it. How many times was that particular ad code placement requested from the server. Doesn’t matter if it was human, search bot, etc. If that ad code placement was requested, it counts.

Adsense shows actual ad impressions. That is, how many times did a unique ad actually get served in that location. As you can imagine, google doesn’t like (and has ways to avoid) loading paying ads to any request other than likely human with eyeballs who will actually see the ad. Page scraping, search bots, people with ad blockers, etc. do not count as “hits” for purposes of the Adsense impressions metric.

ACP is always going to show significantly higher numbers  than adsense will actually serve and pay out for. If you are lucky enough to have someone wanting to directly buy ads from you through IPS that’s great, but even podunk companies have gotten wise that buying a block of impressions without any insight into the demographics of the audience who actually were served and viewed those ads is no longer justifiable. That is, with all else being equal, you have a pretty good example that if you sold 18,000 impressions direct through IPS, it’s likely only roughly 3,800 of those impressions were actually viewed by an actual human looking at a screen. Again, somehow there are still people out there ok with paying for metric and demographic-less ad impressions with no guarantee the bad views have been filtered out of the counter, but here we are. 

Edited May 26, 2020 by Morgin

[Jordan Miller]

On 5/24/2020 at 4:33 PM, VaBeach_Guy said:

How accurate is the 'impressions' that are displayed in the ACP? I enabled Adsense on the 18th of this month, it's showing me that there's been almost 18,000 impressions (according to the ACP).  But on Adsense, they're only showing 3,800 impressions. 

Very curious about this, too. My impressions in my ACP are WAYYYYYY higher than what the reporting shows in my analytics or advertising reports. 

[opentype]

1 hour ago, breatheheavy said:

Very curious about this, too. My impressions in my ACP are WAYYYYYY higher than what the reporting shows in my analytics or advertising reports. 

Fully answered one post above yours. 😉 

[VaBeach_Guy]

15 hours ago, Morgin said:

It’s one of those situations where both numbers are accurate in terms of the specific metric they show.

ACP shows page hits, and that’s it. How many times was that particular ad code placement requested from the server. Doesn’t matter if it was human, search bot, etc. If that ad code placement was requested, it counts.

Adsense shows actual ad impressions. That is, how many times did a unique ad actually get served in that location. As you can imagine, google doesn’t like (and has ways to avoid) loading paying ads to any request other than likely human with eyeballs who will actually see the ad. Page scraping, search bots, people with ad blockers, etc. do not count as “hits” for purposes of the Adsense impressions metric.

ACP is always going to show significantly higher numbers  than adsense will actually serve and pay out for. If you are lucky enough to have someone wanting to directly buy ads from you through IPS that’s great, but even podunk companies have gotten wise that buying a block of impressions without any insight into the demographics of the audience who actually were served and viewed those ads is no longer justifiable. That is, with all else being equal, you have a pretty good example that if you sold 18,000 impressions direct through IPS, it’s likely only roughly 3,800 of those impressions were actually viewed by an actual human looking at a screen. Again, somehow there are still people out there ok with paying for metric and demographic-less ad impressions with no guarantee the bad views have been filtered out of the counter, but here we are. 

I figured that it was along these lines but wanted to be sure. It would be nice if the ACP had a way of filtering out the bots from that number, to give a more accurate figure, but I guess it's not critical since you can get the number from Adsense. 

[Jordan Miller]

2 hours ago, opentype said:

Fully answered one post above yours. 😉 

Oops haha 🙏 

16 hours ago, Morgin said:

It’s one of those situations where both numbers are accurate in terms of the specific metric they show.

ACP shows page hits, and that’s it. How many times was that particular ad code placement requested from the server. Doesn’t matter if it was human, search bot, etc. If that ad code placement was requested, it counts.

Adsense shows actual ad impressions. That is, how many times did a unique ad actually get served in that location. As you can imagine, google doesn’t like (and has ways to avoid) loading paying ads to any request other than likely human with eyeballs who will actually see the ad. Page scraping, search bots, people with ad blockers, etc. do not count as “hits” for purposes of the Adsense impressions metric.

ACP is always going to show significantly higher numbers  than adsense will actually serve and pay out for. If you are lucky enough to have someone wanting to directly buy ads from you through IPS that’s great, but even podunk companies have gotten wise that buying a block of impressions without any insight into the demographics of the audience who actually were served and viewed those ads is no longer justifiable. That is, with all else being equal, you have a pretty good example that if you sold 18,000 impressions direct through IPS, it’s likely only roughly 3,800 of those impressions were actually viewed by an actual human looking at a screen. Again, somehow there are still people out there ok with paying for metric and demographic-less ad impressions with no guarantee the bad views have been filtered out of the counter, but here we are. 

AHHH very interesting. Thank you for the insight! 

[VaBeach_Guy]

I'm sure the numbers are different for everyone, but for my board, the ACP number is about 4.3 times higher than the Adsense number. Now, the ACP is around 27,000 with Adsense at about 6,200. My board is NFL related, so I'd expect those numbers to increase as NFL training camps and the season gets closer (assuming there will be a season). 

[Morgin]

9 hours ago, VaBeach_Guy said:

I figured that it was along these lines but wanted to be sure. It would be nice if the ACP had a way of filtering out the bots from that number, to give a more accurate figure, but I guess it's not critical since you can get the number from Adsense. 

Ad software is very complicated these days. What IPS offers is a nice little value-add to do some very basic direct ad sales, but it’s honestly a bit of a relic at this point in terms of the ad industry. Ad buyers want and expect more data from their ad buys now. If you need anything beyond what is offered in IPS Community Suite in terms of serving ads and stats associated with them, it would be worthwhile to start looking into Google Ad Manager or OpenX (or, bluntly, if you have the traffic to support it, move onto an ad network like ezoic or something). 

[VaBeach_Guy]

12 hours ago, Morgin said:

... (or, bluntly, if you have the traffic to support it, move onto an ad network like ezoic or something). 

My board is still fairly new, though it began its life with basically a 'built in' membership of about 1,000 people. An NFL team decided to close their 20+ year old forum and my board was born from that. They gave a 2 week notice of the closure, so that gave the new board 2 weeks to inform members of the new location. 

Right now, traffic between about 8 AM (Eastern US) and 11 PM never dips below about 75 members online at any given period. So it's not massively active, but it's the NFL's offseason with very little going on, so I wouldn't expect to see a whole lot of traffic right now. During the NFL Draft, at the end of April, traffic peaked at around 400 online and from past experience, I would expect at least that much during games.

[Morgin]

3 hours ago, VaBeach_Guy said:

My board is still fairly new, though it began its life with basically a 'built in' membership of about 1,000 people. An NFL team decided to close their 20+ year old forum and my board was born from that. They gave a 2 week notice of the closure, so that gave the new board 2 weeks to inform members of the new location. 

Right now, traffic between about 8 AM (Eastern US) and 11 PM never dips below about 75 members online at any given period. So it's not massively active, but it's the NFL's offseason with very little going on, so I wouldn't expect to see a whole lot of traffic right now. During the NFL Draft, at the end of April, traffic peaked at around 400 online and from past experience, I would expect at least that much during games.

Ezoic is somewhat unique in that they’ll take sites with as low as 10,000 monthly visits. Most bigger ad networks (Adsense excepted) want to see 1 million monthly page views at a minimum, and often won’t take forums unless they also have regular content posted. 

[VaBeach_Guy]

How can I block specific types of ads? Specifically, political type ads. Or can that even be done?

[Morgin]

11 minutes ago, VaBeach_Guy said:

How can I block specific types of ads? Specifically, political type ads. Or can that even be done?

Who is your ad provider? With Adsense, you certainly can. It’s in the Adsense settings (they change things around frequently so I don’t actually recall specifically where, but it’s there). Other providers I’m not sure, but any good ad networks usually allows you to block certain categories of ads. 

[VaBeach_Guy]

On 6/30/2020 at 1:55 PM, Morgin said:

Who is your ad provider? With Adsense, you certainly can. It’s in the Adsense settings (they change things around frequently so I don’t actually recall specifically where, but it’s there). Other providers I’m not sure, but any good ad networks usually allows you to block certain categories of ads. 

It's Adsense.