What happens when your own Google Adwords ads display on your own Google Adsense rich site and users click on it. You lose money for driving traffic to your own site, from your own site. But there is a way to stop this…
Google Adwords on Your Adsense Site!
This is very common. Google Adwords will display your ads via Adsense on any site based on keywords, and the higher the budget and ad quality, the higher the ad position is. So potentially your ad has a high chance to appear on your own site because you are targeting those very keywords.
So what is the problem? Since your own Adwords are appearing on your own Adsense site when someone clicks the ads, they again reach your own site and you get charged for it. Of course, you make a fraction of the money from your Adsense earnings also, but the resultant cycle is not worth it. This is not a good Adsense arbitrage.
Use Adwords Site Exclusion
You can exclude any own domain from your Google Adwords campaign easily. If you block your site, it will prevent your own Ads from showing on your own Adsense Ads. From Adwords Admin – Go to Tools> Site and Category Exclusion> Select your campaign – and then easily add excluded sites and refine your Google Network targeting by preventing individual websites or categories of webpages from showing your ads.
Should Adwords Block Your Own Site by Default?
I was browsing the popular Digital Point forums and found their own ad on their own domain.
Spotted these ones on the huge 728×90 banner
And this one on the top right color-rotating 468×60 banner.
Since these ads are appearing in top positions among multiple Adsense units on the site, I guess they have a great Adwords campaign running. Although at first look it seems they might have forgotten to exclude their own site, actually they have cleverly using Adwords to direct traffic from their forums to their main page which offers a host of other services… (or maybe not as the title of the ad still says Digital Point Forums).
I bet you were wondering why Adwords does not block your own domain by default – because people might want to target traffic to different parts of their domain.
Is your Google Adwords showing on your domain? Check it.