Currently reviewing lots of things in my online world. I have left a lot unattended for some time and new stuff has appeared.

With respct to Adsense, do you find much worth on messing with things like

Blocking options
Advertiser URLs
General categories
Sensitive categories
Ad networks
Advanced Settings

I could see how it might improve CTR or even revenue if you removed certain ad networks that show only shit.

Or the sensitive categoris, one of mine is 6% of last months earnings, so that one would stay, but does it work like this:

Stop the shit showing and it gives the people with good ads moer chance of showing.

Or is all of this a waste of time and I should ditch Adsense?

Good q Rich. I got one site where Adsense has been sitting steady for 3+ years. Increase in traffic BUT earnings stay the same/drop.

I've done some tests on ad block size, colors etc. but only to see minimal effect.

Maybe I'm just bad a doing it or hit the mark the first, but not worth the time to do too much imo.

One of my clients (hardwood floor layer and sander) said he was sure his competition were clicking on his ads all the time - lots of clicks no phone calls.

Suggested he send an anonymous email to them - all in the bcc (get list from Google Places - top 20) saying "can you confirm what time your guys are coming on Friday".

Got as many originating IP address as I could from the emails and put them in the IP exclusion of his adwords for him.

Clicks went way down  immediately - If I remember correctly he was paying between £3-4 on some clicks and about £1-1.50 on others.

When the clicks went way down I also suggested he exclude IP addresses on his cPanel so they couldn't even see his website.

He reckons it has worked well for him.  Mentioned it to a couple of others and the same thing happened.

I also suggested that they try only using adwords on Search as they think that is where there traffic is coming from.

Note: This is only for local tradesmen - Painters & Decorators, Plumbers, Sash and Case Windows, Electricians etc - all trading locally - all getting a lot of traffic from Google Places.

The personal interest ads and tracking are a royal pain - doesn't work well for otherwise high-paying niches, but unfortuantely no way to switch that off.

Had a message in my Adsense interface recently about ads displayed over comment spam - warning my account could be shut down if not addressed! Turned out someone had scraped one of my sites and left the adsense on it, but that they'd also scraped some spam I'd long cleaned off.

So now I've had to only allow URLs for my own sites to prevent such issues. Don't want to get banned just because some idiot scrapes my content badly.

I seem to be very good at making downward changes to performance.  Upwards is always harder.  It does seem that whenever to try optimising adsense for CTR / CPC we take it down a peg and switching back never truly recovers.

Anyone else serving adsense through DFP and using direct sale / internal inventory to try to push the CPC up?  Been experimenting with this, but struggling to give it the time it deserves to be honest.

I've been thinking of opening a thread on the topic "Has anyone else noticed the crappy ads on major media sites?" (major media: mostly newspaper sites but some broadcast news sites as well).  And by crappy, I mean the likes of acai berry, tummy fat, work-at-home scams, etc.

I've long used these types of ads as a quality marker for the site. At the very least, they are a sign of either financial desperation and/or lack of knowledge about the internet marketplace and/or lack of care or editorial control of the site.  If you're running (or faking) a quality site, I'd block them.