There are many blacklists available you can use download and input into Adsense so that low paying bulk advertisements do not show. Here is one, Google for more: (http://www.adsblacklist.com/)
You can also create channels, for certain categories and track your earnings by channel and then inspect the ads in low paying channels and look for some obvious ones to filter out.
I had an idea a while back to automate this process. Basically a user chooses maybe 8 different places they would be willing to place ads on their site. Then there is software that tries out the different placements, colors, etc, and records how well they do.
Then use maybe genetic algorithms to optimize those variables for ad revenue.
I'm hoping I could just make some javascript the user could put in their code, and it would mix and match the adsense placements (maybe color, etc too)
It would need a way to track the effectiveness of the ads. Tracking ad clicks would be simple enough with JS, tracking how much you make would be harder. I don't know if adsense has an API for that or not.
There are many blacklists available you can use download and input into Adsense so that low paying bulk advertisements do not show. Here is one, Google for more: (http://www.adsblacklist.com/)
You can also create channels, for certain categories and track your earnings by channel and then inspect the ads in low paying channels and look for some obvious ones to filter out.
You should use section targeting to tell Google which content sections to emphasize for relevance: (https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&#...)
To increase your click through rate you can place your ads in a better position, follow the heatmap:
(https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=...)
There are many other variables that come into play, something known as smart pricing can lead to huge swings in ECPC / CPM.