AdSenseAdvisor - 8:49 pm on Apr 27, 2009 (gmt 0)

Who decides in what category an ad belongs - is it the advertiser or Google?

Google’s adserving technology determines the category to which an ad belongs.

someone asked this question at the google panel at adspace today, and the way i heard the answer is that the _advertiser_ sets the category.

I’m sorry if this was unclear. The way Google contextually targets ads to your page is not just by identifying keywords in the ads and on your page, but by extracting themes and concepts from the ad creative and the advertiser's landing page. (The backend technology is pretty mind-blowing, IMHO.) We can use that information to group ads into larger categories like the ones we’re using for category filtering.

Hopefully ASA will read this thread and pass this information on to the proper people.

I’m happy to pass this feedback (as well as your requests for keyword and other types of filtering) along to the right people.

ASA