buckworks - 9:21 pm on Sep 2, 2012 (gmt 0)

can you see the effect of interest-based ads on conversion

From the advertiser's side I can't usually tell if ads were served because of interest-based targeting.

Once in a while a clearly off-topic site gets a few impressions and shows up in the reports, and I assume those are interest-based. But if there's a way across the board to distinguish interest-based ad impressions from normal keyword/theme targeting, I haven't figured it out.

The one place I can reliably see a difference is with our remarketing campaigns, which I suppose could be considered a sub-category of interest-based. They're targeted by the historical fact that the user already visited our site. Those campaigns are small but they convert well.

As far as I can see, the vast majority of our content-network impressions and conversions look like they're coming from normal on-topic pages.