Adwords Warning!

Check it if you use Japanese Adwords

[lukasz]

I have noticed that my adwords ads started to appear on content pages. So I decided to check the quality of content pages where my ads are shown.
I got shocked.
So far I checked 4 sites.
All of them completely unrelated to my keywords or my page.
One of the pages has acually an adult content!
One was a link pages of japanese links in Indonesia. (I have nothing to do with indonesia, nor I want my ads to appear on link pages)
Thats not all.
All the ads which where in Japanese were completly unredable, something like:

?.?.?.?.?
?.?.?.?.?.?.?
?.?.?.?.?.?
mydomain.jp

Disgrace!

Since the ads were unreadable it also brings the question why would anyone click on them?

Well there is more.
I thought that maybe changing the encoding will make the ads readable, but changing the encoding actually crashes the IE6. Tried several times on 3 diffrent pages.

[whats up skip]

It is not good, but it does not impact on your click through rates and it will not be costing you anything as no one should be clicking through.

[lukasz]

Actually I got 17 clicks from those unreadable ads.

[Woz]

He he he, I can see it now, an unflux of ads across the adwords network populated purely by Question Marks.

Onya
Woz

[techiemon]

Did you ever think though that the? was created because your browser is not set up to support Japanese language websites and that those people who are clicking on them can read them just fine? I'm willing to bet this is the reason.

[bill]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld techiemon.

I'm willing to bet this is the reason.

I'd bet you'd lose ;) lukasz is placing Japanese language ads in Google...he most likely has his system setup to see Japanese...:)

[David_M]

lukasz,

How'd you find the content sites showing your ads?

[lukasz]

techiemon you lost your bet. I am using both english and japanese winXP and I have never had any problems with Japanese character display. Also the ads were appearing on japanese content pages and the pages were displayed without any problem.
David_M I found that pages browsing through my log files. Obviously I only found them because I received clicks.

[bird]

At least on my site, the Adsense ads are served by Google with iso-8859-1 declared as the character set. For an ad in japanese language this is clearly wrong and will result in the mentioned question marks.

If the user hasn't explicitly changed the defaults, then Google will serve their search result pages as UTF-8, which should display ads in any language just fine. The problem will persist until the Adwords ads are also served as UTF-8.

same story from a publishers perspective [webmasterworld.com]

[ron_ron]

Lukasz,

Thanks for the warning. I log into my ad words control panel in English. So should I uncheck the box under "Where to show my ads" that says "Content sites in Google's Network" to disable this?

Ron