How about ad targeting like Yahoo does?

[Crickey]

Just read the following on the yahoo Publishers blog:

If you are not already familiar with Ad Targeting, it’s a feature that allows you to better match the ads on your site to the interests of your users

If your site is mainly about finance, for example, you can choose “Financial Services” as your major ad category. You can also choose subcategories: Within “Financial Services” you can select from eight subcategories, from “Accounting and Taxes” to “Investment.”

If you think your audience is interested in electronics, you could tap “Electronics and Appliances” as your major ad category and “Consumer Electronics” as your subcategory. At present there are 20 categories and 109 subcategories to choose from.

* Select the ad categories and subcategories that you think will be most appealing to your visitors.
* Enter the Targeted URL in which you would like to see these ads appear. If you would like the ads to appear throughout your web site, enter your domain URL.
* Click the “Save” button and verify that your selection appears correctly in the Manage Ad Categories section.

Wouldn't this be a great feature for Adsense as well?
Knowing that Adsense has the most advertisers to choose from I can't think of a reason why they shouldn't implement this.

I know it would help me to get better targeted ads on my site which is all about software and webrelated topics.

Would love to hear your views on this.

[Januuski]

This would be nice. The ad targeting on my website is so bad that I decided to remove adsense from my site (again). I had nicely blended leaderboard (728 x 90) at the premium spot above the fold and my CTR was just about 0.5% and CPC close to $0.10 per click.

There has been some days when the targeting was decent and my CTR was about 3-5% however it happened just about few times over the 30 days of my "once gain" trial of adsense.

No! I dont need to show unrelated ads on my site to gain about $25/day. (about 50K impressions) My site is a local niche "MyCityMyNiche" however the ads displayed are almost always from another cities. I dont need to show ads for the same niche in other cities or countries such as Australian or UK ads on US website. For example. I dont know if anyone would be successful selling Sydney or London Hotels on Las Vegas travel website.

Maybe one day we will get the tools until that I will have no ads on my site. Good for the user I guess :-)

Jan