Forum Moderators: martinibuster
There are pages, though, where the only thing that runs are public service ads. Some of these are lengthy book reviews. I can't understand why AdSense is still running these ads on these pages? If they can't find something specific about that book, author, or topic, why not just run the generic book ads?
I can't figure out what to do besides remove the AdSense code for those pages. What's the point if they're never going to run anything related? Any ideas?
Or, it's possible Google hasn't yet spidered that page for Adsense.
I've found that Adsense gets smarter with time - pages that were initially running generic ads are now running more targeted ones.
Why? :
- Most of them are for American organisations, and mostly a lot of your visitors will not be coming from America.
- A visitor will find it strange that a website serves PSA, and possibly gets less trust in it.
I mean a text saying :
"Donate to Charity
100% Tax-Deductible Donations Free Pickup. No Hassles!
www.giftsforsight.org"
I mean, this does just looks strange! I'm from Europe and I have never heard from that organisation, so I don't even know if they are legit. And if they don't for example put the money they receive in their own pockets..
I've noticed that some of my reviews always have public service ads - and the reason for that seems to be a high density of "negative" words (as mentioned in AdSense FAQ).
By negative words, I mean words like "corruption", "death", etc. which advertisers may not want to be associated with.
Not trying to contradict you, just got curious and did
a search.
Andy
By negative words, I mean words like "corruption", "death", etc. which advertisers may not want to be associated with.
When I first started using Adsense one of my sites had targeted ads on about 70% of the pages. Then it suddenly went down to about 10% for a few days. Google told me that in part it was because of "negative content" and they also mentioned that at this time they only server "family friendly" ads (I later told them that's fine because I cannot show non-family-friendly ads on the site). They didn't elaborate, but I guessed it had to do with the fact that the site in question deals with crime and legitimate content had words such as murder, rape and porn. I contacted them and explained the situation, including how they had been showing ads that were well-targeted, and they told me this is a problem that they're working on.
The percentage of pages showing targeted ads began increasing about a week after they last contacted me.
I do not mind them too much but would love more targetted PSA's so if your IP is Thailand you would get Thai charities etc.
At one point, I checked about 10 or 15 pages on my site and they all had public service ads. The next day, they were all back to targeted ads.
As long as I'm getting more clicks and more commission, I'm not complaining.
Beth
Anyone else thinking that those public service ads are stupid? I'd rather have 0 ads on a page, or links to search results from google related to my pages his content than those PSA.
I couldn't agree more. I'm really sick of the PSAs. Google has not been very forthcoming about the details of these ads. From what I've been reading, it appears as though we're not getting paid for them. That means that we're being forced to donate our space to charity by participating in the program. In the US, most of these charities offer tax incentives for donations. But without Google giving me a record of my adspace donation, I have no way to claim any tax deductions. This seems to be a rather unfair practice on Google's part. We definitely need some clarification here.
In my case, there are a couple of the "charities" that I didn't care for, so I added them to my filter list and they stopped showing up.
If you really dislike them that badly, you could probably add them all to be filtered out and see what ends up in the space.
I can assure you that Google would prefer to be running paid ads, too. They would only run the PSAs if they had no paid ads to display.
If you are seeing lots of PSAs, it's probably content-related. Either Google doesn't know what the page is about, or that topic doesn't have enough ads. The bottom line is whether the Google program works for your site or not. If it compares favorably with your alternatives, keep it. If it doesn't, dump it.
In my case, there are a couple of the "charities" that I didn't care for, so I added them to my filter list and they stopped showing up.
yeah! actually I would love to put there some charities about which I do care rather than those proposed by google....
Pages we added 30, 31 July and 1 August are still not showing targetted whereas before it was nearly instantaneous for pages such as this with similar content length etc.
Hope this improves.
I'm assuming you do not get paid for clicks on the PSAs. Is this correct? Would I be better off accepting graphic button-type advertising from environmentally friendly products/services? Would Google deny me AdSense ads if I tried to do both?
Appreciate any help here. Thanks
SN
If you really dislike them that badly, you could probably add them all to be filtered out and see what ends up in the space.
They don't get filtered out. 24 hours after adding them to the exclude list, they all still appear. Maybe none of them can be excluded.
I wouldn't mind if they were geo-targeted, but ads for local US charities are fairly pointless in most of the world.
Burst (ad network) used to handle this (at least when I was a member, years ago) by allowing the site publisher to set the "default ad" to be either their house ad/charities OR to load your own banner, but this is a little trickier when the "banner" has "ads by google" on it which would have to be removed in that case.
Rob
Do some test searches for things you would expect your content to show up for. If there are adwords there, it would be reasonable to expect them to show up on your site. If not, you would probably be looking at PSAs.
Their guidelines are a little confusing to me.
