Horrible Targeting Tonight

New features cost adsense targeting skills?

[ChrisKud5]

Tonight after moving a few things around, I was going through a few high traffic pages to check some ads, and as expected, targeting is horrible. These are pages in the google index with very high PR, and thousands of daily impressions.

1. Double ads.
On a wide skyscraper format, a few impressions showed all 4 ads the same exact ad, same domain and same text. Right clicking to get URL, are the urls were the same. They were not affiliate links, they were the same ad. 4 ads on one impression that are the same? Come on google.

2. Tons of PSA / Alternate Ads.
I have never seen so many Alternate Ads as i have tonight. Ad dispalys that are 1 or 2 filled or alternate ad. I found it rare to see a ad layout with 4 ads that did not have duplicates. Traditionaly these spaces have been filled with ads.

It appears that all the new excitment and activity around these new features of adsense have cost them the ability to provide god targeted ads.

Milking the adsense program into a conglomorate with a ton of "products" such as site search and all kinds of other ways they want to incoporate adsense into everyday life has caused targeting ability to drop. Publishers are still intersted in having good targeted ads, why dont you concentrate on making targeting bombproof before moving onto other ways to get adsense revenue out of publishers.

[yoyo8]

And what happens if these mistargeted ads remain for awhile and then at some point in time Adsense determines that conversions are low enough such that a smart pricing revision kicks in thus lowering EPC, and even after targeting comes back, you find yourself in the lower smart pricing tier?

[ChrisKud5]

YoYo i just could not tell you.

I would vote in favor of improving the system and targeting capabilities more before tacking on any new gimmicks in the future. This is obnoxious.

[damon]

My company has an analogy about system upgrades that we deploy...

It's like a ball of rubber bands.

When we upgrade one program with increased functionality (for the Google folks, this would be like additional Adsense channels, WebSearch, better targetting, etc.) we have to pull back each "rubber band" to get at the underlying program.

Each program (or "rubber band") has a connection to other programs. Often several connections to several programs. If one goes down during the night, MANY go down during the night.

Anywho, once the program has been upgraded, we have to lay each rubber band (or program) back upon the other rubber bands (as we slowly work back toward the surface of the rubber band ball) exactly as it was before to avoid impacting any other programs.

Of course, something ALWAYS gets impacted due to how delicate the balance of rubber bands on the ball and despite the regression testing, audits, double and triple checks, etc.

I wonder if Big G experiences the same thing whenever they do something (even cutting monthly checks). In a perfect world, they wouldn't be vulnerable to this. But, trust me, my company manages nearly a trillion dollars. Nobody is invulnerable.