Adsense is not targeting ads well on our site any ideas?

[tresmom5]

I co-own an information and forum site. Our site has a high target to a certain group of people, but also has another few groups that have nothing to do with the main target audience. All our ads on our forums display towards the main audience whether the post or forum has anything to do with it or not. How do I get adsense to target better? Why is it just looking at the keywords on our main forum and not our subforums or posts? Is there anything I can do with it. At this point google is making us very very little and I am about ready to drop them. I feel like if I could get them to target better they might actually be worth it. Any ideas?

[Palehorse]

Well, one way is to use the Google adsense preview tool.

Change things around a bit, check, rinse and repeat.

Good luck

[Jenstar]

Could you be serving session IDs to either guests/members or the AdSense mediabot? This could definitely be causing this issue on message boards.

[MikeNoLastName]

A few quick tips we've discovered over the past month after being in the same boat:

Rule #1: Wait! Before doing anything give them time to settle. Apparently GAdsense does some "zero-ing" in on the proper ideal keywords based on the highest paying ones it finds on your page. I believe it has to do with the top $ producing words and if someone clicks on them that further re-inforces the "goodness" of the term. It has taken almost a month for us to "train" GAd using these rules. The terms they pick seem to need to be on the page at least twice and tend to be less than 3 words (one or two).

Rule #2: If the ads seem to get "stuck" on one or two non-sense terms and do not make anything because of ultra-low CTR, DELETE or somehow modify those terms on the page, at least temporarily and then wait some more. You should see better (or at least different) terms slowly start showing up. Cross your fingers that the more accurate terms get some click action to influence rule #1. Repeat for the new terms if needed. Forget trying to "influence" them by "packing" the preferred keywords close around the code. We've found it to be totally useless beyond normal keyword density optimization parameters (e.g. Rule #1 says it has to be there at least twice). We tried once by repeating the keywords on ALL sides of the code. Nada.

Rule #3: I'm still confirming this, but new pages appear to START with the general theme of the account/domain/channel (not sure which it is yet - I'm guessing domain at this point). So if the pages you are having problems with are new, wait again or try adding them into their own channel/domain. This can actually be a very big help in most cases, apparently not yours.

Rule #4: Check the page frequently with the GAdsense tool to see if your "proper" terms are appearing further down the list. If they are, add extra units so they can get seen, until they start showing up in the top units reliably.

This would all be a non-issue if G simply allowed everyone to use the Google-hint code, but since they don't we have to fudge around, work the system and be patient I guess.

Oh by the way, pages which keep the same name, but change content frequently, are nearly hopeless to get targeted. Once the keywords settle on a certain topic, it can take weeks to get them to shift again. When they do, it seems to be Saturday mornings are critical and you may see sudden keyword changes and corresponding jumps in CTR on those days.

Your milage may vary, this is simply our experience and experimentation over the last month or so after being frustrated by G's total lack of concern.