Out of whack ad-targeting...

...and I think I understand what's going on.

[West of Willamette]

Within the website in question, I have pages, all of which contain adsense, on a wide array of traffic. In the last few days, my CTR has really dived and I decided to investigate. What I found is that all the interior pages within one site were showing ads only related to the index page of the site even though the interior pages were on totally different topics. Even if I were to reach the interior page through a relevant Google search, the interior page would still show ads related to the index page.

So (in case I confused you), one of my index pages is focused on wine and some of the interior pages were focused on real estate. The real estate pages were showing wine ads whether I got to them through following links or through Google.

I think I need some of that wine...

[ahsanshami]

Similar problem here.

On some inner pages, we're getting ads related to the index page of that section/directory and on other pages, we're getting a mixed bag of ads which relate to several topics within this section of the site.

There are some pages though, which are getting properly targeted ads, which leaves me very confused about what is going on at Google's end.

[West of Willamette]

If I were an advertiser paying for these click-thrus, I'd be real upset. If this were a widespread problem, there are a lot of advertisers getting the shaft.

[Jon_King]

I should think that if Google misses the 'target' there just won't be any click-through. You should be the one upset - ads on your pages with little likelihood of click through because the ads don't match the content!

[justageek]

I should think that if Google misses the 'target' there just won't be any click-through

Not true. Remember the untargeted banner ad? Still there and still gets clicks.

JAG

[hyperkik]

That may be the "even a stopped clock is right twice per day" phenomenon. The fact that an ad isn't relevant to a site or page does not necessarily mean it isn't relevant to some of the people who happen across it.

[West of Willamette]

My ads are being clicked-thru...just at about 1/3 the normal rate. And, actually, the average I'm earning on a click-thru is about 3 times normal which means I'm not losing any money on this. However, that doesn't mean I'm happy ...things that end up wasting advertiser money is bad for all of us that want this program to grow and prosper. That's why I hope Google fixes this ASAP.

[DougW]

West of Willamett:

Were these mentioned pages dynamic or static. I see the same thing happening on one of my sites, but only on the dynamic pages.

Hopes this helps.

[West of Willamette]

Static pages.

[cyberprosper]

me too.

I think this is Google's first attempt at replacing the PSA's with revenue-producing ads. They probably have some algo in their database that guesses at your site's overall topic and serves ads based on that topic. However, my site is not really topical... I was going through the site earlier this evening and found most pages were about dogs... while my site does have a pet section, it is a small part of the site. But, google seems to think I have a dog site. I did, however, notice I was not seeing any PSA ads in my testing...

[whizkiddo]

definjitely happening on my dynamic pages. but surprisingly only on about 60-70% the others work great. and yes just as u described google targets the index page not the interior ones. I remember the good ol days when the targetting was abso perfect , so now though the CPC and impressions are more or less the same ; the CTR has taken a drop for the worse. as I mentioned before its almost 1/3rd from b4.

i know g is trying to improve the algo but for me the original one was just perfect , may be they shouldnt fix something that aint broke.

hope G sorts out ASAP, this is costing me :(

[West of Willamette]

Bump

[jbgilbert]

Similar situation here. Seems to have started late last week (Sep 17 or 18). It's like the ads on the first page of a site you visit "follow" you around the site?

I actually had a few cases where I felt I had to remove the Google code (ads were just way too far off). Hope this is temporary...

Anybody else noticing this?

[Macro]

I'll join the chorus.

Same problem here on static pages.

i know g is trying to improve the algo but for me the original one was just perfect , may be they shouldnt fix something that aint broke

Google could be running all manner of experiments. They could be running an experiment to see which sites are most affected by running home page ads across the site. Or they could be using this as a way of assessing a site's theme. Or they could be doing something else.....

The current problems are not necessarily a new algo Google believes will be an improvement to the original. It could just be Google running experiments and collecting some research data ;-)

[Macro]

Funnily, it's not happening on all my sites. This strange behaviour of showing ads relating only to the home page (or is it relating only to the keywords in the URL?) is applying to one fairly new site but not an existing well established site.

[birdstuff]

This entire "targeting" thing leaves me baffled. Here is the scenario with almost every new page that I upload to the server:

Step 1 - Create and debug page

Step 2 - Upload new page to server

Step 3 - After 5-10 minutes, see perfectly targted ads

Step 4 - Work on something else. Return to the new page after a short while only to see ads targeted to the "site theme".

When I look at the page later in the same day the ads will be targeted again. Then a little later they aren't. It seems to flip flop all the time.

What's going on here? I thought once Mediabot crawled the page and determined the keywords, the targeting of the ads were more or less stable until at least the next crawl.

I can understand advertisers pausing their campaigns or using up their daily (or monthly) budget, but that doesn't seem to be the case here. I'll see targeted ads followed by non-targeted ads, followed again by the very same targeted ads, all on the same day.

Is it just me or is something similar happening to anyone else?

[West of Willamette]

I don't quite see what birdstuff sees but every since this became a problem, my CTR has been about 60% of what it used to be.

[jbgilbert]

Yep I see the same thing - flip-flop.

I've also seen a sizeable drop off in click throughs the last two days.

[birdstuff]

It looks like Google could do something to add a bit of stability to Adsense. Maybe later.

[div01]

West of Willamette,

There is definitely somethin' goin on...I am getting non-targetted but somewhat related ads on one site (still better than PSAs), regular ctr, but much lower epc.

[chiyo]

IId have to agree with macro totally on this. We have a significant number of impressions daily. Almost alternately on a daily basis CTR can be double the day before and Revenue per click halved. The next day the reverse is true.

I see almost no worth in trying to "work out the algo", when Google is obviously trying various things all the time with the relevancy and other adsense algos. On a weekly basis it all "evens up" though with revenue altogether.

On balance, though it is as boring as hell, (but also saves heaps of time), Ive concluded the best thing to do is just let adsense do its thing and just do the obviou things like ensuring your keywords are in your title and body etc, and maybe avoiding posion words.

As far as predicting trends go, I forget it!

[whizkiddo]

well chiyo after worrying myself sick ; i came to the same conclusion that overall at the end of the week it all evens up and you cant do anything about it. But it still makes me sad to see what the CTR was, still is on some days and what it sadly becomes on 2 out of 3 days. The third day though makes up for it :)

Though i believe Google would be wiseput to email the publishers that they are testing smething , how long this "testing" will go on and the possible effects during testing and the final benefits. This would not only free us from concern but also increase respect for G in the minds of publishers as in that they consider us their partners, albeit very small ones

[Macro]

Though i believe Google would be wiseput to email the publishers that they are testing smething

That would affect the results of the test so I can't see G doing that.

[chiyo]

Its also very possible that these "changes in algos" (for want of a better term), may not just only be for testing, but part of a permanent "changing" situation where some good degree of randomness or systematic weightings (based on say site, site type etc.) is introduced into such things as which ads to display on which sites etc. In some ways this could be one way google ensures diff content in the ads.

[killroy]

Looks like massive split-run testing to me. I just hope that everytime my revenue takes a dip, googles does too, otherwise I'm *expletive*.

Would be nice to have a relative scale if you are preforming better or worse relative to the whole network :)

Ideally, eversytime google changes something that improves my own ads, everybody elses improve too and Google sees a network wide improvement

SN

[ahsanshami]

I just installed Opera 7.20 because I read that the browser displays AdSense ads [webmasterworld.com] (with the related searches) as part of the browser interface and I thought that was a useful way to see how Google defined our pages, in terms of keywords.

Anyway, what I found interesting with Opera 7.20 was that the browser's AdSense ads continue to be properly targeted, but the ones on the site pages were still off.

I would've thought that if the mistargeting was algo related, then it would affect Opera's ads as well on those same pages.

I might add that only some of our pages are showing generic ads (though no PSAs, thankfully) and many remain unaffected by whatever Google is doing to fix/improve things. When our ads are properly targeted, it's funny to see the first two in our skyscraper be the same up top in Opera's 468 banner -- I'm glad it's not a popular browser; I wonder how much rev we'd lose to their ads.

[2oddSox]

I've spent the last few days trying to optimise my pages to get better targetted ads, but to little avail. It seems the tighter I focus the page, the more generic the ads become.

I have ads on page A that would be perfect on page E, ads on page E that are perfect for page B, and so on. It's extremely mildly frustrating.

One thing I did notice is that the mediapartners bot that has come by the site only has about a 20% success rate in actually calling the pages. A good 80% have returned a 404 error to the bot when it comes a-calling. Interestingly the pages that have been crawled have good ads, the ones that returned the 404 don't.

Has anyone else noticed this, and been able to determine a reason why the bot can't crawl? I haven't added the mediapartners bot to my robots.txt file, and equally I haven't any areas that are off limits on the site - a bot is either banned completely or it isn't.

2odd...

[hyperkik]

Keep in mind that while a new page is spidered within hours, it may take two or three *weeks* before an edited page is again spidered. As Google knows the page was changed, but does not yet know what the changes were, the changes will likely result in generic ads or PSA's until the page is again spidered.