Search arguments are used by AdSense!

Be careful, or your tracking codes may kill you.

[androidtech]

I think I read a blurb on this on another thread, but it is so important I'm adding this topic.

We recently changed a large bunch of our PPC campaign URL's to include the search engine that was the source of the campaign. We mistakenly used the search engine name as the search argument: "http://www.blahblah.com?srcheng=ppc_engine_name".

Suddenly, our usually wondefully relevant ads started including mostly ads for PPC search engines!

We rapidly went back and altered all our ads to have a numeric value for the argument "?srcheng=9999".

So don't use a valid english word for your search argument keywords, or values. You can test this yourself pretty easily of course. Just take one of your AdSense page URL's and try adding different search arguments in the browser address bar.

This seems a bit silly to me.

thx

[JollyK]

Haha! It's kind of funny, though. By the way, in my tests, it works for:

arg=widget

but not

widget=arg

In other words, ads will show relevant to whatever's on the right-hand side of the = sign.

Gads. On the other hand, I wonder if this could be used to point relevant ads on pages that show highly irrelevant ads or PSA's?

I'll bet this puts WAY too much control in the hands of the webmasters as far as Google is concerned. Enjoy it while it lasts: I'm sure they'll put a stop to this asap.

[Nick_W]

I noticed this a little while back.

Think conditional adsense.....

Nick

[loanuniverse]

I can see a lot of people adding

? arg=web hosting
? arg=impotence
? arg=wathever pays $5.00 or more a click

I think it would be easier to red flag it than it would be to do something to the ad serving system.

[androidtech]

loanuniverse,

Anyone that tries that sort of thing is really asking for it. Tracking people playing games with search arguments is a thousand times easier than doing fraudulent click detection. All Google has to do is analyze the document referrer property from their syndicated ads delivery server.

My post was what it was intended for. To warn other PPC campaign users of innocently and inadvertenly diluting their AdSense ads through the use of tracking arguments.

thx

[loanuniverse]

I agree, but I never said the cheaters would be smart. :)

[justageek]

I'm not so sure Google could hold the website owner responsible since all the competition would have to do is go to a site and add the query string and hit the enter key. If that triggers a Google trap then the owner gets the dreaded email. Best if Google does it like some of the others and allows it but only to add weight to existing content. To me that's always been the logical thing to do anyway.

JAG

[JollyK]

Honestly, I'm wondering if Google may not realize this is the case. (Okay, well, if they didn't, they do now.) Sure, that's a stretch, but it's possible. I tested two keywords that had nothing to do with my site as something like arg=stuff. Sure enough, mediabot crawled "page.html?arg=stuff" shortly thereafter. I would have thought that after that, Mediabot would have said, "Oh. Golly. That's a page about foofooraws, and not about 'stuff' at all," and thereafter disregarded it. However, I just checked again (same page with same args) and it shows the keyword-related ad.

It is, of course, somewhat tempting to change the links to some of my pages that have poor targeting or PSA's only, but while I don't think this is "strictly" against the TOS, I have the feeling that at the very best it could lead to a "fraudulent yadda yadda" email, so I'll refrain.

What would be really cool would be if they did something like this:

First, tell everyone they can influence their ads in that manner using whatever keywords they want. (But make it so that only GoogleKWArg=keyword will work instead of "arg=keyword". Tighten it up a bit.)

Then, set a minimum CTR requirement if you DO do that, and disable ads on all pages that don't get X click-through. This way, people can't just blatantly advertise, say, pet food on a car site without being penalized.

When I say minimum CTR and ad disabling, I'm only talking about for ads which are using the influencer keywords, and not normal ads.

Wonder if they're working on something like this, or if their algo just hiccupped? :-)

JK

[killroy]

Standard behaviour. You will notice that it takes 2-5 hours AFTER crawling to get real targeting. So by tomorrow the page should be back on widgets and will have forgotten all about stuff.

SN

[ThatAdamGuy]

Killroy beat me to it, but I just wanted to emphasize that this is also correct from my experience.

I have some pages that really DO have bad targeting consistently, despite generally good content (e.g., pages all about professionally crafted widgets bringing up ads on arts and crafts, or pages in which a single word happens to override the otherwise oft-described major concept of the page). So I tried jiggering the AdSense targeting (ethically, IMHO) to get ads that really DID fit with the page.

It worked -- for about a day or two. Then it was back to PSAs or laughably untargeted ads.

Don't get me wrong; I'm generally pleased with AdSense, and am still making decent cash from it. But I do wish we Webmasters had a better way to guide, if not fully dictate, appropriate targeting.

[JollyK]

I asked Google if this was okay to do deliberately (make your links with "arg=keyword") to try to get targeted ads on, say, pages with PSA's or bizarre untargeted ads. They said they don't *currently* have a policy against this, but that URL was only a small part of how ads are determined, and that you'd probably find that once the bot has respidered the page with the new arguments, those ads will go away. I tried this with one of my pages and once the bot had spidered it, using the URL with args gave only PSA's. Removing the args put it back to targeted ads.

So, basically, it sounds like they're aware of it and don't have a problem with it since spidering will review the page, notice that it doesn't have anything to do with "high-ticket-keyword", and display PSA's or regular ads based on the full content.

Regardless of whether they do or do not have a policy against this, it still strikes me as a bad idea to do, though, unless you want PSA's where once ads appeared. :-)

[justageek]

Hmmmm. Sounds like a sure way for a less than honest kiddie hacker to be able to cripple a sites revenue to me. So arg=iuhweiuhrfouhjuohref would surely screw up a page then. I suppose a simple little spider could do a lot of damage in a very little amount of time. I would hope Google terminates this 'feature' asap.

JAG

[Nikke]

So arg=iuhweiuhrfouhjuohref would surely screw up a page then.

I don't think it would. It's rather the other way around.
If your site has some site-generic content ads. Try adding one of those as arg=widget and you would immediately get targeted ads, without having to wait for the spider to come by first.

[ahsanshami]

notice that it doesn't have anything to do with "high-ticket-keyword"

I think the extension to the URL has to be able to skew things a lot, even completely, because if you do it on a page about one topic and type in arg=other%20topic at the end of the URL, you'll get ads about the other topic.

I don't know what else would factor in those ads being served, except the keywords, given that the actual page content has nothing to do with the ads.

[chicagohh]

... more free Q&A for Google by the webmasterworld community.

shhhhhh... you could have made some nice $$ utilizing that little trick. Although, I doubt it will last long now.