Poorly targetted ads

everything running smoothly until yesterday

[mfishy]

We are running adsense on a loans/mortgage site. We had been getting great ads - all from mortgage companies.

Yesterday we started getting "pay day loans" ads and the CTR dropped to nill.

Is it over for this site as far as adsense is concerned? Is there anything one can do? It is a disservice to our visitors as well as a waste of space to show them "pay day loans ads", which are a bit "shady" to begin with.

[worker]

I began to see more PSA ads and a lower clickthru rate yesterday too. Today the numbers seem low too.

Perhaps Adsense has some sort of shortterm problem.

[mfishy]

Never had a PSA ad.

The problem is, that the ads are closely related, but not related enough that they make sense. Sure, cash advances are a form of loans, but no one looking for mortgage or refinance info is really looking for a $500 payday loan :(

So, to get back to the question, is there anything one can do?

[trillianjedi]

I began to see more PSA ads and a lower clickthru rate yesterday too. Today the numbers seem low too.
Perhaps Adsense has some sort of shortterm problem.

Seeing exaclty the same here.

TJ

[loanuniverse]

I might be specially qualified to talk about this particular type of “widget site” as my site is similar in widgetry topic :)

First, I would comment that one day of one type of “related” but not really on-topic ads should not be much of a concern. I am saying this because I have seen the targeting fluctuate within one broad topic greatly. I would say that the most likely culprit are tweaks in the targeting algo. I believe that this has been tweaked dozens of times.

I would also consider the following as possible reasons:

1-Changes in the amount bid from advertisers. Those advertisers selling “payday widgets” might be bidding higher than your desired ones. The only solution I can see is to block them manually.
2-Did any of the content change? I am saying that because every couple of days something changes in my front page when I answer a question from one of my visitors. My observations have shown that this has an effect on the ads shown by Adsense.

All I can say is stay away from any words that might trigger those unwanted ads… I would guess anything that might have to do with “hardship” will count. It also occurred to me that adding a tagline to all of your pages at the top {kind of like XYZ.com your source for Fuzzy Widgetry Information} would add to targeting. Frankly, I am too lazy to even implement it on my site and so far have been happy with the targeting myself.

[mfishy]

Thanks loanuniverse.

I gave a specific example as to demonstrate that ads that are somewhat related can really turn out to be useless in some cases, like ours.

I know it has only been a day, but it concerns me nonetheless.

We made no changes to the site's pages at all. We do have phrases all over the pages like mortgage, refinance, etc...

I guess I'll wait another day or 2.

The reason why we are impatient is the area where the irrelevant ads are displayed was used for a form for loan apps from a partner where we were making significant money (not a few bucks per day) :)

Adsense was performing a wee bit better up until yesterday. I guess we can only "wait and see".

[RobbieD]

I find that I can have PSA's showing up then I add the Alternative Banner code and it's like Google tries harder to find a match.

We have very few PSA showing at our site after running an alternative.

[Jettie]

Same happened to me RobbieD.
Had a lot of PSA's but when I showed up with my own
ad ... there they where :))

[mfishy]

Again, there are tons of threads on PSA's - not the issue here.