Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Others were simply from sites I personally consider unsuitable for display on my site.
Yesterday I implementedted exclusions for about 10 sites.
This has left me with many pages showing only one or two ads and the others still displaying one or two ads from sites that I would probaly exclude for reasons stated above.
This leaves me in the position of pondering removing adsense completely. Or possibly removing it from my main pages and leaving it on a few less critical pages, just to keep my options open. That would still generate a few click thrus, I suspect.
I'd be interested in hearing how others who may have had a similar experience with the program have dealt with these issues.
I sort of see why it's irrelevant and I'm talking to google support about it, no resolution so far. They are really trying to help though, I'm impressed.
The reason as I see it is that I have a couple of words as part of my page navigation/template that triggers the adsense and they show ads, related to these words. These are somewhat relevant for the site in general, but not for particular pages.
So, bottom line - try their support, they do respond and to the point usually.
Others may find that acceptable for their sites, that's their choice.
I don't find it acceptable for ads that appear on my site.
Another group, while targeted at my general area, don't target the more specific content on my site.
I find that interesting. But there aren't enough impressions since I did the exclusions to draw any meaningful conclusions.
Example: I have a nonprofit information site for aspiring freelance writers that dates back to early 1996 (when I was managing a forum for writers on MSN). A few months ago, I put the AdSense code on its pages in the hope of recouping the hosting fees. Big mistake! All the ads were for vanity presses and other scams or near-scams. I took the ads down within 24 hours. They might have earned me money, but they would have made the site--and me--look sleazy.
They might have earned me money, but they would have made the site--and me--look sleazy.
I had a similar problem when I first started using AdSense as a primary feature of my site is a periodic table of elements. Certain element pages like calcium were attracting all kinds of quackery. After a few days of adding sites to my filters, the problem seemed to have subsided and very rarely do I end up having to add new sites to the filters now. I do surf problem pages on a regular basis to make sure they are clean of scams.
Like ken_b, my site has a problem attracting good AdSense ads. I'm sure that if my subject and audience was different, I'd be making a killing with AdSense given my traffic levels. I'm just hoping that as AdSense/AdWord gains greater brand name recognition, that better advertisers will start to show up and buy more keywords that are relevant to my site.
I'm just hoping that as AdSense/AdWord gains greater brand name recognition, that better advertisers will start to show up and buy more keywords that are relevant to my site.
Pretty much my hope. Although I might substute "more appropriate" for "better".
I am impressed with some of the on target ads that do appear. More of those would make me very happy.
I think it really shows how much tunnel vision people have when they choose the key words to target.
In the very short time I've had AdSense on some of my pages I'd say that accounts for about 30% of the poorly targeted ads I've seen. Appears that folks do have blinders on when setting up their ads.
I think it really shows how much tunnel vision people have when they choose the key words to target. For instance I get coin dealers for the element nickel and satellite phones for the element Iridium (iridium satellite phones).
I have a different perspective on this. The way I see it, Google's technology has fallen short in that they don't recognize the overall content of the page they are serving the ad on. In fact, they acknowledge this shortcoming as I've read quotes in the media attributed to Google employees specifically commenting about this.
So this is not an issue of the advertiser poorly selecting keywords, but rather the technology they are depending on to properly serve their ads.
The way I see it, Google's technology has fallen short in that they don't recognize the overall content of the page they are serving the ad on.
To be fair to Google, they have to know the context of both the webpage and the AdWords ad. If an advertiser is to select a single generic keyword like say "iridium," how is Google supposed to put that into context. The more keywords an advertiser picks, the better chance Google has of putting the ad on the right pages. In my example all the advertiser would have had to add was the keyword "phone" and their ads would not show up on my pages.
Like ken_b, my site has a problem attracting good AdSense ads. I'm sure that if my subject and audience was different, I'd be making a killing with AdSense given my traffic levels.
I maybe can offer some strategy that I used and that works out perfectly and I get very targeted and very good ads in AdSense banners:
- I decided on several types of articles related more or less to the main topic of my website
- then I am trying to add a bit more keywords when writing articles and watch what shows up in AdSense
- then, after some practice, I am able to "suggest" to AdSense what kind of ads should appear and in 90% of cases AdSense is really showing such ads!
So it is a matter of targeted writing and after some time of practice you can be sure of getting properly targeted AdSense. Of course one could say that AdSense influences my writing, but I see nothing wrong in that - in several cases AdSense actually helped me to improve that writing!
So people, don't complain about Google, just try to write articles a bit differently!