Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Summary my experience:
Since about June 1st, the targeting of ads to my pages has gone downhill. Ads targeted at one page were obviously showing on others instead. This morning, I noticed ads for the wrong site(!) showing up.
My click-thru rate has gone down right along with the targeting. When I first started, I was actually showing off to people how on target the ads were. Well, not any more. Each of my pages should more or less have a unique set of ads, so it is obvious when ads start hitting the wrong pages. Many times I can even tell which specific page the wrong ads are from.
I can explain away at least one instance of the wrong site ads to a bug I suspect is in the MediaBot regarding virtual hosting, but the rest of the wrong ads on the wrong pages have me totally stumped.
I have emailed Google this afternoon. No response yet, although it is too soon to expect one.
I have a tens of thousands of pages...is Google getting overwhelmed?
I am averaging about 30% of AdSense revenue this month compared to June.
Are other experiencing anything like this? How about "tricks" to improve targeting Google approves of?
-Pete
Keep in mind that if you have a website about Shakespeare, your website visitors won't necessarily be Shakespeare fans, but actually students looking for ideas for their essay. They probably won't buy another 16th century play in their life, but they'll probably be interested cheap sources of textbooks, or even student credit cards.
So, if the ads are getting less targeted, I'd see that as a sign of Google getting a better sense of how what earns revenue.
Reply was simply that they're aware of this issue and are working to address it. - Nothing earth-shattering in the reply, but nice to know the big brains at the big G are adapting some solutions to what has become an uncomfortable and (eee .. frightening) situation.
Also noticed that after a really crappy few days of lowered clicks/revenue .. today's adsense stats seem back on track .. crossing fingers and putting faith in the Google engineers and bean counters.
No quoting is allowed here, but they thanked me for bringing this issue to their attention, are currently working to resolve it, and will get back to me when they know more.
Maybe they didn't know they had a problem, it looks like I gave them some examples which will help them resolve it.
Let's hope my/our targeting improves. :-)
-Pete
My experience has been that sometimes adsense will display ads on target with a particular page other times it will display ads that are on target with the home page. No trends that I can figure out.
Having said that, CTR has not really suffered that much and the average for the last week is similar to that of the first week.
My experience has been that sometimes adsense will display ads on target with a particular page other times it will display ads that are on target with the home page. No trends that I can figure out.
That's whats happening to me, all my adsense seems to be based off a single phrase on my homepage.
B@H, my site isn't even about the topic the adsense has chosen. And each page on my site should have fairly different ads, but alas, they are so off topic atm, it's awful.
Too soon to know if this is a fix, or a statistical fluke, but double the click-thru rate seems significant. I have reached yesterday's revenue already today, with 4.5 hours left in the google day. That at least makes me feel much better.
I hope this is a fix and has helped others as well. I'll update this thread when I have a larger sample of data.
-Pete
