PSA Alternatives

Still just a waiting game?

[simons]

Our AdSense revenues are now very high but we have a lot of Public Service Ads on new sites (we're constantly launching new sites & subdomains) and
a) We have no time to write targeted copy as an alternative;
b) Reviews of textads.biz aren't too favorable;
c) Kanoodle's contextual offering is apparently limited to financial advertisers & our own experience as advertisers suggests Kanoodle volumes are low.

So the questions are: 1) when will Overture launch AdSonar and 2) has anyone meantime found a decent alternative contextual advertising resource? Surely someone somewhere is missing a massive opportunity (even if short-lived).

[ByronM]

Adsense is very reflective of your content and advertisers willing to pay for keywords on it.

Have you tried optimizing your content, getting inbound links for your content and setting up site maps that point to your pages and describe the functionality of the page? <a href="yourpage.htm">My blue widgets</a> and such?

If you see lots of PSA's, pull the keywords from your pages, do a search on google and see if you see any ads or if its just generic ads for ebay and whatnot.

[simons]

Byron - thanks for this. We have strong inbound & outbound links & the pages are in a format / with tag/ H1 / kwd density etc. pretty much proven from an SEO (and AdSense!) perective on tens of our other existing sites. I suspect that our main challenge is that this particular site is United Kingdom focused and Google has far fewer UK advertisers to choose from.

We are also getting some strange results. As an example, we have an indexed page selling a cosmetics case that has AdSense ads for Auto Dealers just because the Cosmetics case happens to be made of an ABS composite (we assume triggering the keyword 'ABS' and linking to automotive ads!). Yet there are plenty of 'cosmetics' Ads when you look in Google (and indeed on our 'cosmetics' category pages).

Despite the above, our pages already in the main Google index seem to have mostly relevant ads. The pages yet to be indexed are however creating a further relevancy problem, many seeming to just default to cellular phone or financial ads (with no apparent relevancy to page content).

You can probably see why for our UK sites we are so keen to find alternative advertisers! Any ideas very welcome!

[edited by: simons at 5:11 pm (utc) on Jan. 20, 2004]

[ByronM]

All i can say is content is king. If you have a page with crazy ads, email adsense.

You can also edit the page, shuffle some content and try optimizing keywords and see if that helps.

I had to do this on some pages of mine as well, and it atleast gets googlebot back to review them.

[simons]

We've been further tuning the pages today to see whether we can improve the situation. If AdSense really indexes instantly (we're very unsure about this) then the answer so far is no improvement!

[hyperkik]

simons, AdSense will spider a new page quite promptly. However, it may take two to six weeks for that page to again be spidered after changes are made. During that waiting period, the ads may not be attuned to the altered content.

[cib258]

Simon, AdSonar is a service of Quigo, not Overture--I don't think they are related, other than Overture uses Quigo's filtering technology.

I've registered with Quigo, but haven't heard a thing.

I tried to put up some ads via Kanoodle's contextual system, but all they offer is financial right now.

Tribal Fusion might have something you're looking for, although I haven't tried them.

[cib258]

No, hyber, I don't think that is right. On dynamic pages, Google is reading the news and changing its ads ASAP. See the Washington Post or the NY Times.

There are some things I don't understand about Google AdSense--on Associated Press articles, for example, you can see pretty good ads from Google on NY Times, but on, say, the Bowling Green Times on the the very same news article Google will drop in PSAs.

I have been told that was from Google being served up by an ad network, but where I checked this doesn't seem to be the case. The difference I do notice is that the ads are in a rotation of some kind on these small site and not at the NY Times or the Post, so that could be it.

[LorenzoFisher]

I just joined this forum a week or so ago and this is my first post. I used to use AdSense but it isn't working for me and I've been looking at alternatives and am wondering if anyone knows anything about D-CAB's? Has anyone tried them? They seem like the best option compared to the others mentioned here but I just don't know. Do they work as an alternate ad?

[simons]

Hyper's comments about refresh times tie in with our understanding - a first pass index and then slower refresh rate. As ever with Google's algorithms, I guess several hundred blackbox weighting factors drive refresh - put exactly the same page on a PR8+ or high brand value site and a PR3 / unbranded site and I wouldn't be surprised to see different results.

CIB - big thanks for the post re: Quigo & Tribal Fusion we'll look into those.

[justageek]

I used to use AdSense but it isn't working for me and I've been looking at alternatives and am wondering if anyone knows anything about D-CAB's? Has anyone tried them? They seem like the best option compared to the others mentioned here but I just don't know. Do they work as an alternate ad?

Welcome aboard.

D-CAB is the name of a product (Dynamic Contextual Advertising Block), not a company, and it's only just been released so I doubt anyone has enough information to answer your questions. It's more of a contextually relevant catalog built on the fly rather than just text ads. You'll just have to try it yourself and see if you like it and if it works for you.

JAG