Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Anyone else sending their visitors on inadvertent world tours?
12 pages visited (including 6 regionals) = 11 targeted ads
visited the one page with no targeted ads and it showed targeted ads the second time around.
I have a non-US IP and all the ads were correctly targeted (though they were obviously British English creatives - "car hire" and "centre", etc).
Not much sense advertising to people who are already there :)
Not all the time, and not on every page... but enough to be of concern. Probably about 20-30% of pages are off-topic at any given time and a bad page today may be good page tomorrow. Very frustrating... and damn near impossible to pinpoint the correct action to be taken.
It seems as if "activity" words generate the ads without an association to the "country". Words like "hiking" and "bushwalking" and "white water rafting" seem to be triggering adventure tour ads for Canada, Sth America, Malaysia, Peru... yet the page content has absolutely no connection with those places in any way shape or form.
Words like "hiking" and "bushwalking" and "white water rafting" seem to be triggering adventure tour ads for Canada, Sth America, Malaysia, Peru
I've seen that happen, too. Somebody here once speculated that Google may be displaying the highest-bid ads in grey-area cases--for example, a page on "biking in Elbonia" might get ads for "biking in Peru" instead of, say, "Elbonia tours" if "biking in Peru" has higher bids. I'm a little skeptical, though, because some of the ads that get displayed don't strike me as being for keywords that would attract higher bids.
Yes, it's the site in my profile.
No, we're run from and hosted in the UK.
Having seen that new Adsense ad video in the recent thread, their experience of "providing really tightly targeted ads" doesn't seem to fit with this experience. It certainly varies - some cities I cover give ads for hotels in those cities, but other pages seem to miss the mark by a few thousand miles. One of the ideas behind providing Adsense on this site was to avoid labour-intensive commercial content on the site itself if we could provide similar options through Adsense links - so hotels in the city are bang on target.
-gs
Pretty good, on the whole. I see occasional bits of goofiness, such as ads for St. Martin Hotels on a page about Germany that mentions Martin Luther. But such glaring mistakes are more of an annoyance than a major problem.
I do very well with AdSense. It's a great source of revenue for editorially diverse sites like mine, where a lot of pages would fall through the revenue cracks if I relied only on affiliate sales.
Your property page is also having an identity crisis. Adsense appears to have the right country but wrong industry - this is similar to the problems I'm having on my travel site.
Some pages have page-specific ads - Paris hotels, for example - some have user-locale-specific ads - Blue Mountains (near Sydney) tourist attractions - some have generic travel ads - Travel Expo, cheap flights, etc. - and some are clearly mistargeted - Costa Rica ads on an Iceland page (presumably "volcanoes" miscueing). And often there's a mix of these four.
I think advertiser foibles are probably responsible for most of the variation: whether they use geo-location or not, how targeted their keywords are, etc.
