Changes in context matching?

My ads are nearly all becoming PSAs

[billegal]

Noticed really low impression and CTR this morning. Poked around my site and saw nearly all PSAs. I still see the same ads on Google search results.

Pages were matching fine in the last few days. What is going on? Has the matching formula gone to hell? Some pages have only a paragraph or two, is there a minimum content requirement now?

Do we get a tax deduction (at least in the U.S.) for PSA advertising donations?

[jackti]

whatever they have done, i wish they will keep doing it.. my ctr is through the roof and i'm a happy man. quite strange that we are experiencing such opposite behaviour.
i suspect something has changed in the formula, i noticed it this morning.

[europeforvisitors]

No problems here. In fact, I had a record day yesterday, and today is looking good. Maybe advertisers for your pages' keyphrases have reached their daily budget limits. That could happen if you're in a very competitive category, I suppose.

I'm not a CPA, but I don't see how you could claim a tax deduction for PSAs, since:

1) PSAs are served only when Google can't serve paid ads (meaning that the impressions have no commercial value).

2) Even when paying ads are served, payment is by the click, so there's no set CPM (cost per thousand) value to AdSense ads.

[billegal]

I don't think it's budget limits. These advertisers are still spending plenty of money on the Google search results pages. It's just that they stopped matching on SOME of the pages where they used to. Some of these pages are shorter but still had important and matchable content.

[europeforvisitors]

I don't think it's budget limits. These advertisers are still spending plenty of money on the Google search results pages. It's just that they stopped matching on SOME of the pages where they used to.

Advertisers can opt out of "content ads" (such as AdSense ads) while continuing to use AdWords on SERPs. Maybe that's what happened. Some advertisers are leery of non-search ads, especially now that Google is using "content ads" in questionable venues such as its DomainPark program:

[google.com...]

[loanuniverse]

On top of advertisers opting out, you got to factor changes in the targeting used by adsense to determine which ads are shown on your pages.

[justageek]

It really is odd. I've thought of just about everything from advertisers pulling out to maybe just a corrupt index somewhere shifting ads out of whack. Nothing really makes sense.

Ads being shown for a state when the content is about a country doesn't fit into any possible scenario discussed here. The system knows enough to know the page is travel related but can't get it right. Even when I search on the main Google site I cannot get the same ads or even close to the same ads as I'm seeing. This tells me it's not an issue of the advertiser wanting to show up anywhere. If there are no matches then why show an off target match? Surely it's not good for business.

The only possible thing I can think of is that if the ad is off target a click will likely not occur so maybe it's a business decision to show close ads when an exact one cannot be found, with the hopes no one clicks, which would be better than showing PSA's and showing a chink in the armor. I just don't know.

JAG