AdSense Regional Ad Serving

(PSA's from out of town, relevant ads when in town?)

[paybacksa]

Today I helped analyze an Adsense phenom I had not seen before.

A website that is clearly regional for New York (a NYC retail business) was serving relevant ads before "black Thursday", when viewed from New York or from Los Angeles (where the web designer resides).

Now viewers from LA see PSAs, while viewers inside NY see relevant ads. I've confirmed that viewers in other regions far from NY also get PSAs.

AdSense seems to have decided that this is a local website, and not worthy of National ads (even though most of the relevant ads were of National interest).

Result: impressions stay high, EPC dropped way down (80% off from pre-Thursday levels). The owners are close to dropping the AdSense program altogether if this is a permanent thing.

[HINT to Google: Just as many, many people buy certain magazines specifically for the ads, relevant AdSense ads can actually add content value to a site. PSA's not only DONT add value to commercial sites, but often detract -- I don't wants AIDS RELIEF ads on my luxury indulgence promotional pages.]

[Jenstar]

One possibility is that those NY advertisers are only advertising to the New York region - meaning anyone outside the geo-targeted New York area that the advertisers specify would not see those same New York targeted ads. This is something done on the advertiser level, not by AdSense determining a site is regional and not national.

There could have been enough advertisers who were running their advertisers nationally that it wasn't noticed.

Also, all Adwords advertisers got an email about the new pricing - it could be a budget issue of many who decided to drop down their daily spends in anticipation of the "less expensive clicks", and so advertisers are expending their daily budgets too quickly.

[Sharper]

I would suggest that you implement alternative ads, even if you're just going to put a set of links to your other pages/websites.

That way you won't get PSAs that don't match your content.

[icedowl]

Question.

Could this mean that if you simply mention your own location on your site that your visitors might see PSA's if they're not in your area?

[paybacksa]

Thanks for the comments. This is a new playing field for sure.

Jenstar said <edited>: "... This is something done on the advertiser level, not by AdSense determining a site is regional and not national."

Do you mean to say that AdSense does not make that regional/national determination? Can you confirm that if it does make that determination, it was a new ability added as part of this change?

Jenstar said <edited>: "There could have been enough advertisers who were running their advertisers nationally that it wasn't noticed...many who decided to drop down their daily spends in anticipation of the 'less expensive clicks', and so advertisers are expending their daily budgets too quickly."

Is this a fact or a conjecture? Please clarify if this is known to be true or just an idea. I have seen a dearth of ad variety in the past few days and it is only the 6th of the month. Thanks.

The "alternate ads" idea is a good one, but I can't say how good an idea it is when for the same value proposition they can switch away from AdSense completely. No sense in having a 4 ad leaderboard serving up one or maybe two value ads. AdSense doesn't want two ad sets on a page (from AdSense or a competitor), yet isn't even filling one with good content?

[Jenstar]

Here is probably more than you ever wanted to know about how Adwords does their regional ad targeting:

[adwords.google.com...]

With regional pages, the mediabot is likely picking up the heavy "New York City" or "South Dakota" or whatever city/state name is on the page. It is simply determining the most important keywords, which happen to be a specific city/state on most regionally targeted directories. AdSense is not stamping a site as being national vs. regional - but your keywords are definitely influencing what ads appear when it is heavy with those regional keywords.

Say it decided your page was about "New York City Flower Shops" - there could be 4 NYC flower shops advertising with Adwords, but are only showing their ads to those in the NYC area. That would result in anyone with an IP from the NYC county area seeing those flower shop ads, but cause anyone outside of NYC to see PSAs, (or perhaps ads for a large internet flower company).

There does appear to be a suprisingly large number of adwords advertisers running ads on a regional/state level instead of national. Try surfing with different geo-targeted IPs, and you can see this yourself.

Check out the Adwords forum, there is plenty of discussion on the spend issue from an advertiser point of view, since this change came about.

[paybacksa]

Yes, I had read the faq, thanks.

If so many adwords customers are choosing regional targeting, I wonder if they are aware of how many users don't get served their ads because they are indeterminate geo location (I don't know if G has solved the OAL user geo-location problem, for example).

It seems that if you were NOT serving their ads to alot more people (due to regional targeting), then their budgets should last longer -- in terms of impressions at least.