Forum Moderators: martinibuster
One of them is about college students. It is a forum for dozens of colleges for a specific topic. It is three years old now.
I have had Adsense since last June on this site.
I put a few direct links on the home page and forum pages to the advertisers with "advertisement" before the links. The anchor texts are commercial keywords and they describe what the advertisers are about. Those keywords have nothing to do with the forum site, except it has a few separate links pages to the advertisers.
Since the last week's algo change, most of the adsense ads show that "commercial keywords targeted" only, even though the forum is not about the keywords.
The advertisement links are for our advertisers and not for our forum. So, I am not happy about the "mistargeted" ads on my forum, since few college students have interest in those commercial keywords. Only a few visitors click the advertisement a day but most of them will want to see other advertisements about the forum's topic.
So, my theory is that Adsense is heavily weighing on the anchor texts on a specific page to find out what it should target regardless of the theme or title or topic itself of the page.
It used to show well targeted ads for college students. Not any more.
So, if you put a direct link with A-Topic keywords in the anchor text for a B-Topic page, you will see A-Topic targeted adsense instead of B-Topic targeted.
It's not the context, only, that is being measured, it's context AND $ which determines who shows up on your pages.
Alas, you might be getting few clicks. But that's fine--for G.
Remember, the marketers only buy so many clicks. Google is putting the ads where they think they are most likely to be clicked so they'll make money. It's a time/money formula. In the past G was displaying too many ads for too few clicks.
From the channel, I found that CTR is way down and EPC remains same, which means they don't click those mistargeted high price ads. Since used-to-be-there ads have only less than a nickel per click for the college students audience, I need as many number of clicks as possible.
Those high price ads are only 3-4 times higher than the old ads. But if nobody clicks them, there is no benefit of having them.
I may have to move the top palcement of this adsnese until it shows the correct ads...
For example, I run a site which is about California Real Estate Brokers and Listings, but all 4 ads are about different subjects, or rea estate in OTHER states, including both a Texas and Florida Realtor, even though the words Florida and Texas do not appear anywhere in the website.
It's a huge disservice to both ourselves (adsense publisher) and in this case the adwords advertisers in TX and FL, with stupid non-relevant impressions.
I am guessing (with no evidence) the problem may be G allowing too broad keyword (non-targeted) matching to be used in adwords but that should be easy to resolve by notfying the advertiser about the issue and suggesting they not do so, or even not allowing the ads at all!
Why in the word does G get that so wrong, so often, and on so many sites. It would be great if G simply disclosed the algorithm they use to target the ads so we could see what the problem is, and help both of us in the process, including G who seems to be blind to this serious issue.
