Bad Adsense targeting is back

or is it just me?

[ownerrim]

Once again, I am getting off target ads and once again I have none of my adsense-alloted magic bullets (200 to the box, one box only, url-filter brand)

Anyone else seeing this?

[ken_b]

Bad Adsense targeting is back

and getting worse!

[adamxcl]

I'm a victim of very bad targeting. However, I find that on many of the bad targeting pages....I go to it and it has bad ads displayed... I hit refresh and the ads are better, or the way they should be. Somehow it is just reading the page and doing a better job of targeting? I've gone through this on many different sections and pages and it seems to hold. Anyone else see this? Now I just have to get every customer to reload the page after it's been loaded once so they can click on an ad and leave my site so I can get some coinage. woo hoo!

[Need3lives]

Yes, I have seen this also - I had assumed it was likely because I visit my pages regularly, and previous, bad, ads have been cached. I do hope the average visitor, first time to the site, does not need to refresh to get a correctly targeted ad to show. That would be most unfortunate indeed.

[ganderla]

I am finally back to good ads, I wrote message 16 and it took this long to get the good stuff back.

[expert_21]

still bad targeting in my case :(

[Jon_King]

adamxcl,

The same here. It seems to have something to do with the referrer ip?

[union_jack]

Went back to 3.4% yesterday. After days of poor ads.
today 0.4%! GRRRRRRRRRR!

[paybacksa]

could this be causing what is observed here? In other words, can your mis-taregting observations be explained by AdSense being more heavily influenced by the theme of your domain's primary pages?

[webmasterworld.com...]

[Undead Hunter]

Do you think it has something to do with inventory management?

Nevermind how many people actually SEARCH for a given term in a month. Let's say that only a limited amount of advertisers buy that term, and that they can only afford a low amount of click-throughs per day. That might result in, say, only 1000 click-throughs per day between them all.

It might only take 200,000 impressions before all 1,000 click-throughs were "used up", but Google might have 800,000 impressions to offer between themselves and all their publishers.

If that was the case,Google would "run out" of click-throughs every day.

So instead of running PSA's in the extra 500,000 impressions ad space, they decide to do a number of things:

a) substitute other, high-paying ads, which is better for them and for us versus running PSA's

b) split the impressions out throughout a 24 hour period, so all the click-throughs don't "run out" at 2am

c) and/or rotate the impressions around a series of different sites throughout the month, so everyone has an equal chance of getting a portion of the 1,000 per day click-through revenue?

d) some or all of the above, testing out which is best for everyone

If this is the case, it adds a new wrinkle to our work as publishers: trying to find search terms that don't have too much available inventory.

I don't know. I'm new to all this. Is this too obvious?

[Need3lives]

This could be possible, for certain niches I imagine, but goes directly against the standard tenet that PPC demand vastly outstrips supply. Although surely Adsense is helping Google quickly grow supply, I can't imagine that it has yet reached the levels of demand, except for certain small, targeted areas. I know as an Adwords buyer, for basically all of my keywords, I would easily buy 3-4x more if Google could supply them and they were of the same quality.

[ken_b]

b) split the impressions out throughout a 24 hour period, so all the click-throughs don't "run out" at 2am

I think this has been a standard feature for Adwords/Adsense since the beginning.

But advertizers can also run or pause their ads pretty much at will as I understand it. So ads that are available at prime time may not be available in the middle of the night for instance.

[varya]

If site theming were being used, then I wouldn't have the terrible ads I'm seeing on a couple of pages.

I have a book review site. Site themed ads would be fine.

The reviews of the Iliad and Odyssey by Homer, are both showing five ads for Homer Hotels.

[martinibuster]

For me, the bad targetting stopped late last week.

[BriGuy20]

Bad targeting started for one of my sites recently. CTR is now almost nil. :(