AdSense Targeting Has Problems w/ Regional?

[Need3lives]

I am just starting to get into creating pages that are defined by regions. I have created a few pages targeted to things such as 'California widgets' and 'New York widgets'. Those are the only geographical regions listed on the page (i.e. California only references California - no mentions of other cities or states).

Yet, the Adsense ads that showed up, do not seem to be targeted to the region. Out of 4 ads, I have one ad for California, and others for Maryland, Wisconsin and New Jersey.

Yet, when I go to Google itself, and search for California widgets, I get over a dozen advertisers all specifically targeting California. This is true across the other regional pages as well. Any ideas?

It seems to me that AdSense should be able to better identify that the page is about a certain region, and only display ads targeting that region.

[totter]

Someone correct me if i'm wrong, but I think adsense targets the ip address of the computer. Would an aol account help here?

[Marcia]

I recently saw one targeted to my area - for a generic widget site - and found out it is by IP number.

Yet, I've got 2 pages up that are without doubt targeting a local area in the Western U.S. - I just looked, same local IP as always, and it's running AdSense for two east coast states, a European country and an Asian country.

I think they haven't got it right yet with geographic targeting.

[level80]

What's interesting (for me anyway - perhaps not to you) about IP targeting is the following:-

a) some ISPs have a very small geographic footprint (eg very small area) - and therefore it could be very highly targeted

b) there will be false positives as some people go through a proxy server (security reasons, others etc) - the IP address given will be the proxy and not the one you're using.

There is also the fact that many systems won't allow automatic whoises as it puts too much drain on their resources. Course there are always people who forge their IP address too.....

[edited by: level80 at 9:52 am (utc) on May 22, 2004]

[Mario]

Targetting has been way off on my home page of late. I removed the offending urls with the site filter and everything is back to normal.

[Need3lives]

So, if I understand what you are saying, Google is targeting the ads to the geographic region of the user itself? That doesnt explain why I have seen ads from all over the country on that page. I would also think if a page is written about California widgets, that the ads should be about California widgets, not New Jersey widgets because the visitor happens to be in NJ and wants to read about California widgets.

[Res_Ipsa]

Our observations are based on using AdSense for only 2 months. It looks like served ads are based on keywords that appear in text on the page and possibly the Title. If the page has the keyword "widgets" the Google Ads include the keyword "widgets" -- with or without a geographic term, and regardless of any geographic term that appears on the page.

For example, on the page text "widgets," the Google Ad "Find Widgets in Massachusetts;" or, on the page text, "widgets" and "New Jersey" the Google Ad "Widgets Sale" or "California Widget Maker".

To our knowledge, Google can only serve advertisers' geo-targeted ads based on geo-located IP addresses. Google does not know the IP addresses of our site visitors. The Google site and perhaps the sites of Google partners with geo-location technology display geo-targeted AdWords based upon IP addresses.

If you see geographic terms in the title or text of and ad displayed on Google, but the ad never appears on your site, it may be that the advertiser has opted out of "content" distribution.

There may be ads displayed on AdSense publishers' web sites that are not displayed on Google search results pages -- the advertiser has opted out of "search" distribution.

[Res_Ipsa]

Correction: the AdWords advertiser can limit "search" distribution to Google only (I believe).

[HughMungus]

It still kind of blows me away that more search engines don't simply have an input box into which you can put your zip code (so, for example, you get both geospecific ads and geospecific web pagees, where applicable).