Odd sensing behavior

What's going on here?

[Phil_C]

One of my sites is dedicated to cars, Porsches in fact. So the general theme on most pages is "Porsche" or "Car". But I also have pages on car insurance and car loans. Adsense picked up the loan page perfectly at the beginning of the week, show loan/finance type ads which gave my earnings a big boost, but for some reason (and I haven't changed anything) it's now showing car/Porsche related ads like the other pages!? Incidently, the insurance page never picked up insurance related adverts.

Can anyone offer advice as how to get adsense back on track and showing loan/insurance related ads on my pages? The page titles are "Loans at sitename" and "Insurance at sitename".

Cheers

[Imaster]

Phil,

Since Google analyzed the pages perfectly previously and provided very targeted ads, I presume that it has information about your page and knows what it is about.

If you haven't changed anything with respect to title, filename, content, etc of the page, then there is little you could do to ask it to revert to the old targeting.

I believe the reason could be the end of the previous month and start of this new month when some advertisers may have pulled off and thus its filling in with the second best available matches. Give it a little time and check up the results and if that doesn't work still, then the best approach would be to contact Google.

Good luck and let me know what happens.

[killroy]

Incidentally, I've also noted manyof my pages going off proper page targeting, and onto a "global site theme" of sorts. My problem is that my site conaitns 2000 pages of very distinct topics, and the "global site theme" doesn'T really fit well with any of them.

Also, a new page, about a very specific topic, started out with spot on ads, and now that I've moved it to apermanent domain, It's on PSAs ever since. It's not indexed in google, but I thought that didn't matter.

Are there any bad words I should check for? (incidentally some pages were added that include te word death and suicide (it's a medical site)), also I'm wonderign if there are meta tags I could ad to show that the site is clean and child safe and all that.

SN

[Imaster]

One point that baffles about targetting is that the page must be crawled either by googlebot or perhaps mediapartners bot, to show targeted ads.

But in many instances I have noticed PSAs on many pages that were showed targeted ads earliers, but PSAs at another time.

And if the crawling by google is really important, then I wonder why a local file on my computer, called as widget.html displays targeted ads on widgets on the local computers and not on any website.

Its possible that targetting technology also involves reading the filename and displaying ads.

[Jenstar]

Another thing to consider is your headers, footers and navigational bar. If there is enough Porsche related content in those areas, it could override your loan information to provide the Porsche ads. The AdSense bot cannot differentiate between those areas and the "content" area of a page, so it will base the ads upon the overall page. Chances are extremely good that if you removed everything from the page but the loan content, you would show loan ads.

Many people have noticed this on their pages. It is still correct targeting by AdSense, though, just not the content targeting you would prefer because it judges the page in its entirety, and not on a specific part.

[yoyo8]

"One point that baffles about targetting is that the page must be crawled either by googlebot or perhaps mediapartners bot, to show targeted ads."

That is not true. I have had targeted ads on brand new pages. Maybe due to the fact that I have keyword friendly urls, or it's basing it on previous topics, I don't know which.

[Skier]

Looks to me as though Google "understands" content only on a total site basis, not by page.

I have placed adsense only on internal content pages, not on my main subject pages. These internal pages have specific topics, different from the main pages, and are all found by Google searches for those topics. Yet adsense ads always, 100%, relate to the site/mainpage subject. Never the subjects of the pages on which the ads were placed.

I had hoped that the ads would be offering visitors more information about the subject they searched. Not!

Too bad, it would have added value, and justified the increase in page clutter. I'm still not convinced about this.

[killroy]

AdSense uses the path info (the referer is the only thing it has to go by) whenever the page isn't spidered yet. Which sometimes even has the effect of targeting well before spidering and giving PSAs afterwards, because other page elements over power the page content (or the content is not understandable by adsense, for example link lists)

Also see this thread: [webmasterworld.com...]

SN

[bether2]

Looks to me as though Google "understands" content only on a total site basis, not by page.

Not seeing this on my site. Ads are, for the most part, targeted to the content on each specific page.

Beth

[europeforvisitors]

Looks to me as though Google "understands" content only on a total site basis, not by page. I have placed adsense only on internal content pages, not on my main subject pages. These internal pages have specific topics, different from the main pages, and are all found by Google searches for those topics. Yet adsense ads always, 100%, relate to the site/mainpage subject. Never the subjects of the pages on which the ads were placed.

It's possible that there's a shortage of AdWords buyers for those topics who have chosen to allow content ads.

I just did a spot check of my site, and I'm seeing the usual targeted ads:

- Ads for various Portugal hotels on a page about ruins in Portugal

- Ads for barge cruises on a page about barge cruises and canal boats

- Ads for car rentals (three of them specifically mentioning European car rentals) on a page about car travel in Europe

There are a few exceptions, of course, but they're mostly because Google misinterpreted the topic of the page, not because it's displaying generic "site theme" ads:

- On a page about Berlin sightseeing and excursions, I'm seeing ads for San Francisco day tours and London tours in addition to an ad for a company that sells tours in various European cities.

- On a page about luxury travel, three of the ads are on-topic, but the fourth is for luxury hotels in Bali (which is a long way from Europe, the region that I cover).

If I had to choose between ads for San Francisco day tours or Bali hotels and generic "site theme" ads about European travel, I'd choose the latter. With luck, AdSense will either improve its topic-matching algorithm or allow publishers more control over default advertising themes and specific keywords. But in the meantime, AdSense is working pretty well for my site on the whole if not in every specific case. (Mind you, I'm in a category that attracts a lot of advertisers, and that could be why I haven't yet encountered a plethora of generic "site theme" ads or public service ads on my pages.)

[Phil_C]

Interesting stuff here.

How about placing the ads and content within an IFRAME, that way, the rest of the "irelevant" content won't take adsense in the wrong direction?

I suppose the page then becomes search engine unfriendly!