Getting ads for all cities all over the U.S.

For location dependent services

[Jane_Doe]

I was looking at the ads on one of my sites today. To use an example let's say I live in Syracuse and have a site on plumbers. I'm getting ads for plumbers all over the U.S., from Maine to Arizona, inluding cities I've never heard of. Obviously if someone lives in Syracuse they aren't going to call a plumber in North Carolina.

So is this a problem with the Adsense targeting, adwords users targeting too broad a match for their ads, or something else? I not sure what to do to adddress this. In the past it seemed like I would only get local ads to where I live on the site. My click through rate is lower than normal today and I suspect all of these misplaced local ads are may be a factor.

[edited by: Jane_Doe at 2:47 pm (utc) on Sep. 1, 2006]

[Car_Guy]

As you know, advertisers come and go; and local advertisers can be outbid by distant advertisers, whose ads would then appear instead.

[gamiziuk]

Sometimes, while vising Syracuse, you have "influence" the Syracuse text a bit to get the correct Syracuse ads for Syracuse visitors.

Then the Google Syracuse robot will serve Syracuse ads on your Syracuse page.