Targetting down the tubes today.

ctr=0

[Powdork]

I noticed my CTR was 0 for the day this morning so I went and checked the ads running on my pages. My site is about a popular western USA vacation destination and has almost always shown vacation related ads on the home page. Today all six ads are for real estate. Real Estate is never mentioned, although lodging and accommodations are. My "stuff for kids to do" pages are filled with ads about London. My disc-golf pages (which Adsense has surprisingly always had inventory for) now show ads about golf. All other pages are showing similarly untargetted ads. Are Adsense running another attempt at more broad matching or is London the only town that hasn't run through their monthly budget?

[ken_b]

Might be a little looser than sometimes. I saw all power cord ads on one of my Cord automobile pages. Well, car lovers use power cords too I guess. :)

You know what really surprizes me? A couple weeks ago I finally put adsense on one of my more popular pages. I had not put it there before because I just didn't think there would be enough inventory, if any, for the page. But not only is there more than enough inventory, it's turned out to be one of my most profitable pages. I'm ok with that.

[Sally Stitts]

Of all the Adsense revenue factors, it seems that targeting is the biggest determinant.
When I had great ads, I made good money. Now I am getting the lesser ads, and a fraction of the money.
What determines who gets the GOOD ads? Conversion rate? Impressions?

[Powdork]

OTOH, now that the day has moved on and I have gotten a few clicks, while my ctr is still way below normal, the effective epm is pretty much standard.
All in all though, with the untargeted ads, I don't feel as though Adsense is adding value for my users, like it does when the ads are targeted.

[ownerrim]

definitely bad targeting today. I'm getting ads that are totally unrelated. Of course, this has happened many many times. Usually after a day or so, it's back to normal. Except...that one time months ago when it was like this for an entire week and a half.

[Bluepixel]

The bad targetting depends on the site.
I guess they wouldn't try it if it doesn't help other sites.

[ncw164x]

It happens at the end of the month especially when it falls on a weekend, advertisers have either used up their advertising budget or have stopped the ads from running over the weekend, that only leaves psa's or ads which are not really relevant to your site but it's all thats left in the pot.

Also don't forget it is the holiday season, millions of people are sun bathing by the sea and having a good time instead of spending money on advertising

ncw164x

[ownerrim]

in my case, the bad targeting is drawing ads from industries that are only peripherally related to my site. The other advertisers are still running their campaigns. It is simply that adsense cannot adequately discern that the new ads are NOT what my users are interested in whatsoever EVEN THOUGH THEY SHARE THE SAME KEYWORDS.

My only solution has been the url filter each time this has happened

[trader]

Good targeting toward the site content is for some odd reason a constant battle. I have many sites which had relevant ads for months and then all of a sudden without reason and no changes to the site the ads are non-sensical (or worse yet PSA's).

It has happened so often it is almost a non-event now when I see it. For example, one of my higher traffic sites always had very well targeted adsense.

However, on July 30 the relevant ads are gone replaced by domain name registration ads. I doubt if anyone would ever click on a domain ad as the site visitors have absolutely nothing to do with domain names.

Domains are not mentioned anywhere on the website and a search for the word domain on the webpages comes back empty.

Anyone have any idea or even a guess on why that seems to happen so often and without reason? It is extremely annoying seeng this happen so often and for no reason!

[mquarles]

Good targeting toward the site content is for some odd reason a constant battle. I have many sites which had relevant ads for months and then all of a sudden without reason and no changes to the site the ads are non-sensical (or worse yet PSA's).

I wonder if everyone would be better off if we, as publishers, could say what the page is about ourselves. Maybe we could have a special meta tag like <meta adsense="red widgets"> or some such.

Many, many AdSense publishers (most?) already use keywords to target subjects. We could just write our good content and ignore targeting if we could ensure the right ads are showing.

This could easily be policed based upon CTR and conversion data, which would then trigger a hand-review. Add a provision to the TOS that says the keywords the user supplies must accurately reflect the content, and it might be a winner.

MQ

[ownerrim]

29 days out of 30, relevancy is fine. But then there's usually that one day where it all falls down. My guess has been that they're tweaking and sometimes they tweak wrong. I've said it many many times: they need to increase the url filter limit. I never used the url filter till 2 months ago when things went haywire for 2 weeks straight. But in that time I filled the filter space to the limit. I think 250 would be better.

[MrAnchovy]

All the more reason for Google to let Avg Joe the ability to use "google_hints" or something else to assist in displaying relevant ads. I know there is the possibility of abuse there, but I emphasize the word "assist".
Weight site content 80% & google_hints 20% or something thereabouts. In cases where confusion may arrise, google_hints could be very helpful is displaying relevant ads to visitors.

I'm pleased with earnings here, but the targetting on one of my sites is horrible. I've seen relevant ads sporadically, and earnings were actually less, so I'm not too concerned, since it works to my favor.
But wow, for this one site, most ads are rediculously off topic.. I can't even imagine how these ads could even remotely be linked to the site's content.

One of my biggest fights is over ads servered based on domain name. It's a brandable name, of which has nothing to do with site content, but are rather generic terms (ie AdjectiveNoun, GreenDog, etc). Not one place on the entire site are "adj" & "noun" seperated, and "AdjNoun" only appears once in text on the entire site, yet Google continues to pick up on the adjective (in the example's case, "green") to serve ads.