Wrongly targeted ad having nothing to do with the website

[trader]

I have become quite suspect these poorly targeted ads may be due to the Google Toolbar. Checking their TOS reveals they gather IP Addresses and the website url's you visit and pass that info on to other services they offer, i.e. very likely adsense!

This would account for the fact some of my sites have ads targeted toward a totally different business category, which also happpens to be an industry I am involved in heavily and frequently visit other sites in that industry. However the site with the non-relevant adsense has absolutely nothing to do with the businesses of the adsense ads!

I am guessing G knows what business category I frequent (more often than that poorly targeted industry) thanks to the Tool Bar, so if for some odd reason G does not put up targeted ads they put up ads in the business the Tool Bar has reported as the industry I frequent, i.e. you might say it's default ads based on personal web-surfing info gathered from the tool bar.

This is all just an educated guess on my part but am so confident it is really so that today I uninstalled Advanced Features and Page Rank of Google Toolbar so it does not send any information! Opinions anyone?

[Marcia]

I visit all kinds of sites with the toolbar always on, and mine are all very closely targeted - to the point of most being very specific.

With a brand new site that's never had pages up I put AdSense on first thing this weekend when I uploaded them and it was all right on within a few seconds - except one page where they could not figure anything out, it had a PSA until I moved their code. I moved it back and forth a few times to verify it - and each time it switched from targeted to PSA. Some page locations make it easier for a good match. In fact, as I added some content to those pages the ads changed a bit to reflect what had just been put up. It's so quick it's creepy.

[newbies]

generally, targetting is not a problem for me. Some time ago there were a few mistargetted ads due to some irrelevant key words on my site. Those can be easily blocked by the url filtering.

[annej]

It seems to depend a lot on the topic of the article. Some topics just don't have good matching ads. For example a page I have about friends and family understanding the chronically ill got dating service pages. I just don't try to use adsense on pages like that as they get very few clicks, look poor on the page and waste the advertisers space as well as mine.