Ad Quality

[slobizman]

I run a conservative political website (<snip>). Google is serving me ads that are the exact OPPOSITE of what I can sell. Right now, I have 3 of the 4 ads trying to sell the Hillary Clinton book! That's been running for the last 24 hours it seems. At best I might get two ads that are something conservatives would want.

Google says that they are not able to define a site as on the right or on the left politically, and serve the correct ads. There are so many political sites out there, with the election coming up, it seems they have to address this issue. It's not only unproductive, it's embarrassing.

Does anyone have any suggestions, or know any work arounds?

[edited by: engine at 5:25 pm (utc) on Aug. 8, 2003]
[edit reason] No urls, thanks. See TOS [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]

[dmorison]

if you need good targetting, then place as much text as possible.

That won't really help some publishers, as it looks like one of the problems AdSense has is that it is giving priority to on-page text rather than the theme of a website as a whole.

One example that springs to mind would be a website publishing reviews of computer games. An AdSense block on that website should show ads for computer games or products and services related to computer gaming.

However, as it works now; an AdSense block on a review page would serve ads related to the subject of the game - which are not going to be that well targeted.

[PolishGuy]

However, as it works now; an AdSense block on a review page would serve ads related to the subject of the game - which are not going to be that well targeted.

I had very similar experiences!

Far fetched example: you are reviewing game about submarinez, but Google AdSense is serving banners about "buy a submarine, with 10 nuclear warheads, cheaply, almost not used" while it should show banner with advertisements of another games for the same console, like for example "Pacman Forever - the new game for Playstation 3".

If we could provide to Google some hint that this page is about computer games for playstation 3, and not about selling second hand submarines with nukes, then the problem woudl be solved! I would suggest some hints in HTML comment tags!

[killroy]

Problem is that adSense seems to be very sensitive to powerfull out of context keywords. Like certain nouns which are VERY context sensitive (such as "death" for example) and cen blow up the targeting, no matter how much text you got.

SN

[jrstark]

I keep getting ads for teaching your child to read and proofreading services on my forum page. I think it is picking up the standard forum links (read, edit post etc). I've been blocking them as I see them.

[JollyK]

By the way, a Google person mentioned to me that FAQ and TOS kinds of pages don't seem to work well with the targeting. This was when I mentioned to them that my "rules" page had one thing that was something like "Don't send money to anyone on the Internet for some kind of 'business opportunity,' as these are likely to be scams." It was only one thing out of a whole page of other stuff, but made "Make 100,000 a week!" ads show up on that page.