Local Ads on Adsense

Seeing Ads for Service Providers Thousands of Miles Away

[Jane_Doe]

On of my sites, just to use a fake example, is on something like proctology. But when I look at the ads, I'm seeing Adsense ads for proctologists thousands of miles from where I live.

Does this mean those proctologists are setting up Adwords campaigns that are not locally targeted, and should I block their ads in my filter? My page has generic information applicable to anywhere in the world. So if these ads for proctologists in Des Moines show up for everyone who views my site, then it seems like that would be kind of a wasted ad space for most of my visitors and would lower my click through rate for that page.

Any thoughts? Anyone else have this issue? Today I'm seeing an ad for a proctologist in the same state but a six hour drive away and one in another state.

[celgins]

I see these types of ads often. Most times, the topic is relevant to the page content. But the location may be off by 200 miles.

In fact, I see two displayed on my site right now. One is for a family law practice in South Carolina, U.S. and I don't even live in South Carolina!

My guess is that advertisers are setting up Adwords campaigns that are not well targeted (if targeted at all).

[Rosalind]

I wish there were some way to suggest this, or even some optional additions that could be made to the Adsense code to indicate negative keywords.

For instance, you sell blue widgets but for some reason you're getting ads for other things associated with blue. It would be good to have a parameter like so:

google_ad_negative_keywords = smut,depression,sky;

That way, Adsense could be made more relevant on a page-by-page basis.

[farmboy]

I've written about this before. My ISP is located in a large city 200+ miles away and I often see local ads for businesses in that city. I mentioned this over on the AdWords board a while back and several of the advertisers there didn't seem to be aware the targeting isn't as good as they might think it is.

FarmBoy

[himalayaswater]

Targeting may be correct but not the IP. ISP often lease ips from large provider. Some time ISPs spread across diffrent countries but use the same IP range across all location. So Country2IP database returns wrong information. Some time ISP uses multiple upstream transparent proxy server located at diffrent locations (200 miles difference).

[skweb]

I was recently researching my Spanish website and went to an English speaking country with literally no Spanish speakers. Yes, AdSense was displayed with some ads in Spanish a few in English. I was not sure if there is even need for any ads there because the chances of any traffic from that country is remote.