I've Been Clicking AdSense Ads Since IBA Rolled Out

Pecking those Ads Like a Chicken on Feed

[martinibuster]

IBA = Interest Based Ads

I have been clicking AdSense ads like a chicken on corn for the past two weeks. I've been researching fishing gear and keep seeing these ads for fishing outlets and sales on fishing gear.

I needed photos for a project I'm working on. Researched at different sites. Then I started seeing ads for discounts on stock royalty free photos at leading websites. My fingers started clicking on ads everywhere I went, chasing down offers like 10 free and 15% discounts.

I have never clicked on ads before. Since IAB rolled out I have clicked on dozens of ads. I buy stuff online. So yes, I have made purchases as a result of the IBA's. I was researching my purchases. Ads for discounts popped up. For me, as a consumer, IAB worked.

Is IAB resulting in an increase in earnings for me? No. I have not noticed a dramatic increase in earnings. But I'm not seeing a decrease either. Earnings are doing fine, but I can't say positively whether that is a result of IAB because I have not seen a dramatic lift in earnings.

I am not saying that IAB is a good thing. I am only stating that for the first time in my life I am clicking on AdSense ads.

[rajivatre]

@Martinibuster : Thanks for sharing the experience. So according to your experience IAB works. Now I have few questions if you would like to answer.

1) The sites you were searching were the ads matched the page content or purely IAB ads?
If yes then is it possible that there is a combination of IAB and content related ads.
If no then may be google is showing purely 100% IAB ads.

2) What about the sites you own or run? Do you see the same ads on your site as well?

3) Suppose Once you clicked on the IAB ad made purchase, after that also you see those same ads? Or they disappear after you purchase the material? Sorry to miss the point in your post. You said discount ads popped up. Whether those discount ads were for same or similar product you purchased?

Please us know. So may be this can put up more light on overall IAB topic.

Thanks
Rajiv

[martinibuster]

1) The sites you were searching were the ads matched the page content or purely IAB ads?
If yes then is it possible that there is a combination of IAB and content related ads.

No. Zero relevance to the pages. It was 100% IAB.

2) What about the sites you own or run? Do you see the same ads on your site as well?

Yes, I do. And my sites have nothing to do with the ads, zero.

3) Suppose Once you clicked on the IAB ad made purchase, after that also you see those same ads? Or they disappear after you purchase the material? Sorry to miss the point in your post. You said discount ads popped up. Whether those discount ads were for same or similar product you purchased?

The ads reflect my most recent search activity, regardless of whether I had already purchased or not.

So according to your experience IAB works.

Only to the extent that I am clicking ads for the first time in my life. But otherwise, not really. :) Only what I stated in the title and in my previous post: "I am only stating that for the first time in my life I am clicking on AdSense ads."

[rajivatre]

Martinibuster, Thanks for the detailed replies. This put me in thinking mode as to what changes I may have to do in my websites. For example I was really trying hard to put proper title and description for the pages, experimenting with long title, short title etc to see what ads are shown and how it is affecting my overall revenue.
(Ofcourse I do understand that "Reader comes first" policy which google emphasizes, but keeping that in mind I was experimenting.)

But if this is the case (ofcourse this may vary from site to site or may be even adsense account to account) then may be I will have to rethink about the overall strategy about trying to get proper related ads for the page and instead concentrate and experiment more on the placement of ads. Because more IAB ads google puts in, there are more and more irrelevant ads on the website anyway. Whatever you do. So then your only option remains is to try and show ads at the proper place.

In short will this go like a newspaper ads?
which most of the time are not at all relevant to the articles written?
It may be relevant to the Reader or Reader group which majorly subscribe to that newspaper but not directly related to the article in the newspaper.
Is this where adsense is moving?

But otherwise, not really.

I do understand that this is just your experience this time.
But being a person who knows adsense well (Should I say expert?) I think this experience has lot of value to it. Also more and more people may face similar experience. In your case you noticed it, in many cases people may not notice it.


Thanks
Rajiv

[dauction]

IAB'S all over the place for me..

Been looking on known and unknown sites for solar batteries and now everywhere I go solarB ads appear..

[HuskyPup]

These ads can be infuriating until one clears cache and cookies.

Recently I bought some UK train tickets on-line, I didn't search for them, I knew precisely from where I was going to buy them and did so, but lo and behold the next site I went to had train tickets for sale, then the next site, then the next...cleared everything out and it went back to normal.

A few days later I had to buy some more train tickets and the same happened again...grrrr...this is not HuskyPup friendly targetting whatsoever! Now I am considering searching without Javascript enabled.

[BillyS]

As a publisher, I never click Adsense ads. When I see an ad that matches what I'm looking for, I visit that site by carefully copying the URI from the ad.

I realize Google doesn't get credit for this sale, but as a publisher I don't want to risk being targeted as a "clicker."

[sid786]

So, what's the use then? It benefits the advertiser and the consumer! Alright, that's a good thing.

But how are we, the publishers, benefited with this? Anyone making decent money when IBA are ON? My earnings have been tanked here.

Thanks for sharing your experience, Martini!

[walrus]

But how are we, the publishers, benefited with this?

I don't see any benefits either, just drawbacks. Their main concern is profit for shareholders, not webmasters. I know thats typical business but by increasing their presence with maps, G earth, G books, G sites, youtube, android, GTV etc etc, they have morphed far away from a search engine into its own content supplier/advertiser behemoth. Google Music and Google games have to be next.

One more thing i just don't get is this. If i search for a gift for a kids birthday, say an ipod.
I find it the first day. What is the logic in chasing me around the net with creepy ads
AD -"need a new ipod ? "
AD - "Did you buy that ipod yet ? Cause if you didnt heres one ! "
A week goes by and still ...
AD - "did ya get that ipod yet ?" I know you're actually at a site about motorcycle parts but did ya get that ipod yet ? "

Yes Google I did, last week, and if i wanted another you would have caught me searching for another one, but i was searching for motorcycle parts, and havn't been intersted in an IPod for over a week. What a waste of ad space.

Really wish they would just drop IBA altogether.

[edited by: walrus at 4:15 pm (utc) on May 29, 2010]

[buckworks]

I can share some perspective from the advertiser's side.

I manage an account that has had about 63 million impressions on the content network since March 1, and about 1.7 million of those impressions were shown to "audiences".

The audience-targeted ads are a bit under 3% of the total exposure, but they've contributed significantly more than 3% of the account's productivity. We bid twice as much for those clicks as the overall account average, and the effective CPM is strong.

However, at least in our case, Google still tends to favor the traditional keyword / theme based banner impressions the majority of the time. They're showing audience-based ads sparingly and are definitely not throwing regular contextual ads out the window.

Audience targeting has been icing on the cake for us, not a major change in our account.

[Leonard0]

We bid twice as much for those clicks..

So that means that Google's (and our) revenue could increase as a result of showing IBAs, assuming that the CTR of IBAs and context-based ads (CBAs) are equal.

Could it be that the clicking history of each individual user plays a role in the Adsense algo?
Each CBA's CPM could be adjusted by the user's CBA clicking factor and compared to an IBA's EPC adjusted by the user's IBA clicking factor.
(Sorry about the alphabet soup.)
Someone such as Martinibuster with a history of few or no clicks on CBAs would be more likely to be shown IBAs, especially after clicking on one.
The user's IBA clicking factor should be reduced as time progresses from the ad's first appearance or from the user's last click on an IBA, but that seems not to be happening in some people's experience.

[netmeg]

Anyone making decent money when IBA are ON?

Yep; I'm way up.

[dibbern2]

Anyone making decent money when IBA are ON?

Yes.

[ken_b]

Anyone making decent money when IBA are ON?

I must have missed it, where do we find IBA stats in our AdSense control panels?

[martinibuster]

The audience-targeted ads are a bit under 3% of the total exposure...

If that is typical for most advertisers then the effect of IBA might not be that noticeable, in either direction plus or minus.

[micklearn]

@martinibuster - I've got to agree with you for the most part. Could it depend on the category of a site? We have no idea what type/category of site(s) that buckworks has in that account.

Which leads to:

@buckworks - Are those stats for one website or multiple ones in different categories?

And...

@netmeg & @dibbern - How can you tell that your higher earnings are a result of IBA's being ON?

[netmeg]

I must have missed it, where do we find IBA stats in our AdSense control panels?

@netmeg & @dibbern - How can you tell that your higher earnings are a result of IBA's being ON?

We don't. And we can't. But that wasn't the question. The question was, is anyone making decent money with IBA turned on. I haven't blocked anything at all in my accounts (except for a few categories) and I'm at about twice what I did last year, and 50% better than the best year I ever had. I'll be the first to say I don't know if one is related to the other. But I am not losing sleep worrying that IBA is *hurting* my earnings.

[micklearn]

@netmeg - Kudos for the quick reply. :) I completely understand what you're saying...I turned off IAB and my earnings went up...go figure. I'm definitely finding it tough to determine what relates to what these days. Lately, I've been wondering about how things work on the advertiser's side of the equation...are they fully understanding the changes that keep happening in AdWords?

(Just so you know, I wasn't trying to be confrontational with my previous post.)

Best,
Mick

[buckworks]

@micklearn

Those stats are for one website, promoting several products in one specific category. In a given year there might be 1 in 200 people who want the type of product this company makes. That means we walk a fine line to extend our reach without wasting too many impressions on the wrong eyeballs.

So far the "audiences" targeting seems to be helping with that.

[Captaffy]

I felt I should post from the other perspective, because for me IBAs have been a huge annoyance while surfing.

I did my taxes online, using what is probably the biggest online tax preparation service. For the next month, almost every Adsense ad I saw was for this service.

Logged in to a client's domain registrar one day. Saw the registrar's ads everywhere for the next couple of weeks.

Currently I am seeing ads for my hosting service, and have been for about a week.

I find it pretty ridiculous.

[buckworks]

Captaffy, I strongly agree that too much exposure can become a negative thing. If it starts to feel like "stalk the user" that advertiser has poor skills.

For the account I mentioned, we set the frequency cap so that users won't see more than five banners per day from any one ad group.

If someone is doing enough research in the sector that they encounter us more than that, they'll at least get a different banner for a different product.

The frequency is a judgement call on my part, and we're still experimenting, but common sense says that overdoing the exposure can backfire so keep a light hand about it.

[martinibuster]

If it starts to feel like "stalk the user"...

My wife noticed IBAs and remarked that it was "creepy" how ads reflected her recent search activities, searches that were unrelated to shopping.

Captaffy's experience underlines a shortcoming in IBAs, Google's inability to properly classify search activity that is shopping related and search activity that is not. Google may need to improve IBAs by classifying search activities better.

[rajivatre]

Google may have strong reason to put IBAs all over. But my common sense tells me that ads need to be more relevant to the content of the page. Otherwise why google search is not showing IBA ads?
(Atleast I have not seen any IBA ads on google search. I always see ads related to my search term.)
Is google is experimenting at the cost of publishers?
If IBA is successful on content network they will put on google search and if not then they wont put.
Anybody seen IBA on google SERPs?

Thanks
Rajiv

[netmeg]

Lately, I've been wondering about how things work on the advertiser's side of the equation...are they fully understanding the changes that keep happening in AdWords?

The agencies and professionals - yes. The business owners who manage their own accounts - not so much. There are more of the latter than the former.

[jkovar]

Sometimes it's nice, but there are a few "black holes" that will have me seeing the same ads constantly for days, or weeks. For instance, I play a game called "Eve Online" every few months when the expansions come out, and as soon as I search for something about the game I start seeing ads for it everywhere and it gets annoying.

I used to get a lot of ads for local restaurants when IBA first started, I don't see them very often anymore. I like those.

I've been seeing a lot of big name consumer product ads lately. I actually broke down and bought a 2 liter of Mountain Dew recently because I'd seen the ads for it so many times and was thinking about it when I was at the store.

[joelgreen]

Anybody seen IBA on google SERPs?

Sure, everybody including you because Google shows ads related to search term, which is exactly what IBA is (IMO).

[joelgreen]

Some time ago AdsenseAdvisor posted here on WW that IBA should only appear for some short period of time (few hours after search if i remember correctly). Anyway, seeing IBA for a week after search looks like a bug in their system according to what AA posted (unless they get data for IBA from latest gmail entries...).

[bwnbwn]

joelgreen the cookie can be set for as long as 30 days.

[davelms]

A positive user experience so far for me. I've clicked on a number of adverts for widgets I had recently shown an interest in through my search history. Targeted adverts down the make and model. Good for me, and got me clicking on adverts when I wouldn't have usually. And their appearance also re-ignited my interest in said widget even though my mind was on other matters when the advert appeared (i.e. the sites had totally unrelated content but it made me go back to looking at buying the widget in question).

[thisismyurl]

I have to say my experience with IBA's has been similar although frustrating.

Every website I've hit lately features ads for webmaster related services, EVE Online, hosting and ad services such as Google AdSense. I'm not saying it's bad that they're tailoring to me (rather than the content) but it's also not helping web masters to have such a limited pool of advertisers who can appeal to me.