Bad targetting

Lots of irrelevant ads recently

[graeme_p]

My site is investment related.Core material is about how to analyse and value investments, but there is a lot on economics, accounting etc. Some of the visitors have a professional interest in the subject (investment bankers, brokers, accountants..), most are private investors of the serious "I research everything I buy properly" sort, and many are students studying a related subject (finance, economics, business...).

Ads have got less and less relevant to the subject and the audience. I have had growing numbers of ads for anything from hotels to security systems. Yesterday there was an ad for courses in plumbing.

What is new is that it is inexplicable. In the past I was usually able to see what keywords might have triggered an irrelevant ad. Some words have more than one meaning, and the algo is not that smart about context - fair enough.

Then, of course, there is also a rising tide of irrelevant site targeted ads, but that is a different problem.

[piatkow]

I assume that you mean when looking at the site on the web nor to your previous search behaviour.

When testing a change on a page that I have saved locally the ads have no relation to what is seen on the live site.

Do they relate to the location of your business or to location based searches that you have made previously? My site topic is niche-music-location and I get all sorts of rubish ads that seem to be location related. I just wish I could tell G that my visitors only click on ads that are niche-music relation either by location or national.

[graeme_p]

Not location related, on the web, both from my own location and through a proxy in my target country, often with Google cookies recently cleared.

Whatever I do, I can see a consistent deterioration in ad relevance over the last two weeks.

[netmeg]

Well... the first thing I would do is probably tot over to my competition's sites to see if 1) their ads are any better and 2) ads that were previously running on my site are still running on their sites.

(I'd probably do it from behind a proxy server too)

May not tell you anything, or may tell you there's something going on with the niche, or there's something going on with your site. But it doesn't cost anything but time.

[lucy24]

You think you've got problems? :) Sites that focus on pocket pets*-- especially rats and mice-- have to think long and hard about whether they can risk auto-generated advertising at all, because half of the ads will be for exterminators. Unfortunately this is really true. Not recent, either :(


* Generic term for any small pet mammal.

[graeme_p]

@netmeg, great idea. I just tried bit of it but right now none of our sites are showing real junk. Next time I see junk I will look at the corresponding page on competitor sites.

One thing we all have in common is that Google seems to be targetting ads to the site rather than the page too much. One of my competitors has the same ad on almost every page.

@lucy, that is bad. The nearest I have had in my line are ads for obvious scams. They seem to have died away now. We still get consumer credit ads on pages that have anything to do with debt - so someone who wants to know more about investing in corporate or government bonds sees ads offering to consolidate their loans.

[farmboy]

Ads have got less and less relevant to the subject and the audience.

Don't forget that you don't know the subject of the ads your visitors are experiencing.

I just read an article about a man selling a million copies of an ebook he wrote and is selling on Amazon for Kindle readers. Then I visited one of my sites that is about a technical subject and all I see right now are ads for self-publishing.


FarmBoy

[piatkow]

I just read an article about a man selling a million copies of an ebook he wrote and is selling on Amazon for Kindle readers. Then I visited one of my sites that is about a technical subject and all I see right now are ads for self-publishing.

I have noticed this more with Bing than with Google but I also see ads based on previous searches.

[piatkow]

I just read an article about a man selling a million copies of an ebook he wrote and is selling on Amazon for Kindle readers. Then I visited one of my sites that is about a technical subject and all I see right now are ads for self-publishing.

I have noticed this more with Bing than with Google but I also see ads based on previous searches.

[graeme_p]

My nearest competitors (or those that use Adsense anyway) are getting similarly badly targeted ads.

@farmboy, @piatkow, I do not see much of that myself. Does it happen more when you are signed into Google?

[farmboy]

@farmboy, @piatkow, I do not see much of that myself. Does it happen more when you are signed into Google?

Not sure what you mean by "logged into Google" - I was visiting my own site. It's Interest Based Ads at work.

The larger point is you don't know what your visitors are seeing on your site regardless of what you are seeing.

FarmBoy

[JCKline]

Google serves ads mainly on user "behavior", therefore the ads you see are not the ads user A sees, and those ads are different then what user B sees, etc.

[ember]

Don't you have to have IBA ads enabled on your site for visitors to see ads based on their previous searches? Otherwise, aren't the ads on your site supposed to be targeted to its content?

[ThatsBoBo]

@ember no, by selecting to disable IBA on your site ONLY means that data will NOT BE COLLECTED from your site for IBA. Your site will still display IBA based on the visitor's past browsing.

[Play_Bach]

> Otherwise, aren't the ads on your site supposed to be targeted to its content?

Nope. All you can do is opt out of the IBAs you see, not the IBAs other people do. Pretty pointless IMHO.

[lucy24]

Google serves ads mainly on user "behavior"

Visit your site from

#1 one of your own backup browsers that you don't normally use so it has no established history
#2 the home of your brother-in-law whom you can't stand and who disagrees with you on every issue under the sun
#3 a public terminal such as an Internet café or library*, where user behavior varies all over the map and there can be any number of UAs associated with one IP


* My small-town library is all one IP, but the physical computers are donations from various sources so they've all got different versions of Windows and MSIE.

[graeme_p]

I always do #1 if I am checking ads. I do visit the site from other IPs sometimes. I will try #3 to see if it makes a difference.

I should also probably switch from using my own proxy (on a VPS so it always has the same IP) to a shared one.

Do Google use IPs to target users? I would have imagined that they would mostly, or entirely, rely on cookies given that IPs get regularly reallocated to residential customers, and share by business customers.