AdSense ads suddenly become very generic...

[irock]

I notice my ads start to be very generic. My site covers a lot of different categories of PC hardware... and most of the times, I saw ads targeted at the particular product page content. But today, those ads seem to be very generic... and my CPC and number of clicks start to drop by 40%.

Did anyone experience anything similar?

[Sense_able]

I have been waiting all day for someone to bring up this subject. My CTR has also dropped by 40%.

So you are not alone.... This is why I love this forum (it stops me going mad wondering what is happening)

Is anyone else showing a reduction in CTR and revenue but the impressions are remaining steady

[irock]

I tend to think this is some sort of Google's experiment as this doesn't seem be natural... They must have switched something that caused most ads to be more generic... If this is the case, then Google will definitely see a huge drop of revenue also. I hope things will get back to normal by late afternoon.

[ronin]

irock> Yeah I've seen my CTR drop by 50% over the last week and I've eventually come to the same conclusion as you - the ads currently showing are for large scale generic widget companies whereas before the ads were for much smaller widget specialists (ones that related very closely to the content of the page rather than generally relating to the theme of the page).

Clearly readers prefer to click on adpanels which are very specific in topic rather than more general.

Perhaps Google will conclude this too... or perhaps the current AdSense system means that the high-paying big company generic adverts will always be shown first (until their budget runs out)...

Perhaps the solution is for big companies to realise that they have to create very specific rather than generic adverts?

[markus007]

I'm getting pretty annoyed, 75% of my site is now showing PSA ads, and my site is extremely targetted, i used to have several hundred advertisers ads shown

[cyberprosper]

I am glad to see (in a way) that it is not just me. Man, click-thru rates have gone down! I got too many pages to figure out why. When on my sites though, I see a lot more public donation advertisements (whatever they are called).

[whizkiddo]

50% drop in CTR , i hope its google experimenting and i also hope that they conclude this is NOT working! anyway what is going on , will some 1 please tell us?

[skunker]

Hi all,
I feel better--I wasn't alone:) But, I did some extensive testing today to try and get "rid" of the PSA adsd (charity, donations, etc).

First, make sure you don't have any PAYPAL DONATION buttons on your site---google will pick that up as a "donation" keyword and will display more PSA ads. I removed it and it partially solved the problem (don't remove it if you make good $$ of donations, though!).

Secondly, I renamed my "news.htm" (or any page with the ads) to "keyword_keyword_news.htm" (where "keyword" reflects the main keyword/topic your page is about).

This improved it a bit more.

But, the main reason why you may be getting PSA ads is because Google hasn't SPIDERED your page yet. I noticed that on my new page, Google was displaying not only PSA ads, but occassionaly SEABISCUIT ads...and I remembered that SEABISCUIT was a topic from a previous page...so Google still had my old page in its cache. Also, check yoru PAGERANK button in the GOOGLE TOOLBAR if you have it (if u don't, you need to download it!). If your site is ranked in PAGERANK, then that means that Google has your page spidered already and is displaying ads appropriate for that page.

It seems that the main problem for us all is that we are creating new pages before Google has a chance to spider them. Google doesn't know what to do with the new page and will just display "buffer" ads, or Charity/PSA ads.

This is all my theory. I'm sure others know more about this than I do. Lets hear it!

[europeforvisitors]

My CTR seldom goes up or down by more than a tenth of a percent on any given day, and I haven't seen any recent swings that might inspire alarm. Revenues are lower than they were a month ago, however. That's probably because my site is about leisure travel and there's less demand (and therefore less willingness to submit high bids) as the blow season approaches.

[irock]

Hmm I notice the latest series of updates seem to back to normal...

Anyone agree?

[Sense_able]

Just like that they are back to normal....

The big switch must have been pressed

[Sense_able]

I have just noticed soething rather interesting..... I have been looking around my site and if the .js from google is slow. Maybe due to high traffic you get served with a 'donate to' etc. If you then refresh you get targetted ads.....

Interesting

[dazed]

Hola
Me and my buddy own a large network of sites, in the last 4 days our ctr has dropped a full percentage point from the normal it has been doing for the last 2 months.

Site traffic is up but ctr is taking a nose dive across 10 sites. This isnt a minor flux for us and with absolutely nothing changed networkwide I can only conclude something different with Google.

I am also in contact with other highend site owners doing 10-30 million impressions a month and all 6 of them have had the same thing happen in the same time frame. Odds are next to nill then that this is something to do with us then and reflects a change someplace at google.

CTR drop is 50% down from a daily 2 month average across 30 plus large properties. From what I can read here others are seeing the same thing.

Dazed

[edited by: Laisha at 1:18 pm (utc) on Sep. 12, 2003]
[edit reason] These kinds of personal asides belong in email. [/edit]

[europeforvisitors]

I am also in contact with other highend site owners doing 10-30 million impressions a month and all 6 of them have had the same thing happen in the same time frame. Odds are next to nill then that this is something to do with us then and reflects a change someplace at google.

If that's true, maybe there's a cap on the number of ads that can be served to one site, or to sites that have unusually high (note that I did not say "suspicously high"] clickthrough rates.

If Google wants AdSense to be a broad success, it might feel that it needs to distribute its eggs to more than a few baskets. And I think we can assume that Google does want AdSense to be a broad success, because letting the network be dominated by a small number of high-volume sites would just play into the hands of Overture (which can compete against Google in the high-volume space more effectively than it can on the Web at large).

Mind you, this is just idle speculation, and I don't claim that it's a theory or even a serious hypothesis. :-)

[Imaster]

I have noticed the same for most of my sites. PSAs are appearing and the ctr has gone way down.