How does adsense match content?

I'm seeing some seriously off target ads...

[Rollo]

How does adsense match content? I've been experimenting a bit and it I've been getting some pretty poor mathces to the content, despite that the site is well optimized meta tags, titles, keywords etc... any way to improve the performance?

[hunderdown]

In my experience it takes a while for the targeting to zero in (assuming the content on the page IS well-focused). The program seems to be set up so that ads are not all narrowly targeted--it tries out ads to see what works. So if you keep changing a page, you may actually be preventing the targeting from settling down.

AdSense ranks the ads by best results (clicks x bid cost) and puts the top-earning ad in the #1 position, the next best in the #2, and so on. If you've got 4 ad spaces in a block, then you'll get the top 4 ads....

Also, keep in mind that AdSense regularly cycles in new ads to see if they work or not. Some can be wildly off-target--I think some advertisers manipulate the system by bidding on many keywords unrelated to their site. After a couple of days of virtually no clicks, the ads will drop down on the ad list, but in the meantime they've gotten a lot of eyeballs. Some of those ads may be what you are seeing.

Bottom line: wait at least a week to see the results of changes.

[icedowl]

True that you will need to wait a week or more to see properly targeted ads, however that's not always the case. Sometimes the bot gets it right much faster, and sometimes longer.

Then, sometimes the targeting gets totally lost like I'm currently experiencing. I've got some really off-target ads today on pages that haven't been changed in months. Real estate ads on pages of cake recipes. The targeting isn't making much sense today. It just doesn't compute!

[hunderdown]

I got ads throughout my site (which is about writing and publishing children's books) for a specialized singles dating service. Utterly off-topic.

That's why I think that advertisers bid on off-topic keywords to get eyeballs. I'm betting that this company bid high on a wide range of keywords, and got exposure on thousands of sites before AdSense caught up with them--either through checking the ads manually, which I know they do for new campaigns, or through the algorithm, which would have showed a very low CTR.

Probably the same thing with yours. I'll be those ads disappear soon.

[icedowl]

Now I'm seeing ads for drums on these same pages. And, the real estate ads continue... shoot, they're not even in my neck of the woods. They're for an area that is at least 500 miles away from here.

Whatever is going on, it certainly appears that adsense is broken beyond belief today.

Added: I'm also seeing singles dating service ads too. My URL filter list is growing!

[jaacob]

i was seeing incredibly off-target ads on one of my sites and after a week of watching my stats drop to zero, i emailed adsense support. it took two weeks with a couple of back and forths of me explaining a few times what is going on - but then after a week of no contact, i got an email saying 'this problem has been fixed' - and sure enough, it had. ads have been 99% on target since.

as they say - the squeaky wheel gets the oil :D