Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I run a couple of hobby site in a field where there aren't too many SEO / marketing savvy people operating. I've got one ad coming up at the top of most of my skyscrapers that's been typed in (what I suspect is, anyway) an Asian character set - which is fine. However, javascript and non-standard character sets don't get on, so it's coming up as nothing but question marks. An email to Google got the reponse that 'advertisers may choose to display adverts in foreign languages' and told me that I could block the URL if I wanted. Last time I looked, a row of question marks wasn't a foreign language, it was a screw-up.
I'm also getting the 'free, free, free, click here for free stuff' type of ads - surely these get minimal click throughs? Surely?
I'm loath to ban them though, as there are precious few relevant adverts as it is, and I'm already getting 2 and 3 ads skyscrapers on some pages . . .
Anyway, not a major problem - just curious about what other people were seeing.
Roddy
I've never seen anything like that, though - I've had ads in foreign languages, but the most obscure is probably Albanian, which is still a variant Roman alphabet. I've never seen Cyrilic or Chinese or Greek or Arabic text.
Also, I had a look at the website and their customers are going to be english speaking folk in the US, so there's no reason to believe they'd have any necessary support installed.
I'm leaving them on for now - they're at the top of the skyscraper, and I'm hoping they might get a few 'hey, who are these numpties' clicks . . .
Roddy
Ultimately, the technical means to make ads in non-roman alphabets work are in Googles hands.
Sites are different, but I'm seeing them very topical for the pages they're on, except in one case on a page or two where it's more suited to what's in the navigation to other parts of the site than what's on those particular pages. Those can't help but have poor CTR, that's not what the people are looking for there.
How good the clickthroughs are can depend on what's on the pages topically, which determines what kind of ads are running. On some sites people are just browsing and on others visitors are seriously looking to buy - big difference in the two.
>>Ultimately, the technical means to make ads in non-roman alphabets work are in Googles hands.
Would it be a good idea to write tech support then, just mousing over the ads to get the URL and let them know which ones are giving a problem?
I contacted Google and explained the problem, and got the response I mention above - that advertisers are entitled to place foreign language ads if they wish.
I read over my email again, and it was perfectly clear that they weren't appearing in any language, they were gibberish. I'm not inclined to bother again.
I'm surprised the advertiser in question hasn't checked out their ads on a variety of systems and spotted the problem - surely the first thing you'd do when dealing with something as patchily supported as non-standard character sets.
Roddy
It seems likely that the same ad looks perfectly find on the Google site. Google (usually) serves their own pages as UTF-8, while the Adsense ads are served as ISO-8859-1, at least on my site.
If the advertiser doesn't hunt down their ad on a content site somewhere (which is difficult, and they may not even recognize it when they find an example), then they'll never know about the problem.
Roddy
PS My original title got edited. I guess someone didn't like the phrase 'incompetent advertisers' - apologies if that was the case.
