Unintentional clicks because of foreign language traffic?

[Lapka]

I wonder if your site gets visited by people who don't understand the English language (or have a very poor understanding of it) and how it would affect your adsense revenue (by producing unintentional clicks).

Why would they visit?
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They are fascinated by some little visual web toys I had produced on my site, which seemed to have become quite popular. I am concerned that since they are 'Chinese' (also Polish, Brazilian, Isreali, etc...) and they come from websites written ONLY in Mandarin with links to my site.

Problem
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My theory is that they would start clicking on any link to see what happens just BECAUSE they do not understand the language.

It is beyond my resources to create a seperate Chinese website (and other languages) BUT what if adsense can be confingured to detect the country of origin and display ads in that language. It would at the very least prevent these unintentional clicks from occuring.

Is it currently possible to do this?

If not, what are other options I can take to reduce those unintentional clicks.

[MediaSpree]

Well, if you know any scripting language you can identify their IP address then attempt to match that to a database of IP addresses matched to countries and decide whether to show ads only to united states etc. ...but...

[hunderdown]

I've read somewhere that AdSense does geo-targeting, so this may not be a problem.

Why not email AdSense support and ask, if you can't find any documentation?

[jomaxx]

This is Google's problem. They support geotargeting by advertisers and they have access to the user's location and native language. I would let them optimize their ad serving as they see fit.

Anyway they serve ads all over the world and must have a pretty good idea how user behaviour is affected by situations like this. My theory is that any situation that occurs millions of times a day, Google must have some awareness of.

[Lapka]

joma#*$!:
I think you are mistaken by that.

What google does is IF the website is in English they would display English ads, the targeting could be hong kong, Germany, etc... they dont care. They would assume since the website is in English these users would understand this language.

Google has taken this in to account by reducing your average return per click. They would identify this as Invalid clicks.

What I would like is to OVERRIDE googles default behaviour for those specific pages. And ask that they display ads in the language from which the user originates from.

[Rodney]

What google does is IF the website is in English they would display English ads, the targeting could be hong kong, Germany, etc... they dont care. They would assume since the website is in English these users would understand this language.

Actually, I think they also do regional IP address targeting as well.

So even if a site is in "English", but visited by someone in the UK, the ads will be more relevant to the UK rather than the US.

So it seems the same would hold true for different languages (that they support). If the visitor is visiting from a German IP address, then the ads will be in german (if there are some available).

[jomaxx]

Suggestion: redirect Chinese surfers to a Chinese-language version of your page.

But it is not necessary to do this. Google run native-language search engines all over the world. I don't know why you think they can't handle the language issue.

[lammert]

What google does is IF the website is in English they would display English ads

As a world traveler often visiting and updating my sites from abroad I know that in countries with a native language other than the website, often ads in the country language are shown. This is partly because English language advertisers don't advertise in those countries or only at low bid prices, and partly because local advertisers in those countries use English keywords to get their local language ads also shown on sites in English.

You can use the AdSense preview tool or some proxy located in a non-English country to see which ads are on your website for visitors from various countries. Unfortunately the preview tool doesn't support China yet so in your situation you have to find a Chinese proxy.

[Lapka]

I was under the impression that Google used the website's language as the determining factor on what language the ads would display in.

I did not realize that you could use the adsense preview tool to view how your ads would display from other countries.

Will check that out

Thanks