IF the AdSense algorithm is working properly, that ad is earning you and Google the most money. Unless MOST of your traffic is repeat visitors, you have a good flow of new traffic, I would think. But what works on the network as a whole may not work on your site, so:

Some people have reported a slight increase in earnings by blocking the five most common advertisers on their site in a rotation. Seems like extra work to me.

You could try blocking it for a week and see what happens. Personally, I can tell you that when I blocked an advertiser that was one of the top five on my site because I had concerns about its ethics, my monthly earnings dropped by more than 10%. Don't think it was a coincidence.

Oh, and I should mention that I've had the same ads showing up in the top spots on my site for more than two years.

If your income hasn't dropped a ton why do anything?

In other words, as long as people are still clicking, the ad is still working, leave it alone.

Why not setup an adsense click tracker. Then you can see if your visitors are really clicking on it or not.

Agree with hunderdown.

Usually greeeeat majority of visitors are "new traffic", so if the ad is good and related to your site, pray that it stays. I have one ad that has been around about a year - I would cry if it didn't show up anymore.

The only major exception, I think, is that you have very steady flow of regular visitors - for example majority of your traffic coming from a forum or something like that.

Of course, when in doubt, try it out (long enough, so you don't jump any false conclusion) - and carefully log statistics.

We seem to have a somewhat similar but different issue. Let's say we have a site called widgets.com. Part of the site is directly related to widgets, but there might also be pages for widget accessories, and even pages that have nothing to do with widgets per se.

What I see in terms of ads is that most ads seem to be targetted by the widgets site name and theme, so we're getting essentially the same ads on pages, even if they aren't about widgets.

There IS a unifying theme to the site, but to provide a more concrete example. Site is about "planning", and there are pages for business planning, strategic planning, disaster recovery planning, career development planning.

We aren't getting the specificity. And, of course our visitors are seeing the same ads over and over again.

(that's what it appears like when I check the site, maybe others get different things)

PS. Tried section targetting too. Doesn't seem to help, and the same problem occurs on pages regardless of things like length, amount of text content, etc.

Ideas?

I noticed some changes in targeting when I modified things like page names, page titles, and meta descriptions. I assume you've tried these already?

My site is approximately 15,000 documents small, diverse and the ad in question is almost a competitor.

I would prefer a diversity of ads on subject for each page, not a generic ad everywhere. Anyway, I blocked the ad right after I started this thread and my income is unchanged. CTR is actually a little higher. So, the ads being clicked on are paying less. I'll see how it goes.

I don't think I have blocked an ad in a while..

so we're getting essentially the same ads on pages, even if they aren't about widgets.

IME, that means one of three things:

• Google hasn't had time to analyze the page yet, so they just use their "site-theme guesstimate" in the meantime.
  
• Google can't really figure out the point of your page, a common problem for short pages (e.g., if you have 50 words of Widget navigation in your menu text and only 100 words of "real" text on the page, you're making it unnecessarily hard for Google to identify the "real" theme of the page.)
  
• Google did identify the theme of the page and decided either that there were no good products to sell with that theme, or that your particular page would do a real crappy job of selling those ads. So they defaulted back to the site-wide theme guesstimate.
  

thanks guys.

I noticed some changes in targeting when I modified things like page names, page titles, and meta descriptions. I assume you've tried these already?

No, not really. At this point, with so much "hand-rolled content" built over 6-8 years, it's really not practical to look at modifying titles, metas, etc, that are descriptive to visitors.

It may be that because our titles might often contain the theme of the site (let's say widgets), that's a problem. If so, I'll live with it.

ronburk said:

# Google hasn't had time to analyze the page yet, so they just use their "site-theme guesstimate" in the meantime.
# Google can't really figure out the point of your page, a common problem for short pages (e.g., if you have 50 words of Widget navigation in your menu text and only 100 words of "real" text on the page, you're making it unnecessarily hard for Google to identify the "real" theme of the page.)
# Google did identify the theme of the page and decided either that there were no good products to sell with that theme, or that your particular page would do a real crappy job of selling those ads. So they defaulted back to the site-wide theme guesstimate.

All old pages. Articles for the pages I'm talking about would run between 750-2000 words (I'll actually have to check to see what targeting looks like on pages of different lengths, come to think of it).

It could be the latter point. The ads are certainly relevant to the theme of the site.