I was looking at the ads on one of my sites today. To use an example let's say I live in Syracuse and have a site on plumbers. I'm getting ads for plumbers all over the U.S., from Maine to Arizona, inluding cities I've never heard of. Obviously if someone lives in Syracuse they aren't going to call a plumber in North Carolina.

So is this a problem with the Adsense targeting, adwords users targeting too broad a match for their ads, or something else? I not sure what to do to adddress this. In the past it seemed like I would only get local ads to where I live on the site. My click through rate is lower than normal today and I suspect all of these misplaced local ads are may be a factor.

[edited by: Jane_Doe at 2:47 pm (utc) on Sep. 1, 2006]