They're ads that have targeted you. I think they might be CPM ads, but I'm not sure about that part; advertisers can target CPC ads now too.

When we turn on the ad review center are we in any way letting these site targeting ads in?

Mine is a small site that ought to go un-noticed by most advertisers. One or two genuine ones have found the site, but hundreds of poor quality advertisers fill the review center. No way have they manually found my site and decided it would be a perfect match for them.

I believe that many of those targeted ads are targeted to keywords, not sites.

That's sort of true. As an advertiser, when you're doing a site targeted campaign, there's several ways to do it. You can specify actual sites, you can pick categories of sites, and I think you can also let Google pick them by keyword (it's been over a year since I tried a site targeted campaign, so it may have changed) At any point, you can eyeball the sites and remove any you don't like.

So if you feel your site is too small to be site targeted, you just may have been picked up in a category sweep.

(And yes, the default is that site targeting is turned on)

netmeg, that's interesting. So categories are not keywords, then? How are they defined?

Ok, I just went in to see, because, as I said, it's been a while.

You get four choices - Browse Categories, Describe Topics (with keywords), List URLS, and Select Demographics - that one is new, I guess you get to pick your audience.

The Categories that are listed are:

Animals
Arts & Humanities
Automotive
Beauty & Personal Care
Business
Computers & Electronics
Entertainment
Games
Health
Industries
Internet
Lifestyles
Photo & Video
Recreation
Science
Social Networks & Online Communities
Society
Sports
Travel

Each of these has subcategories, too many for me to list.

Under demographics, it looks like you can pick age, gender, household income. Demographics only available for the US. Under advanced options, you can specify ethnicity and whether or not there are children in the home.

I don't know where they get this information, but Google knows everything, so I can't say I'm too surprised.

Anyway, that's how site targeting (now called placement targeting) is set up on the advertising side.

netmeg, thanks for the informative post.

For the demographics, as an AdWords advertiser can you see the demographic profile for an individual site? I'd guess probably not. If you can, I'd probably sign up for AdWords just to see what they think my site's demographic profile is. That would be very useful, but that's also why I suspect Google doesn't offer up that much detail.

Yes, I just engaged the review center on my site on a suggestion from my AdSense Acount Strategist. I found over 700 different advertisers targeting my site. I blocked 52 nonsense sites. Interesting, there was only one arbitrator in the group. I hope this helps my CPM..

I wish we could block by keywords, like real estate, liposuction, etc.

[edited by: Edge at 9:00 pm (utc) on July 2, 2008]

No, the selection is by radio button, so you can only go by one of the four choices - Category, Topic, Specific URLs or demographic.

However there are sites out there that will tell you (if you've been around long enough and get enough traffic) what they think your demographic is - like compete-dot-com and quantcast-dot-com. Also, I think the new beta AdPlanner might give up some of that information as well - I've got an account there, but haven't had time to play with it much yet.

netmeg, thanks, that's very interesting. Those same Categories show up in the soon-to-be-defunct Referrals set-up area, when one is searching for possible advertisers, interestingly enough.

But that Demographics option is particularly interesting.

Hi all,

Thanks for your feedback on the Ad Review Center.

The Ad Review Center enables you to review placement targeted ads that may appear on your pages. This tool provides publishers with more transparency and control over placement-targeted ads appearing on their sites. You can allow or block individual ad groups and advertisers, as well as filter ads by type: text or image.

ASA