I'm glad you asked this. I have the same experience - almost no income from site targeted ads. I have a good description for my channel, my website is clean and useful and only has one ad box. I would say traffic is not negligible either at several k uniques a day. Maybe advertisers are not aware of this option.

This may vary, but I suspect that there isn't much channel targeting going on, so channel descriptions just aren't going to make that much of a difference.

Maybe if you are getting a lot of targeted ads they would boost further, but at the 0.1% level I doubt it.

My assumption is that the bulk of targeting is by category and keyword, with site targeting a smaller chunk, and channel targeting even smaller. Of course, there could be wide variations in different areas.

I made the channgel description after reading from InisideAdsense

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One of the main changes is the ability for advertisers to be more specific with their ad targeting through a combination of contextual targeting and placement targeting. As you may know, contextually targeted ads will appear on your pages if an advertiser's keywords match your content, while placement-targeted ads will appear if an advertiser has specifically selected your ad placement or site. Now, advertisers can target your site or placements, but can also specify keywords for them so that their ads only appear in the most relevant pages. These ads will still need to compete with the available inventory of ads for a particular placement, and so only the highest-paying, most relevant ads will appear on your pages. At the same time, you'll still be able to use your Competitive Ad Filter to prevent ads from specific URLs from appearing.

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So I thought this new featrue could be a key to more income from side targeted ads

jetteroheller,

CPM ads on our sites were always just a fraction of the ads, like < 0.5%.

Yet CPM ads had worked for a period of 15 months (from October 2006 to December 2007). The average eCPM from CPM ads was between 2x and 5x of the average CPM from PPC.

Then, in January 2008, something changed. The average eCPM from CPM ads was suddenly just "on par" with the average eCPM from PPC ads. Sometimes a bit higher, but sometimes also lower.

We stopped CPM targeting after having seen the ad junk on the review center.

What all do you mention in your channel description. Since one of my website is not content targeted, I have merely explained the website along with the demographics of the majority of my visitors. Is that enough?

CPM ads on our sites were always just a fraction of the ads, like < 0.5%.

How do you measure that percentage?

Ah, wait, this thread is about "site targeted" vs. "content targeted". No idea what that means. I opted out of CPM ads anyway.

Zett

Even though you opted out of CPM, your site(s) may be getting "placement targeted" CPM ads! If you have URL channels for specific pages placement targeted CPM ads are easy to see using the "Show data by targeting type - contextual or placement" check box on your reports. (I've even seen placement targeted "Link Unit" ads. To see this you need a custom channel on a link unit though.)

AND, there is no way to review the CPM ads because the "Ad Review Center" is disabled, once you opt out of CPM ads.

This is an inconsistency; with the implementation of placement targeted CPM ads all publishers should be provided with the "Ad Review Center" capability!

I've written AdSense about this and received a reply; a reply of the type where my request was obviously only skimmed. Clearly the content of the request had not been read, and their reply did not address any of the content of the request.