Forum Moderators: martinibuster
BUT in several cases AdSense seems to default to ads that are based on the entire site's content or perhaps the home pages content. It seems to do this prior to falling back to "Public Service Ads" (PSA's).
For example this morning I visited one site's page where the topic is solely health related, BUT, generic site wide ads were displayed by Adsense. Hit "refresh" and poof, good targeted topical health related ads. So what went wrong?
The cases:
1. The homepage (Level 0)itself seems to have these site wide topical ads. Of course the homepage may hint at all the topics covered by a given site.
2. Index pages (Level 1 & 2 ?). This is a term I use for pages that really have only a general topic and link to actual pages with content specific to one subject. Basically a page full of synopses and links.
3. Sitemap pages, About, Terms, etc. all the pages that do not really have much of a topic anyway.
4. BUT finally the big question:
It seems like Adsense also defaults to these generic site wide topics during "fault" conditions.
So an obvious questions is:
1. How often does the display of the "default ad topics" happen on pages where it shouldn't? I think an important question that could seriously impact earnings.
I'd like to identify what these fault conditions are and perhaps how to improve my site(s) performance to facilitate avoiding these conditions.
2. How could we detect or measure these occurrences?
3. Is the problem related to Google server performance and response time, timeouts?
4. Is it an internet performance issue, solely?
5. Page load time?
6. Location of Adsense code on the page?
7. Here's a good one:
----- Could it be happening more often when using the new code? Obviously the new code imposes yet another work load on the Google servers.
8. Yet another ... Could having a long "Competitive Ad Filter" list cause this to occur more often? (I'm sure this is one reason the list is limited to 200 entries).
I'd love to hear from someone who has really researched this thoroughly!
1. How often does the display of the "default ad topics" happen on pages where it shouldn't? I think an important question that could seriously impact earnings.
I have observed this phenomenon in a couple of cases:
a) New page.
b) Page that in the past carried an ad block with well targeted ads, where the ad block was removed for a certain time and now is being re-introduced. Adsense treats this as a "new page", i.e. they are strangely enough NOT using historical data to assess the page content.
c) Pages that rarely get hits.
d) During times of slow adserving (on Adsense side).
Soooo...
a)-c) are related to "not enough historical data"
d) is related to performance
I agree that this may seriously affect earnings, because visitors see off-topic ads that are not likely to attract a click. A lost opportunity to monetize.
2. How could we detect or measure these occurrences?
Frankly, no idea. Given the fact that we just barely know who advertises on our sites, I do not see how we could monitor this. Maybe a 3rd party could by accessing the page?
3. Is the problem related to Google server performance and response time, timeouts?
Yes, that is one of the situations where I have noticed this behaviour. It usually happens when the ad takes a while to load, and then it shows "site wide" (off-)topic ads. Reload, and bang. Razor-sharp targeted ads.
4. Is it an internet performance issue, solely?
Nope.
5. Page load time?
Nope. Just very light pages (below 100 K altogether).
6. Location of Adsense code on the page?
Nope. Leaderboard in hot zone of heat map, should be loading prior to other elements.
7. Could it be happening more often when using the new code?
No idea. I am just using the old code.
8. Could having a long "Competitive Ad Filter" list cause this to occur more often?
Could be, but I doubt that. My filter is chronically full, but I do not see how this might affect ad serving. The filter list appears to be not effective in real time anyway, so there must be some sort of batch process to assess the new settings once or twice a day.
I'm sure that the reason for the 200 limit is strictly business related. I do not believe that it's a technical reason. Can't be. Not at Google, the land of unlimited servers and bandwidth.
IMHO the targeting is a factor of too many things to list here but in addition to the above, here are some additional considerations:
- Specific visitor search history + Region + Time of day
- Site/page level of authority on topic
- Current available topic ad inventory
- Current topic publisher competition (dilution)
- Phase of the moon..
In simple terms, it is a marriage of visitor/topic/advertiser and publisher factors, the possible combinations are astronomical.
For example - I have some of my sites as links on one of my iGoogle tabs; my main site is actually a link on my browser toolbar. If I click on that link, I might see an older version of my page (such as from the last time I looked at it), with really weird ads. But if I refresh it, I get the latest version of my page, along with proper ads.
I also notice this behavior sometimes when Comcast's cache seems to be acting up and not refreshing like it should be.
