Hi all, I'm fairly new to this whole AdSense thing, but my site has been running for about 3 years. I've got keyword meta data in my html files (although there seems to be divided opinion over the value of that), and the TEXT ads that AdSense inserts are always relevant, but the IMAGE ads are all over the place. Anyone able to shed any light on why that might be the case? My site (http://www.audio2u.com) is a podcast site. I'm a professional audio engineer, and I produce 3 podcasts of my own each week. It used to be more than that, but I'm trying to cut back on the habit. However, a couple of podcasts which I've stopped producing still have their pages up, as the content is still current. So, in all there are 5 podcast pages, plus a couple of other "generic" pages on the site. The 2 photography pages generally get photography-related image ads, but my 2 podcasts which are ABOUT audio, the images ads there as almost random. If anyone can help me improve the ads being generated/inserted, I'd be most appreciative. Cheers, Bruce.
Someone might be buying inventory on your site. In which case, their ads wouldn't necessarily make sense to you, but it makes sense for them to advertise on your site. Check your stats (Advance Reports; select "Show data by targeting type - contextual or site"); are you getting a lot of "site targeted" impressions? If not, then it's just ad relevancy problems, which you may be able to solve by using section targeting. Find more info on it below: https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=23168
Jack, Thanks for the reply. Not sure what you mean by "buying inventory on your site". My content is free. I can't imagine why anyone would specifically be buying ad space on my site. While I'm moving in excess of 80 GB a month (because of the MP3 files), I only see about 6000 (html) page views in that time. However, your link to the stuff about Google section links is very interesting and I will definitely be implementing that! So, thanks again! Cheers, Bruce.
You can check your report stats to make sure. Reports --> Advance Reports --> Show data by (select "individual ad" from the pull down menu" and click "Show data by targeting type - contextual or site") If someone is "site targeting" (that is, buying ad space on your site via Adwords), it will show up under "site", while "contextual" is your normal text ads.
What he means is that someone could be buying ads from google that match what your site content is about.
OK, well it appears that yes, there are some sites buying ads on my site, as there are "site" listings for each day. I've added the "section" codes to my html pages. Must admit, I still don't understand a lot of this stuff. I'll learn slowly, no doubt. If anyone has the time and the inclination to look at my site, I'd certainly appreciate it. http://www.audio2u.com The main pages I want to get the banner ads happening on are: index podcasts buildingthepod fuzzylogic shuttersinc sinelanguage But as previously mentioned, the relevance of the image ads is currently all over the shop. Any idea how long it will take for that code to start making a difference to the ads being inserted? Cheers, Bruce.
Well, if those banner image ads are site-targeted (i.e. someone is buying inventory directly on your site) it wouldn't really matter what you did, because, you know, the buyer wants to advertise on your site, and it's up to him to advertise what he wants to advertise, so it could be baby diapers for all the control you have. If you hate those image ads, and they're the only ones that keep showing up, you can add the advertiser's URL to your URL filter list, and that would keep him from advertising further on your site. Although image ads are based on CPM, so it doesn't matter if anyone clicks on those ads are not, because it's cost per impression -- you get paid for every impression, not when someone clicks. But anyways, maybe you should consider changing your image ads to text ads only, that way you would do away with the image banner and have text ads up there. In any case, unless your site is a heavy traffic site and you can afford to be paid per impression, you should always opt for text ads, as they pay more, and have a much more diverse selection of ads for your visitors to click. The default setting, as I recall, is text AND image, but you can force it to just show text ads by choosing that option when you re-generate the Adsense code in the Adsense wizard.
Thanks Jack. I didn't realise that the text ads paid better than the image ads. Like I said... bit of a noob with all this marketing stuff. Well, looks like it's back to the drawing board. Cheers, Bruce.
Sorry to tack this on, but I was reading over this VERY helpful information, and was hoping for a bit of an example clarification myself. I have yet to see an image advertisement in the Digital Point forum. Do you know if the digital point forum is set to text only? Or is it possible that there simply aren't any image adds showing up at this point?
The source code doesn't actually say if DP is text only (curious, as it usually tells you if the ad code is text only or text and image) but in any case, I can vouch that I HAVE seen image ads here quite often.
Thank you very much for your help Jack. I do appreciate the info. Where would one normally find that information in the source code? I am entirely new to ad sense, so I'm afraid I'm not fully versed in ad sense specific coding yet.
Normally Google tags your source code with the default google_ad_type = "text_image"; if you had your codes set to text AND image. If it was just image, it would just say image, etc. As mentioned, DP's codes don't have that usual tag, which is weird. Premium publishers have their own versions of the code, though...
Ah. Well perhaps any ad that does not match the setting of google_ad_type is screeened out, and by not including the code, it allows both image and text ads, due to there being no filter. Has anyone tried this? I did actually see an image ad the other day, so now I have my own data.