A good thing you may say, as you'll get adverts relevant to the uk if you are surfing there, but if I surf to one of my pages with google ads from work, I get Norwegian ads sometimes, as our proxy server is in Norway, although there is no Norwegian content on my pages.
Google can only do the geotargeting based on the IP address it sees, as described in the AdSense help. Nothing you can do about it. I get the same thing at work -- only in my case it's US-based ads, because even though our office is in Canada our connection to the Internet is through an access point in the US. Anything else would require some kind of a cookie or some other way of identifying what country you're actually in.
You can set your preferred language in the javascript. google_language="en"; This variable is not documented. So, before you use it, fire off an email to Adsense support asking if what you are doing is OK.
It doesn't really bother me, 'cos I won't be clicking my own ads, but I thought it a good example and might explain why some people get some very strange ads displayed whilst they are surfing pages with adsense on them. I've zipped an email away to google though, just to find out. Thanks for the input.
Funny, you guys jumped all over me before for suggesting that. I only recommend setting google_language if AdSense guesses wrong when it determines what the page's language is. This may happen, for example, if you are serving multiple languages from the same URL and you can't switch to using different URLs for the different languages. Or if you have fragments of other languages in a page. In this particular case, however, there's nothing actually wrong with the way the ads are being served. Surfers from Norway will be interested in seeing ads in Norwegian. Forcing your pages to be shown in English just because you are coming through a proxy server based in Norway may do a disservice to your visitors, so think about it carefully.
Hi Eric. I don't actually see any Norwegian visitors to the site and would be very surprised if I did, so I don't think forcing to English would be a problem, but it's an interesting point isn't it? I'll wait to see what google recommend. Cheers, Dave
Remember that the AdSense algorithms try to choose the highest-paying ads for you, and if they're showing ads in Norwegian then chances are that they're paying more and/or have a higher clickthrough rate... why block them?
OK, I hear what you're saying, but I don't think i'd get anyone in the UK clicking a Norwegian ad anyway, so the fact they're highest paying doesn't really matter too much. If the ad's in Norwegian, then the page behind it will be too. Swedish would be a whole different matter.
But people in the UK won't be seeing the Norwegian ads. People in the UK will see ads in English. Your situation is different because you're going through a Norwegian proxy server. But most people in the UK don't do that, they end up with IP addresses that are geocoded to the UK. Use the AdSense preview tool to see what I mean, you can see what kind of ads show up depending on what country the visitor is surfing from.
That's true, but lots of people surf from their company PC (I get twice the traffic midweek as at weekends) and lots of people here in the UK work for foreign based european companies, and depending on their structure, may well be running their web browser sessions through a 'foreign' proxy, so it may not be as rare as you might think. Anyway, I just thought it might be another interesting angle on why people sometimes see strange adverts that they wouldn't generally expect. Cheers, Dave
Eric, you suggested it as a way of getting rid of PSAs. Which didn't stand a chance of working. Let's not argue about this. Sorry, if you feel I'm being tough on you. Not my intention at all. Just here do the same thing you are, helping users.