AdSense Ad Choosing?

How does AdSense choose which ads it will show? I always assumed that it generates a keyword list from your site and then rotates the ads among the most expensive ones.

Does anybody here want to speculate?

 

I don't know, but until I went in and checked the urls of the ads showing on my site, I had no clue how many irrelevant ads were showing. I think I've nearly filled up the 200 url limit on blocked urls for adsense.

 

Why would you bother?

The only reason I can see for URL blocking is to prevent showing ads for your chief competitor. Other than that what do you care about the relevancy? All you want is for someone to click on the ad. Relevancy is Google's business.

 

I know my target audience and have also almost filled the 200 blocked limit - especially on our youth focused site

You would be suprised (maybe not) by the crap that some people run adwords on.

 

Why wouldn't you bother?!!

Relevancy is paramount here. If someone does a search for a high output alternator and comes to my site, and the ads are for marine industrial circuit breakers or chinese made mopeds, why the heck would someone have any interest in clicking on the ads? If the ads are not relevant to the page content, let alone any content anywhere on my site, then they don't get clicked on and I don't make money.

 

I can see how some might find a low cost keyword and display an ad for something that should fall under a high cost keyword. Some might think, why should I pay $1.00 for 1 good impression when I can pay $1.00 for 20 not so good impressions?

 

I have a bunch of pages keyed around 'free guitar tabs' that for the most part have ads targeted around the bands for those tabs or other sheet music related ads, but occasionally I'll get ads related to 'hanging tabs' or something of that nature.

IMO as long as there's an ad there that's all I really care about. I don't have the patience to go block all the urls for 'hanging tab' vendors. But still I would think that having 'guitar' in between 'free' and 'tabs' would be enough to filter this out...guess not though.

 

It' just depends on how much money you want to make. My ctr has improved noticeably since filtering out a boatload of crap urls.

 

I will look into that and I will edit pages so they will not contains to many irrelevant keywords.

 

That's an assumption. It translates to saying that your visitors are all interested in nothing whatever in the wide world save the topic of the page they're reading.

Mind, irrelevance does probably lower the odds, but I'd scarcely say "they don't get clicked on". Speaking as an Amazon Associate who, on several sites, sells narrowly targetted books from a hand-selected list, I am amazed by the things that show up on my sales lists (from folk who have gone on into Amazon after my initial sale). "Assume nothing" seems a safe motto for sales.

 

You don't know that for sure. You don't know what they searched on to get to your site in the first place. Maybe your site is the non relevant site and what they really are interested in is "marine industrial circuit breakers".

If you make everything dead relevant why would they click away when your site already has all the answers?

 

I never claimed my site has 'all the answers', it's just well optimized for many of the key words relevant to Fords, Trucks, 4x4's and my sponsors. All I know is that this month, my ctr's are up and the revenue is increased. I'd guestimate the increase to be somewhere around the 40% mark.

Heck, I never even imagined anyone would click on the ads at all, let alone do so as much as they are. Now I just have to get my truck done so I can spend time updating the website.

 

I just wish I could get the stupid thing to display relevant ads on a higher percentage of the pages of Fort Liberty.

Or, just to display firearms-related ads on every page.