Yesterday, a representative from AdSense called me on the phone to provide some one-on-one consultation on how I can improve my earnings. I have several websites I run through AdSense, but we focused on my largest website. My primary concern was too many irrelevant ads. Even though over the years, AdSense seemed to have improved its selection of ads, I still find a lot of irrelevant ads. She explained that the way AdSense chooses which ads to display is not entirely based on contextual relevancy. That is, an advertiser can force their way into your creative simply by paying a lot of money. And in fact, I think that's why we're seeing so many Groupon ads these days. She also said that Google monitors what words you enter into their Search engine to find out what you're most interested in, and will display related ads on any AdSense creative you view. So, if you do a lot of searching for porn, AdSense will display singles ads on any other AdSense website you visit. AdSense also shows location-based ads. So if you live in Los Angeles, it will force some Los Angeles-focused ads on any AdSense creative you see. AdSense still tries to predict what the overall eCPM will be when showing these irrelevant ads, and still tries to balance things out so that it doesn't cause a huge drop in performance. But while that might explain why I'm seeing a lot of irrelevant ads on my site, I still notice that AdSense mismatches the keywords on my page with the wrong audience. For example, my largest website is focused on cemeteries, specifically for genealogical research. Yet when AdSense sees the word "cemetery" it thinks my audience is about funerals, and displays a lot of funeral ads. So, the AdSense representative advised me to use more "genealogy" keywords in my content. We discussed several more things which I documented in a new article on my AdSense blog... http://www.moneywithadsense.com/2010/09/adsense-phone-call-consultation.html Hope this info helps.
interesting talk. I see nothing I wasn't aware of, but it's interesting nonetheless, are you earning over 10,000 a month via adsense or do google phone publishers and not only the big guns?
Irrelevant ads are a nusiance, and I am pretty much stuck with some of mine since I have adsense on several quite different websites. Its one of the main reasons I'm messing with a family friendly ad network in my spare time - a LOT of Google ads aren't family friendly and they have absolutely no publisher controls to stop those besides competitive ad filter, and obviously they are too big to put any sort of restrictions or moderating on their advertisers. But ads that are irrelevant to my children's sites are actually quite relevant to my other site and there is no per-site filter so I just have to suck it up and change my own content to try not to get irrelevant ads. Dictionaries are by far the worst for keyword advertising. I have a lot of pages with food related content on, they get dieting ads and there's no way I can drop hints I'd prefer cooking or recipe ads. I hate dieting ads with a passion, they are all in your face ugly things and you see the same ones on hundreds of sites at once. Its like Evony, but aimed at fat people.
RumpledElf, certainly there are some types of content and audiences that just isn't going to monetize well with AdSense. Either you have to find the right advertisers, or just face the fact that the website you started might not be a good business decision. I've launched many websites only to later discover they were bad business decisions, and therefor I abandoned them and stopped working on them. SO instead of racking your brain on how to get more relevant ads from AdSense, the fact is that you've probably already done everything you can do, and you're just not going improve it any further. And by the way, if you ever choose to abandon a website, simply park the domain on AdSense for Domains, I've found that AFD can sometimes earn you more money with an abandoned domain than that website would monetize with AdSense for Content. Googl, obviously disclosing my AdSense earnings is a violation of AdSense's program policies.
Steve Johnson, disclosing your gross earnings with adsense is NOT a violation of AdSense's program policies, check it out!
Actually the plan of attack at the moment is to get the traffic much higher on my child-friendly websites (of which I have a fair few now). They do earn money from adsense, just not *much* - the primary site is just my personal homepage that I stick stuff on occasionally so there's no business in it at all. The money is nice though, you're right that there really isn't any more SEO type stuff that can be done. They're low CTR low cost keyword sites by definition. However, early next year I hope to have my family friendly ad network live and I can use my own sites as a launching point for those There's plenty of websites out there that won't even touch adsense because of the quality of the ads so I'm sure there's a niche for moderated ads.