One thing I am noticing recently is adsense is showing the ads for the topics I am personally interested in on my site (as opposed to just contexual ads). For example on one of the pages I suddenly started seeing ads related to webhosting when that page has nothing to do with webhosting. What I realized that I was doing some webhosting reseach myself and if Google was aware of it and followed me around. This is definitely a very effective twist to contexual. I can see ads I am interested in irrespective of the page I am on. Has anybody experienced this? (I experienced this at least related to 2 more search subjects which are neither related to my site not to each other)
Behavioural targeting is definitely a hot topic, though I don't think it is built into adsense at this time. I've seen webhosting ads pop up in adsense very often because many pages contain some content that webhosting people target: Apache buttons, CMS names, php error messages
I've actually noticed this too. It may have been during times I'm signed into my gmail or google adsense account. I know google are trialing the personalized search... perhaps they're extending that arm into adsense. Because I've seen some very interesting (to me) ads shown on pages which so far had very little content because I was building them. And they weren't at all "on topic" either. That google cookie seems to think it's pretty clever eh?
The others ads I have seen are not related to just web related stuff. I have seen completely differeent ads. What I am wondering, has google started into "post search" ad. I learned this buzzword first here www.seroundtable.com/archives/003379.html Roy Shkedi from AlmondNet. - 40% of internet ad dollars are spent on search engines where people spend less than 5% of their online time. - On the Majority of the sites where people spend the other 95% of their online time - the ad supported content is sold for very low CPMs. - After people search (post search), AlmondNet presents people with additional paid search as on the sites where they previously search on. - So you search at Google for example, and then they go to a site on a different site a day later, they see an ad for their search at Google in a banner ad at the top of a site they are visiting. - Web users benefit from relevant ads while their privacy is maintained - Paid search providers benefit - Profile providers earn an incremental new revenue stream - Publishers' sites received a higher return on their ad space - Click originating from behaviorally targeted ads convert 5 to 10 times better than clicks from non-targeted ads. - The ads are targeted based on a recent demonstration of purchase intent versus what a person happened to read.
In an interview with Google's Schmidt on http://news.yahoo.com/s/zd/20060317/tc_zd/173753 "Schmidt said Google ads are very targetable, because Google knows a lot about the person surfing, especially if they have used personal search or logged into a service such as Gmail."
yes i experienced it before. i was searching for something and then saw an adsense ad related to what i just searched and not the content of the site. very interesting.
I actually just noticed this too yesterday on my site.. I was testing out a new program for my site and clicked on one article... got the right kind of ads.. then clicked to another article (completely different topic) and got the same ads. Maybe they are playing with behavioral targeting? Not a bad idea in my opinion, I just think that text link ads need to be relevant to what the person is reading because thats what they are interested in right now, not what they were interested in 5 minutes ago. maybe I'm wrong.
Today I have heard that google recently told adwords customers that they are using search data for targeting. And that was an event in Europe, so probably - and very different from what my first suggestion in this thread was - behavioural targeting has been tested for a pretty long time on the US market already.
In my opinion this should improve (even if only slightly) performance of Adsense for publishers. The question is... if a user searchs more frequently using low value keywords / keyphrases and visits your pages with higher paying keywords. Will the improved CRT of behavioural targetting equal or surpass what you would have got without it?