I think we’ve all had the problem before as webmasters. You know, you add a new page or create a new website and the Google Adsense ads are completely off topic and irrelevant. And we’ve heard the standard solutions to fix the problem, and in many cases they work as intended. The problem is this: What if highly relevant ads are not generating the profit, the CTR, and the interest of your visitors?

This is a current problem I am struggling with. The site in question is what many would consider an authority. It gets good traffic, has plenty of natural backlinks, great organic search positions, and of course a significant amount of traffic. The problem is that the people visiting the page are not interested in the ads that Google believes should be displayed. The ads I think should be displayed pay ten times as much and receive twice the CTR when they are displayed. The problem is displaying them permanently.

For this issue, let me explain what I did try. Keep in mind I am trying to walk a tight rope here. I want Google to display the ads I want while still preserving my superior search engine positions. This is not an easy thing to do, trust me.

First, I of course applied the proper weight to the content I want Adsense to read in order to determine which ads to display. I enclosed the paragraphs with the comments below.

<!–– google_ad_section_start ––>
This is where content references to the ads I want displayed are.
<!–– google_ad_section_end ––>

Ok, this did not work. So I added some additional keyword rich content. Still no luck, but my search positions remained unchanged which was great. Then I decided to use my ability to ignore the content which was causing the too relevant ads to display. I used the code below.

<!–– google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) ––>
This is where the content is I want ignored.
<!–– google_ad_section_end ––>

Unfortunately I still had no luck. Keep in mind that I am trying to preserve my search positions while still displaying Adsense advertisements that my users want. So I can’t change the page title, META Description, or a good portion of the other text which Adsense weighs too heavily in determining which ads to display.

In cases like mine, I truly believe there is a fundamental flaw in how Google determines which types of ads to display. Even if I can get appropriate Adsense ads to temporarily display, my CTR goes up and so does revenue. Unfortunately Google reverts back to the same ads that my users do not want to see. This brings into question the fact that Adsense advertisements that are too relevant actually may be counterproductive.

At this point I am faced with contacting the Adsense Team directly. Hopefully a human review of past data, from a Google employee, will support my claim that displaying relevant Adsense ads should be tweaked in this case. In the end, all parties would be happy including the advertisers, Google, my visitors, and of course myself.

If anyone has encountered this problem and would like to chime in with their opinions please do. If/when Adsense contacts me about the relevancy display issue, I will be sure to post back.

Tags: display relevant adsense ads, irrelevant adsense ads, relevancy

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 18th, 2009 at 12:05 am and is filed under Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.