T w e n t y S i d e d
So I decided to try GoogleAds on this site. They are ugly, but small and easy to use.
Since last night the dang thing has been advertising zoot suits, stilts, and nutrition guides. What the heck? Is it that hard for them to figure out what my site is all about? Do the words Geek Culture, RolePlaying, anime, and Videogames not ring a bell? Those words are on every page, and every image is tagged accordingly. This site has a decent focus and there is just no reason the targeting should be so totally off.
I’ll give it another day or two, but if it’s still advertising random stuff nobody cares about then I’ll pull the ad. Since GA doesn’t offer any direct way to guide the content, the only thing it has to go on is the text on my site. If it can’t make sense of that, then the whole thing is useless.
I mean, z00t suits? Crimey.
LATER: They already have all of my text cached, so the content of the front page shouldn’t matter. But just in case it does, let’s see if this does anything:
Wow. That was like having Geek Tourette’s Syndrome.
If it can’t find my target demographic from that then the thing isn’t worth the 28,800 pixels I’m letting it use on my page.
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Oh man, “Lord Ringtone” is one of the ads now, presumably because of DM of the Rings. That’s pretty funny.
From what I know about it, getting Google ads to offer relevant results to your site content takes a bit of tweaking and pruning.
For what it’s worth I didn’t even notice them until I went looking for them.
You realize, of course, that you just said “zoot suits” in a post. Twice if the system can figure out what “z00t” means. If it was just advertising them at random before, it’ll be doing it deliberately now. You’re doomed, dude.
Angie
Hmmm, “Lord Ringtone” is gone and now I’m seeing a halloween promo and something for “stilts crazy legs” Strange. This post, at least, has one that says “Dice, Dice, and more Dice” and a bunch of advertising links, which is actually somewhat relevant.
Trying to tune Google ads is a losing game. Their engine gets utterly bewildered by a normal blog content (link above leads to Tracytoday which also confuses Google).
I think the only way to make this work is to use something called “Blogads”. Try to see what Instapundit uses.
It took me a while to get the ads to stop showing exactly the opposite kind of stuff that I wanted to show on my blog. You just have to go into the AdSense interface and block certain websites from showing ads. Eventually, it’ll catch up and figure out what you actually want on the site.
It amuses me greatly to scroll up and see that the second ad in the adwords block is titled “Don’t Sign Up For AdWords”
As far as I can figure out, the ads are tailored to the specific article you’re currently reading. So, typing this comment, basically all the ads I see are related to advertising online, which _is_ the topic of this particular article; looking at the comments of virtual villagers, the ads seem to have caught on to the italisized word “breeding” that occurs in the text: 3 ads are related to breeding guinea pigs or dogs. So the problem seems to be that the ads’ focus is too narrow – they should look at all recent content, in order to target your usual audience, and not just at one article at a time.