AdSense consistency

[David]

I've been running AdSense ads on CADTutor now for just over a year and I have been more than happy with the income. However, I have found it very difficult to get AdSense to deliver consistently targeted results.

I can see from my AdSense stats that my income goes up when ads are correctly targeted - in other words, I get ads with the word "AutoCAD" in the title. The problem is that I only seem to get such ads for a few days each month and for the rest of the time the ads are broadly relevant but not specific. For example, at the moment, I'm getting ads which are to do with CAD drawings but which seem to be targeted to the keyword "electrical" - see image below. Now, this word does not appear anywhere on my site, so why am I getting these ads?

Today, I gave my home page a complete clean-up. Removing all <font> tags :"> , adding <h1> and <h2> etc. I'll have to wait to see if it makes a difference. This shouldn't cause the strange results I'm seeing but it should help to target my main keyword.

Any comments or suggestions?

Tom and James; do your ads vary during a month or are they pretty consistent?

http://www.websitearchitecture.co.uk/watson/postimages/adsense.gif http://www.websitearchitecture.co.uk/watson/postimages/adsense-1.gif

Later the same day, the ads show as the image on the right. This time my main keywords are nowhere in sight. :angry:

[James]

Hi David

I do sometimes get odd adverts but at the moment my homepage is serving up perfectly themed ads. I'll keep an eye on it and report anything strange.

Sometimes I notice that AdSense serves up ads related to previous pictures viewed and not the current one.

In the example below, you will see some lovely red tomatoes, but the ads are related to screws (not that type! :"> ). Thing is, I do have pictures of screws on the site and I reckon that on occasions AdSense is referring back to previous sessions rather than the current one. I am assuming AdSense simply reads the source code of each page - I have checked the source and there is nothing about screws there. This doesn't happen very often, but enough for me to notice. I wonder if there is a cache somewhere along the line that is not clearing.

http://www.websitearchitecture.co.uk/barker/forum/tomatoes.jpg

In your case, although the word electrical is not relevant, I notice that the ads do contain relevant words: CAD and drawing for example. So in your case I don't think there is necessarily an error, although the dominance of electrical seems more than a coincidence I agree.

[David]

Yes, the ads are not completely wrong; CAD and AutoCAD are often the theme but my competitors sites seem to get better and more consistent keyword targeting than I do. I have no idea where the "electrical" keyword comes from. The word doesn't appear on my site nor has it done in recent history so it can't be a cache issue. There is always a delay of maybe a few days after content is changed until the ads catch up but I just can't help feeling that there's something wrong somewhere. I have contacted Google about it in the past and they have been very non-specific in their comments.

Oh well. :rolleyes:

[Tom]

Comments

1) I often have this problem. Sometimes I have been able to resolve it and sometimes not. The 2 approaches are logic and experiment.
2) Google are aware of the problem and hope to lessen it by allowing Adwords users to target their ads to specific websites. I fear advertisers will be too lazy to do this. A few times recently advertisers have written asking me for links and I have suggested trying this - but I am not aware of any having done so.
3) I guess that the explanation for the electrical drawing ads is as follows:

- Cadtutor is not quite high enough in the SERPs for Autocad
- but the site has reasonable rankings for both Autocad and Drawings
- the electrical folk are bidding on the Autocad + Drawings combination because (1) they don't get the targeting they want with Autocad on its own (2) not enough people are bidding on the 3 word combination of Autocad + Drawing + Electrical

If this is correct then it might pay you to zero the keyword density of Drawing and increase the keyword density of Autocad synonyms. The obvious candidate here is CAD on its own. Other possibilities are Computer Aided and Design.

It is odd that a Yahoo Overture search on Autocad brings results for Auto and Cad but not for Autocad.

I have had a page on Hotels lurking on my site for years. Hardly anyone goes there and even fewer find something to click (the original idea was that some hotels have good gardens, which ought to be included, and some people would like to stay in hotels with good gardens and that their owners do a little advertising). That's history, but the Adsense deliveries are very curious:

Hotels index (http://www.gardenvisit.com/h/hotels.htm) The keyword density for hotels is high and the density for gardens is low. But all the ads are garden-related [the page used to be called Garden Hotels. I changed it to Luxury Hotels to try and get rid of the garden ads. It did not work]
Cheshire hotels (http://www.gardenvisit.com/luxuryhotels/Cheshire.htm) This 'County' page produces good hotel-related adverts
Rowton Hall (http://www.gardenvisit.com/luxuryhotels/rowtonhallhotel.htm) A page like this often produces a single advert for day trips to Los Angeles or Sydney.

I noted the above when wondering if I should do some more work on this section - and was put off doing anything!

[James]

Has anyone experimented with AdWords rather than AdSense - ie be the advertiser rather than the ad host?

I'm thinking of allocating an AdWords budget of say £20, and using it for research to see how the keyword bidding system works and if it has a knock on effect on my own revenues.

[David]

Originally posted by Tom Turner@May 18 2005, 7:25 am
3) I guess that the explanation for the electrical drawing ads is as follows:

- Cadtutor is not quite high enough in the SERPs for Autocad
- but the site has reasonable rankings for both Autocad and Drawings
- the electrical folk are bidding on the Autocad + Drawings combination because (1) they don't get the targeting they want with Autocad on its own (2) not enough people are bidding on the 3 word combination of Autocad + Drawing + Electrical

If this is correct then it might pay you to zero the keyword density of Drawing and increase the keyword density of Autocad synonyms. The obvious candidate here is CAD on its own. Other possibilities are Computer Aided and Design.

Tom, your theory sounds convincing but doesn't work out in practice. A Google search for "AutoCAD" alone places CADTutor 6th, a search for "AutoCAD + drawings" has CADTutor nowhere in sight - at least not on the first five pages.

Here's my keyword density analysis from the tool at www.seochat.com (http://www.seochat.com)

http://www.websitearchitecture.co.uk/watson/postimages/keyword.gif

It does make me think that I need to change my keywort strategy. Currently, my keywords have been devised in order to attract people to the site and I've been quite successful in doing that. A search for "autocad tutorials" always brings me up first or second and a search for "autocad forum" brings me top. That's all absolutely fantastic BUT it is obvious that there are few (if any) AdWord bidders for those particular combinations and "autocad" alone is too broad, hence the inconsistency. I need to include keywords that will attract the sort of ads I want. So, I need to include "training" and "sales". These are good commercial keywords and in combination with "autocad", should bring the ads I want.

What do you think?

James, I think doing some AdWords research is a great idea. I have been meaning to do it myself for some time but haven't got round to it.

[Tom]

You are right about my theory -sunk!

And you are right about the proposed change to your keyword strategy - there is no point in winning a race which does not offer any prizes.

Re those odd electrical drawing ads: it might be worth a few telephone calls to the marketing depts of the companies. They won't want to be on your site any more than you want to have them there, so they might tell you what keywords they are bidding on.

Another possibility is that the Autocad advertisers you do want are not bidding on Autocad as a standalone keyword, and that you are not targeting whatever other keywords they are bidding on.

[David]

Yes, that's why I think "autocad + training" and "autocad + sales" are the keyword combinations I should be targeting.

[Tom]

You could be onto something with autocad + training.

The Adwords figures are:

Autocad £4.64
Autocad + Training £5.64
Autocad + Sales £0.04
Autocad + Tutorial £0.55

[David]

Surprising that "sales" is so low - maybe I'll ditch that one. I may have a contact I can ask about their keywords.

[David]

OK, these are exactly the ads I want on the site:

http://www.websitearchitecture.co.uk/watson/postimages/adsense-2.gif

How did I do that?

Well I'm currently running a test. Those ads were not taken from my home page but from an almost identical copy of it. The only difference is that I have added some syndicated content to the new page. You can see it here (http://www.cadtutor.net/articles.html). The articles are delivered in the same way as the Google ads. I just insert some javascript, play around with formatting and there they are. The nice thing is that they introduce lots of useful and current keywords to the page. :D

The only thing I don't like is the "NEW" flag on the articles - I've contacted the providers and asked them it it's possible to change this.

I'm keeping a careful eye on the ads on both pages for a few days before implementing the articles on the home page but it's looking good at the moment.

[David]

OK, well it seems obvious that I have very little control over the ads that appear on my site. These are from the home page, a week or so after a major improvement in the trageting of my desired keywords :(

http://www.websitearchitecture.co.uk/watson/postimages/adsense-3.gif

I would love to know what causes this major shift for this site. Obviously the keywords that generate these ads are on the page and the ads are not simply random but the priority thing is weird.

[James]

I've sussed something out about why Google Ads sometimes contains unexpected adverts.

I am currently redesigning my site, and have been testing it on my live server (hidden from public view though).

As I was testing CSS layout rather than content, I just threw some random text on the page. The random text was about "web design", I just took it from a site I happened to have open.

As expected, Google Ads served up ads relating to web design as this was the only text on the page.

However - here's the problem! When I changed the text to stock photography related (H1, title, paras were all about stock photos) Google Ads continued to serve up ads about web design! No amount of refreshing would stop it happening.

The only way round it was to change the file name of the test page. Once I did this, Google Ads started correctly serving up stock photo ads!

Conclusion: somewhere, somehow, Google is caching the content of the page the first time it sees it and continues to serve ads related to that page even after the content has changed. I think it is only reading each URL once and then caching it. I don't know whether this is stored in a cookie or in a cache at Google.

[David]

Very interesting James and it makes absolute sense. The page data will be recorded and cached each time google bot visits your site I imagine, so you'd have to wait until the next google bot visit before the ads will change.

It would be an interesting exercise to keep monitoring that page to see when the ads change and then see if it corresponds to a bot visit.