One of the biggest problems with the Adsense system is that you don't have any control over which ads are displayed. Google automatically analyzes your page and shows the ads that it thinks are relevant to your page content.
The problem is, sometimes Google guesses wrong. Sometimes the Adsense ads that Google chooses to show have no relation to your site.
For example, I once kept getting an ad for deodorant on my site for bird feeders. I later realized that the brand of the deodorant was Dove—which is also a type of a bird. Ok, I can see how an automated system might make this mistake.
In trying to figure out how the big Google brain works, I discovered two things.
Ads are Influenced Strongly by the Page url
On another website, I experimented with seeing what kinds of ads show if I rename the page, keeping the content exactly the same.
Not only did the ads change immediately, but I noticed that even when I made very small changes to the url, it affected the types of ads that were shown.
When I had the words "kinkadechristmastrees" in the url, a lot of the ads had to do with trees:
tree pruning
buy hickory trees
When I changed the url to kinkadechristmas.html, I got ads relating to church:
Christian dating
God at work
St. Brigid's Parish
church yellowpages
etc.
These results make you wonder if Google reads the url from the right to left.
I also noticed that Google gets smarter as time goes by. Later looking again at the kinkadechristmastrees.html page, I now saw these types of results:
artificial Christmas trees
outdoor Christmas trees
Home and garden cheap
(and yes, there was one Thomas Kinkade Christmas ornament ad).
Google Associates Ads with a Specific Url
I have another website about dolls. When I first created my Christmas tree site, I copied everything from the doll site and then edited the content.
Unfortunately I had the Adsense code on my pages when I copied them. I noticed that the Adsense ads on my Christmas tree site all had to do with dolls no matter how many times I hit refresh.
I tried many things to get the Google ads to be more relevant; removing the code and then adding it back again, getting new code from Google under a new channel, etc. Nothing worked until I made a small change to the page url. This caused Google to re-evaluate the content.
Eventually I suppose Google would have updated correctly, but that could take a long time and I wasn't willing to wait. One forum post said that a guy had the wrong ads on his site for a week.
I noticed that the ads were correct on the other pages of my site. So this leads me to believe that once you add the code to a page, Google "marries" the ad content with the page url, at least initially.
Lessons Learned
The things I've learned about getting Adsense ads to be relevant are:
- Try to make your page url relate to the ads you want.
- Don't put your Adsense code on your page until it is totally set up as far as your content, meta tags, etc.
- If you did happen to get Google ads before you were totally set up and they are not relevant to your page, change your page url to reset them.
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