Whenever I visit a fairly new page I consistently get ads for Google Adwords.
It used to be that those pages had some sort of general ads on them, often four different text ads (in a banner). Most often they were fairly well targeted to the general site theme. However, since about a week or so I am really seeing a push of "full width" ads for Google Adwords.
About a week ago I killed a lot of my Adwords campaigns (moving them to separate accounts), my normal Google account is now spending about 5% of the Adwords-costs that I used to have.
Is that related? Or is this just a general trend? Is Google buying up all the generic space? Or am I getting personalized ads? What kind of generic ads do you get?
Does Google have personalized ads? Would that make sense?
Aha, affiliate referrals, that would make sense. Lots of money involved in getting new Adsense publishers and advertisers .... it's showing the ad below the thread now. Should I click or not .... click or not .... I'll just try to guess the URL
John
Followup: It's not an affiliate referral, it's directly from Google.
Then again, what stops them from using the search network from simply advertising their services?
You are starting to scare me here. I doubt anything stops Google from advertising super cheap on their own ad network, potentially bumping off higher paying ads or ads in specific categories where google ranks higher ...
But by bumping off higher-paying ads they're actually paying for the space (opportunity cost) . By grabbing a whole wide Adsense block instead of allowing 4 "paid" advertisements they're losing the money which a potential click would bring. It's not cheap.
Anyway, I can't log out on this browser, it keeps logging me in to either the groups or gmail, grrr! I'll have to check on my laptop later on. It's still showing Adwords-ads "everywhere" I look (not always though). Sigh.
Well, something is definitely up with AdSense: for the past 4-6 weeks, my CTR has been a paltry 0.5%, with 0.1% routinely popping up. Pathetic waste of space.
My typical CTR used to be around 1.5-3%, depending on the day. Not bad for a site aimed at webmasters!
Ok, I still see them all over, even when definitely not logged into my account (and no cookies set). Sneaky buggers! Are they just targeting my IPs? Do I really have to dig out my proxy server lists
My CTR is fine, can't complain on that - Pierre, perhaps your CTR dove because of the DoS-protection?
My CTR is fine, can't complain on that - Pierre, perhaps your CTR dove because of the DoS-protection?
Ah yes, I thought of that. My only reply is that the AdSense bot was all over the site unimpeded (but proper Googlebot was blocked). It wouldn't make sense to have bad ad targeting if Mediabot was fine.