Adsense: Interest based ads

With the announcement of 'Interest adverts' (Official Google Blog: Making ads more interesting) appearing on adsense Im supprised it hasn't been mentioned here.

Anyone else opting out?
https://www.google.com/adsense/interest-ads-edit


I get between 80 & 90% on my traffic coming from search engines. I want them seeing/clicking on ads relevant to what they searched for, not Googles perception of what they might be interested in.

Can't see how seeing the same 'interest' adverts on every site (instead of contents related) is a good thing? It's just going to lead to ad blindness.

It should be interesting to see how this works out. One would think that on niche sites it might not work that well, since the user's statement of *focus* (i.e. the site he chose to visit at the moment) on a niche site may be significantly different than the *aggregate focus* based on everything Google has tracked for him/her.

An *interest skewing* process could be more effective, in which I would define as displaying ads within the same niche as the site, but skewing/biasing them in the direction of user interest.

• An example might be a user who visits a "gaming" forum covering all systems & games.
• This particular user Google has tracked as almost exclusively viewing content related to xBox.
• While he is on the general gaming forum, the ads that are displayed would still be about gaming, but would be skewed towards xBox.

If the same user was also an animal enthusiast and spent 40% of his browsing time on puppy websites versus 20% on gaming websites, I'm not sure that displaying a puppy ad on the gaming site would work out long term... unless it was games about puppies ads. I could, of course, be completely wrong, and I'm sure Google did some market testing long before they ever rolled out this program!

I also think this is going to be a crap experiment by Google. But we just have to wait and see how good or bad it's going to cause to publishers.

Originally Posted by Joe Ward

It should be interesting to see how this works out. One would think that on niche sites it might not work that well, since the user's statement of *focus* (i.e. the site he chose to visit at the moment) on a niche site may be significantly different than the *aggregate focus* based on everything Google has tracked for him/her.

An *interest skewing* process could be more effective, in which I would define as displaying ads within the same niche as the site, but skewing/biasing them in the direction of user interest.

• An example might be a user who visits a "gaming" forum covering all systems & games.
• This particular user Google has tracked as almost exclusively viewing content related to xBox.
• While he is on the general gaming forum, the ads that are displayed would still be about gaming, but would be skewed towards xBox.

If the same user was also an animal enthusiast and spent 40% of his browsing time on puppy websites versus 20% on gaming websites, I'm not sure that displaying a puppy ad on the gaming site would work out long term... unless it was games about puppies ads. I could, of course, be completely wrong, and I'm sure Google did some market testing long before they ever rolled out this program!

nicely said!

i dont know if this has recently rolled out or not, but my income the past 3 days is up a solid 20%

Well that's a great sign! I was hoping to get your feedback on this one.

Originally Posted by briansol

i dont know if this has recently rolled out or not, but my income the past 3 days is up a solid 20%

Same here until yesterday, my adsense revenue dropped by about 70% and hmmm today, its going to be even worse

yeah, my eCPM is up almost $1 the past 2 days

rveram - did you notice any obvious change in the quality of the ads being run on your site?

Originally Posted by Joe Ward

rveram - did you notice any obvious change in the quality of the ads being run on your site?

The quality of the ads are better, since my site is a car forum, now I don't see ads that have nothing to do with cars. Before I always saw some ads that were not car related. For example.

There is a famous aftermarket parts brand for honda cars that is called "spoon". Before; ads on the "spoon" threads, I always saw ads of forks, and spoon kits , kitchen accessories etc, now I see ads of aftermarket car parts, with good sellers.

Also my CTR increased almost 50%!

On the last 2 days my ecpm is WAY to low, I hope it gets better on the days to come.

Without any change, last week I notice a stable grow of 20% too.

So ... any news about this?
Do you note any difference?

Anyone updated there privacy policies ?

i added the following line:

Some of our advertising partners use tracking cookies to serve the most relevant ads to you based on your browsing habits. You may opt out of these tracking cookies by visiting this link.

I wonder if the big G will allow you to specify per ad unit if interest ads will show?

If so then this could be pretty helpful.

Showing normal ads within main content (where the money is) and showing personally relevant ads in the header / footer / other non-hotspot.

It could work well, but I doubt Google will give us this 'per unit' control.... shame.