Adsense targeting? May not work well on all sites?

I've noticed that ever since I upgraded to 2.4 and started using the adsense targeting option, my revenue has gone down, my CPM has gone down, I've left the adsense targeting feature turned on for more than a month to see if if revenue would turn around and bounce back up, but it hasn't??

See my screen shot of my revenue drop, it seems as though it declined after feb 8th when I upgraded???

I'm thinking some sites it works well for and with the adsense targeting it improves the ad targeting, but maybe on other sites, the info in the post bits helps deliver better quality or higher $$ ads???

I just thought I'd share my findings. I know there are always many other factors that could be involved but... I'm going to turn off the targeting feature and see how it goes... I'll report back if it changes dramatically.

screenshot below, I've removed the $ amounts on the left but you should get the idea

If you think about a 'trend' line running through that graph, it really looks likes the decline started before your adsense targeting start point. Maybe that up spike just to the right was because of adsense targeting and the overall down trend is caused by something else.

thanks for the feedback. I agree it is tough to say what exactly caused the decline, I know what you are saying about the trend line also.

Maybe January was just an exceptional month for us? It very well could be a trend of advertisers, not spending as much on their campaigns or any other unknown factor?? I have turned the adsense targeting feature off, and will report back in a few weeks to see if it has any effect.

Well maybe this problem (Archive URLs not SEO'd, nofollow tags added) has something to do with my decline in revenue ???? I also upgraded vb to 3.5.4 around the same time I upgraded vbseo....


I just patched my archive file so the archive is working better. If all my archive pages were not working and not sending search engine visitors to the right pages, that makes sense that there might be a decline. Eitherway, I hope it picks back up

Well I upgraded vb to 3.5.4 on Mar 2nd. And now looking at my adsense revenue for my archive pages, it took a nose dive right on the 2nd and it stayed down. I bet I'll see a bounce back up in overall revenue. Just thought I'd share my findings. So this may have very well had nothing to do with the targeting feature, but an conflict in the vbseo vs. vb code. Unfortunately I'll never see that lost revenue, but hopefully we are on the right track now.

I don't think, in it's current implementation, that the Adsense targeting is sophisticated enough to be used on SEO'd forums. I don't think it's a bad idea. It's just too basic and doesn't allow any control. I tested it to see what areas it highlighted, and sure enough, the most important navbar h1 tags were not included. So they may get this working better in future versions.

-vissa