Adsense needs keyword filtering to avoid relevancy blunders

[Marcia]

Mod note: Split from the thread on Adwords Relevancy Blunders (http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=18017) to address the issue of relevancy problems for Advertisers from the Publisher' viewpoint.
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Recent and current examples of topical problems with ads:

1) Page is clearly for pet gifts - ads are running for birthday gifts and wedding party gifts.

2) Pages are selling dresses - ads are running for flower girl dresses. Nothing about weddings on that site at all, and those are useless ads for users and are a complete waste of space on the pages the ads are on. And Google is losing $ by running them, since people looking for sundresses or for a toddler to wear to a birthday party don't need flower girl dresses. The site has NOTHING whatsoever to do with flower girls or weddings.

3) Page clearly for men's gifts - ads were running for cord blood and breast pumps and diaper service. All pages related to baby stuff had to be completely removed from the site (that stuff was running all over, regardless of the page's topic), and all Adsense had to be taken off that page. Maybe will give another try, now that ads for breast pumps might not be running, it's doubtful they'd make good Father's Day gifts.

Problems, AFAIK: Too much weight given to what's in global site navigation in many, many cases. And I've also seen a bit of confusion between sites on different topics on the same account at times, especially a while back. Also, sometimes ads will run that are remotely connected but worthless to the particular page and they're run because they happen to be higher paying ads.

For the most part, the ads are relevant and valuable to users, but certain words seem to be "poison words" and that needs to be dealt with algorithmically.

[Marcia]

The bottom line from my point of view is that we need word level filtering, if at all possible at the channel level.

Like I don't do shoes, but if there's a publisher who has sites for shoes, one may have shoes for everyone - men, women, children. Any of those is liable to show up with ads for the wrong category simply because it's in the navigation. Wrong! There are liable to be ads for baby sandals appearing on a page with mens hiking boots because baby shoes are higher priced ads.

As in my above example, maybe a publisher has a site for toddler dresses and another one for wedding apparel. Well, flower girl dresses are fine for wedding apparel if there's a relevant page - but "flower girl" should be filtered out for the channel/site that has nothing whatsoever to do with weddings.

Running mismatches like that costs Google money, could cost advertisers money with useless curiosity clicks, and looks so silly that there's really no choice but fo a publisher to pull the Adsense off the pages so they won't look dumb to users.

In all cases, for people who want quality ads on their pages, the word FREE should be capable of being filtered because most if not all are scams running lame CPA sites that make users jump through hoops and complete multiple "offers" that pay for leads before even getting near the vague possibility of getting a free lunch. Not to mention email harvesting, which only puts money in spammers pockets.

Advertisers definitely don't need to be presented in an "annoying" light on off-topic pages; it doesn't do much to enhance their branding, and curiosity clicks are worthless.

[sportsguy]

We recently ran into soemthing similar here at work.

The site is bullysports (fantasy sports site), so when we put up Adsense, I expected to see the usual hunting a pecking for a few rotations until the system scanned the pages/site and figure out we are sports-focused.

Great.

Left things up for 24 hours, checked it the next afternoon and noticed something funny.

Since many of the pages are light on actual textual content, the system reverted to the URL and said, "Hmmm, bully and sports, eh?" OK, I have ads in here somewhere that I think will fit!"

It proceeded to showcase ads for:

Diesel performance products (bullydog)
Books on how to deal with bullies at school
A publisher with bully in it's name


The funny thing was that there were enough ads in their system on those two topics that virtually no sports related ads were shown.

I've since had our ad team note the URLs for the ads we don't want and the competitive ad filter seems to be managing them, but geeze - way to take a guess, Google, and get it wrong.

...I've also told the Product Manager to get some more content physically onto the pages to help the system understand what to show.

Should Google give us the option to tell them what we want to target? Like a simple window we can enter a list of keywords into to basically say, "I'd like these sorts of ads, please."

I know it'll require policing and checks and balances against the actual site itself, but it'd be better than showing the wrong ads on my site and making me manage that.

If I say I want sports-centric ads, and you can see that even to a small degree the site is about sports, doesn't that get us both closer to ideal than Google guessing and making me clean up the mess?