Think Like Google with AdSense

[poingo]

A conversation with my son Matt confirmed my suspicion. The Google AdSense ads I recently installed on this website are actually giving me an insight into what the Google search engine spider cherry-picks from my web page content.

It's not hard to imagine: AdSense ads are context sensitive. They exist as scripts on the web page. In order to be context sensitive, the script must initiate an indexing when the page is opened and refreshed.

Is there any reason to think that the indexing process performed by Google AdSense would be different from the process used by Google the search engine? None I can think of. Both indexing processes need to do the same job: extract core meaning from a page and compare it to a database.

In AdSense, the database contains paid ads waiting for a relevancy match. In search, the database holds keywords and phrases. But the meaning extracted from the web page, to be compared with the databases could easily be identical.

Therefore, one might get a peek into the Google indexing algorithm by reviewing a series of web pages which display AdSense ads, and studying the ad content.

Studying AdSense Relevancy on Poingo.com

I studied the 30 or so pages on this site (it's mine) and checked the AdSense ads on each page for relevancy to the page content. Results were quite interesting.

The site contains a number of pages which present the features of various software or service offerings. Verbiage on these pages tends to be sparse and oriented toward key concepts.

On these product presentation pages, AdSense did a great job of extracting meaning.

For example, the page offering Poingo Email Printer, software which creates PDFs, was accompanied by AdSense ads which all pertained to PDF conversion.

Text on the page was minimal, but the page title contained "create PDF", there were 3 keywords metatags containing "PDF", and the first paragraph contained "convert PDF" in bold.

From an indexing standpoint the page spoon-fed meaning to Google, and obviously there was a wellspring of PDF software advertisers for Google to find in its database. A match (or five matches to be exact) made in heaven!

Similarly, pages offering FTP software and an Outlook add-in received highly relevant companion ads. Again, words on the page were sparse, but page title and paragraph text contained the obvious words FTP and Outlook respectively, and Google AdSense took the bait like a trout succumbing to Robert Redford.

The three pages mentioned above offered essentially single concept offerings. PDF. FTP. Outlook. No confusing multiple choices.

When analyzing the page which offers Lightning Navigator, hotkey shortcut software with multiple features, AdSense picked one feature, screen capture, to orient 3 of the 5 the companion ads.

Interestingly, screen capture is listed seventh on the list of product features. It follows six other features which were all keyword-optimized but ignored by AdSense.

From previous research, I recall that keywords pertaining to screen capture such as "print screen", "screen shot", and "screen grab" receive many more clicks per day than other features such as "automatically create email" and "internet shortcut".

Apparently in this example, AdSense was quickly able to select the key concept for which it had the most ads to apply, and then threw most of its ad eggs in this basket.

Interaction between page and AdSense now becomes more interesting. Inventory of relevant advertisers becomes a factor in AdSense's selection of the key concept. That makes sense. You can't post an ad if it's not in the queue.

The non-screen capture ads on the Lightning Navigator page are as follows:

1 for shortcuts (highly relevant)
1 for surveillance equipment (huh??)

I have no doubt that there is a reason the surveillance equipment ad appeared, but it was not visible to me in the text of my page, the ad itself, or the page to which the ad linked.

Mysteries abound in the "second-guess-the-Google-algo" world.

If your eyes are not bleary yet, stick around. There is more to tell.

AdSense Relevancy for Articles

A sizeable portion of the Poingo website is the article section. Here I publish articles about small business and people, processes and technology in the workplace.

Rebelliously, these articles were written without use of a keyword suggestion tool! They are written in 100% non keyword optimized English. What did Adsense do with these verbose, intellectual, index-elusive rants?

To appear scientific - after all, somebody might actually read this - I developed a down-and-dirty rating scale.

First I counted the number of relevant ads (of 5 total) per page, then I multiplied it by a subjective relevancy score scaled 1 through 5, where 5 is "frickin' good" and 1 is "obscure at best."

To maintain consistent subjectivity, all ratings were performed after morning coffee and on non-bill-paying days.

A page score of 25 (5 ads x relevancy score of 5) would be a top score ("AdSense, you're seeing into my very soul") and 0 would be ("We never talk anymore, You don't even know me(sniff)").

Here is the scoring:

Results of AdSense Relevancy Study for Non-Optimized Articles


AdSense scored an average of 10.5 out of a possible 25 on these illuminating, erudite but non optimized articles. Yet in 7 articles out of 20, Google scored the coveted "frickin' good" appellation. Google "understood" 35% of the articles with high accuracy.

Beyond that, there was a chasm of irreconcilable misunderstandings leading ultimately to the vacuum of deep space. What does it mean to us little folk waving our flags and trying to get noticed on the web?

Keep your message simple and clean, boiled down to one or two key concepts on a page. The spiders want to understand us but they are kinda dumb. At least that's what Matt says.

[RuDeDoGg]

I'm getting perfect ads right now. The new section targeting feature makes it pretty easy to get rid of the ads you don't want.

[poingo]

When you say you are getting perfect ads, what do you mean? The ads are perfectly relevant to your content? Do they perform in terms of attracting profitable clicks?

[RuDeDoGg]

well, my ads match my content 100%. I would prefer a higher CPC, but my website targets a low paying niche <edit>. The most irrelevant that my ads get are about SEO, which is still something of interest for almost all webmasters. I have yet to see a ringtone ad.

How I did it:

• properly using HTML tags (title,h1,h2, etc.)

• keeping my site focused on one subject

<edited>

[Marcia]

keeping my site focused on one subject

That may be applicable in cases where the purpose and primary focus of a site are to generate Adsense income, but it's not universally applicable.

There are some sites that are consumer or iinformation oriented that cover a number of relevant and/or related topics and/or products that are geared toward serving user needs, and in those cases the age-old question comes up of whether to do one site that's concise or break the site down into multiple domains.

The latter involves not only much additional effort in constructing, promoting and garnering links for a number of sites - aka a lot more work - but begs questions whether user needs are really met, and raises issues about cross-linking between and among multiple domains under the same ownership - and incidentally, which may or may not be in the same IP range or C-Class.

[vayapues]

one of my sites is an astronomy website.

On my saturn page I get advertisements for saturn cars.
On my sun page I get advertisements for glo sticks (because the Sun glows)
On my venus page I get ads for love.
The jupiter page gets ads for jupiter real estate
The black hole page gets ads for vacuums (because black holes suck)

Ads seem to have gotten less relevant over time. Google needs a filter that would allow you to block out synonyms. They can still use keyword matching, but let us as publishers specify what our words mean.

[klb]

For the most part AdSense does a good job of placing ads for my individual pages. Sometimes they Frickin'Good, but most of the time they are rubbing elbows. Every now and then they aren't even in the same galexy.

[Marcia]

It's not hard to imagine: AdSense ads are context sensitive. They exist as scripts on the web page. In order to be context sensitive, the script must initiate an indexing when the page is opened and refreshed.

That's why it's called contextual advertising.

But the context and content of page are determined when Mediabot visits them, and that doesn't happen every time the page loads. That's why sometimes you have to change ad sizes and locations to change the targeting - so that Mediabot will come back, no?

Is there any reason to think that the indexing process performed by Google AdSense would be different from the process used by Google the search engine? None I can think of. Both indexing processes need to do the same job: extract core meaning from a page and compare it to a database.

Of course. What indexing process? Like in the Backrub paper? What would Adsense be indexing and storing web pages for?

Sure - there's a big difference between the two, it's a completely different process. Adsense isn't about indexing web pages, storing them, extracting information and scoring in order to serve users when they query the search. They're just visiting with a bot and applying an algo to determine which ads are suitable - there isn't indexing involved in the sense that pages are fetched and stored for search.

Now, if it happens that Mediabot might be fetching pages for indexing, it's just supplanting the regular Google crawlers but that's got nothing to do with the Adsense program and there's a completely different process for the two - and a difference in how the crawling happens.

Both indexing processes need to do the same job: extract core meaning from a page and compare it to a database.

No, one is an indexing process for search and the one other isn't.

It's true that they both extract meaning, but when it comes to indexing in a database you can see the difference right there. Adsense is only concerned with on-page relevancy (and to an extent the site topic) to serve the proper ads, but does not function like a search engine, which has 3 basic functions - crawling/ indexing (storing)/ranking and responding to user queries. And a big portion of the algo for search is linkage data - in fact well over 100 factors, and only a portion of them on-page. Not so Adsense.

There are definitely clues as to on-page algo analysis with looking at what Adsense does, but that's only a small part of the picture for search.

Adsense = Contextual relevancy = ads served
Search = Relevancy + Importance = ranking and query time SERPs

Look at the Google search architecture. There aren't any plain hits, fancy hits, different barrels, an anchors file, PR calculations - on and on it goes - with Adsense. That isn't Adsense, which isn't fashioned after the "Anatomy of a Search Engine."

All that said, looking at how Adsense works and what it picks up is a great way to study and figure out what elements on pages can have influence - but that will vary with different algos, in addition to linkage data playing a major part for search in addition.

[Christian at Cabo]

I have ads on two of my sites, still working on it's seo and sem.... anyway they both have very relevant ads, mine are travel sites based on this wonderful place where i live and the other one is about the nearby areas and the ads are very good, and they are pretty much the same all the time since i got a decent ctr even when i'm not showing them all over the site (since i try to give my visitors more content than ads)

I strongly belive that if you are not getting the ads you should maybe your content is not well written also the tags that tell google which is the "relevant content" for the ad selection is very useful.

There my 2 cents

[alemcherry]

I had problems with my forum. It was on mobile, but getting ads about password management, vbullettin etc. Changed some default vbullettin text, added a space in bewteen the word "password", (I know its bad) now getting 100% relevant ads!