It’s interesting to observe how well the “contextual” part of AdSense works.
For instance, for my mini-site for yesterday, Chess: basic principles, it’s working very well. Most ads are about chess, chess sets, or board games. I’m pretty impressed by this one.
However, it fails completely for the Portuguese version of the above, Princípios básicos de Xadrez. The ads are in Portuguese, and mostly related to games - cell phone games, soccer games and so on. There isn’t a single ad about chess or board games.
Why is that? The content is exactly the same, only in a different language. Even the meta tags are correct. I believe that, in this case, it isn’t Google’s fault; it’s just that there is nobody in Portugal using AdWords to advertise something related to chess. In this way, I sadly have to admit, we’re a more primitive country: soccer rules here. 
But I digress.
Another one that isn’t working is today’s mini-site, Zombie Types. This one’s in English, so there should be something out there (horror movies, horror games, etc.)… but the ads I’m getting, even after half a day, are “public service” ads - the kind they use when they can’t find keywords in the site. And these don’t pay.
This can happen, sometimes, when you put the AdSense code before there’s any content in the site, because it can take some time for "Mediapartners-Google/2.1" (the AdSense bot) to come back to the page, so it’s the page’s initial version that counts. But that was not the case here; the AdSense code was the last thing to be added. Oh well… it should be fine in a week or two.
Related posts:
RSS feed
0 Responses to “AdSense curiosities”
Leave a Reply