Making sense out of AdSense

June 21st, 2005 at 07:42pm

Talking about AdSense, i am wondering how it actually works!. Yes., its contextual advertising. i.e, the Ad’s that are displayed are purely based on the contents that are present on the page. And context is the King!

AdSense works like a charm for some. For others, AdSense doesn’t just work. The rest are not at all bothered about it!.

So, what is this post all about ?

For some of my pages, the Ads that are displayed are not relevant at all! No matter what the content is, the Ad’s displayed are about ‘blogging’ etc, which are not at all relevant to the topic or the content of the page. That too after filtering lot of blog related site!

Let me explain with and example.

Say URL #1:
http://www.arjunprabhu.com/blog/archives/2005/03/09/
virus-hits-instant-messengers/
URL #2:
http://www.arjunprabhu.com/blog/archives/2005/03/09/

Basically both #1 and #2 have the same content.
#1 is the permalink to the posting, and #2 is the archive for the day.

If you notice, the Ads for URL #2 are very relevant but not for URL #1. The content is pretty old, and the google-bot has visited it for sometime now. I also did a google search, and URL #1 has a PR 2, and URL #2 has a PR 0. So, that would mean that #1 is known by google much better then #2.

I was wondering about this, and posted this question on one of the forums, but still haven’t got a satisfactory answer. Further, from one of the replies that i got on the forum, I figured out that the Ad’s would be relevant if we append a querystring to the URL as shown below
http://www.arjunprabhu.com/blog/archives/2005/03/09/
virus-hits-instant-messengers/?t=1

Isn’t it strange ? Its clear that google mediabot indexes the page based on the URL. But what about the content?

So, what I am wondering is..

1. If the page is brand new (or the URL at-least is new), then the Ads displayed are very relevant
2. After media bot visits this new URL … the relevancy goes for a toss!!!

Isn’t it supposed to be the other way round ?

So, does that mean that the algorithm to display Ads for the first few times (realtime), is much better then the algorithm used later-on ?

Just curious!

Other Examples:
#1 http://www.arjunprabhu.com/blog/archives/2004/06/24/
microsoft-hotmail-joins-the-storage-club/
#2 http://www.arjunprabhu.com/blog/archives/2004/06/24/

Tags: adsense, contextual advertising, google, making money, money, PPC

Entry Filed under: Net, Technology