It seems like in the last few weeks, even AdSense has been doing retarget ads.

The old way:
Sites would show AdSense ads for whatever the content of the site was about. Shoe sites = ads for shoes. Trading sites = ads for investing. Car sites = ads for cars.

How it's working now:
Say I've been looking at shoes recently. I'll start to get AdSense ads for shoes. Then when I visit another website that is about something else, like fish, or sports supplements, I still see ads for shoes.

AdSense didn't use to do this, but now that they are, it seems like putting ads on your site will bring in a lot less money since you could have the #1 site for something that pays $10 per click, but if the person is being retargeted for something that pays $0.05 per click, that's the ads that are going to be showing.

Thats a great question, I've noticed that too.

if you focus on keywords , cpc you won't earn if you are with adsense always focus on improving website quality, visitor satisfaction

It's worked that way for quite a long time - the ads displayed are a combination of the content on your site and the user's browsing history. If the user has been browsing sites in a similar niche or opts out of the tracking cookie you still get a nice CPC.

It's an optional feature in adsense that you can turn on and off called interest based ads. If the shoe site does not allow interest based ads you will only see shoe ads. If the fish website allows interest based ads you will see ads about shoes. For some niches interest based ads pays higher, for others it doesn't. I have it turned off in my account but it is best to test.

You can find it by going to "Allow and Block Ads" >> "Advanced Settings" to make sure you have it set the way you want in your own account.

^^ thanks for the tip

So by turning it off... it will only display ads relevant to my site ?

Its called remarketing/retargeting.

-aReJay

Originally Posted by Wealthy Wisdom

^^ thanks for the tip

So by turning it off... it will only display ads relevant to my site ?

That's correct. Ads based on user interest categories will not be allowed to show. It may affect your conversion rate but will show ads relevant to your site's content only.

So will it increase your CPC since you'll only being showing ads for your niche?

OR, if you have a site with low CPC, can you potentially retarget something more expensive that they were looking at before and get a much higher CPC?

Well if you have organic traffic and someone searched for "federal loan consolidation" and landed on your site, he will see the ad for the same niche. So maybe Google did it so as to slap all those MFA sites and see that genuine publishers earn more. Time to up your ranks guys!

The ultimate goal for Google as a corporation is to make MORE money. So if they show some different *retargeted* ad then they do believe it will make MORE money this way. When G makes more money, then Publisher makes more money too.

Now the question is how good Google could do its job deciding which ad to show.... I guess based on their massive historical data and machine learning algos they should be able to pick one of the best ads. Since it is a multi BILLION dollar business, they will do everything possible to improve that process / algos of ad selection. So if they want to show a retargeted ad, I would trust them to do so.

the sad thing is that you only seem to be able to change this setting on the ACCOUNT level...
I would love to have this configuration on the site level (some sites are in low cpc niche, some in high.. change settings accordingly)

double post..

Originally Posted by nikao

the sad thing is that you only seem to be able to change this setting on the ACCOUNT level...
I would love to have this configuration on the site level (some sites are in low cpc niche, some in high.. change settings accordingly)

That is very interesting. I'm sure Google has a reason for doing it this way.