Google Ads

1. 83

   Whitney05posted 16 years ago

   Any one else having problems with them?
   
   None of my are accurate? They're all dog food ads.
   
   Each one of my hubs have the same ads.

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   1. 0

      Terri Paajanenposted 16 years agoin reply to this

      I see these alot. I can't even remember the last time I saw an ebay context ad that worked. They are dog food, tattoo or job search ads and they are not formatted right either.

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2. 84

   Isabella Snowposted 16 years ago

   I noticed that - its an ebay ad, I think.
   
   Kind of annoying, but if you refresh I think they go away, so I dont think *everyone* will see them. I'm sure they will cycle out soon.

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3. 83

   Whitney05posted 16 years ago

   Isabella- I've refreshed, closed out, started over, reclicked, etc. They won't go away... *pouts* Ha... I just hope they cycle out soon.
   
   Maybe I'll try a different computer. See if it's just mine.

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   1. 84

      Isabella Snowposted 16 years agoin reply to this

      I just looked at several of your latest hubs and only saw that ad once, so don't worry too much.

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4. 86

   Marisa Wrightposted 16 years ago

   Not just yours, Whitney - I have the same thing!  Not that I have anything against dogs!

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5. 72

   relacheposted 16 years ago

   I'm seeing a mix of ads on my Hubs.

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6. 83

   Whitney05posted 16 years ago

   I've been looking around HubPages, and have noticed that several people seem to have the same or similar ads. Hm...
   
   At one point, the ads were fine, and then when I went back to them a few minutes later, they were back to the dogs.
   
   Marisa- Same here. I even have several dog hubs, but their on other hubs too. :-(

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7. 61

   Keny Lugerposted 16 years ago

   I came here because of the same problem.
   
   I'm seeing dog food ads from ebay...well maybe they are relevant come to think of it. Russ Dalbey is a dog.
   
   Well glad to know that I'm not the only one. Hope they'll go away.
   
   
   Keny L

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8. 84

   Isabella Snowposted 16 years ago

   I just noticed it on each of the hubs I just surfed through.
   
   Including 3 from Relache.
   
   So it's across the board and I guess we just have to wait for them to go away.
   
   Odd, really, as I can't imagine the ads appealing to anyone - the one's I'm seeing don't really say anything more than dog food or summat.

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9. 83

   Whitney05posted 16 years ago

   My ads seem to have corrected  themselves for now. My last two published hubs still have generic ads, but they're ads nonetheless.

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10. 68

    Rudraposted 16 years ago

    Yes you are right dog food and tatoos. But will go away as soon as it picks up.

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11. 61

    mgwhiteposted 16 years ago

    Sorry this has happened to you, but glad I'm not the only on. I noticed today that my no-bake pie recipe hub has dog food ads. I was very puzzled about the trigger ...? Whipped cream ... pudding? Hmmm...

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12. 83

    Whitney05posted 16 years ago

    It looks like their gone, mostly on my hubs. What about you guys?
    
    I am seeing that the ebay ads in the middle of the hubs are back. :-( They aren't content related either...

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13. 84

    Isabella Snowposted 16 years ago

    I just emailed a screen shot of that to Paul.
    
    Hopefully he'll see it soon!
    
    Those ads are useless, I can't imagine anyone clicking them!

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14. 60

    Jason Menayanposted 16 years ago

    Hi all -
    
    I'll offer a bit of an explanation, since I know how the "other side" works (AdWords = AdSense from the advertisers' perspective).
    
    Basically, there is not an unlimited number of ad impressions from each advertiser/category, necessarily. Advertisers can limit their daily budget, or can choose to only display ads in Google search (instead of broadening it to publisher sites like HubPages).
    
    Also, advertisers will start and stop campaigns based on (presumably) their performance, so if an advertiser isn't getting the return they want based on what they're paying per click, they can pull a campaign. Campaigns come and go; it's a very dynamic process.
    
    Advertisers can also advertise across particular sites (site-targeted ads, as opposed to keyword-targeted ads), and pay a relatively low flat rate for doing so.
    
    HubPages as a whole apparently does well with pet-related topics. AskSusanPeters, among others, contribute a lot of Hubs on the topic of pets in general, so advertising on HubPages as a whole probably makes for a good business proposition for pet-product advertisers, because those pet-related Hubs probably perform so well for them that they make up for the same ads appearing on non-pet-related Hubs.
    
    Because keyword-related clicks are typically more valuable than site-related clicks to Google (and they tend to perform better because they're better targeted to the content), Google will prefer them, but if there is no "inventory" of keyword-related ads related to a Hub's topic, or the Hub is so new that Google hasn't had the chance to crawl it and determine which keyword-related ads are best suited to it, it will run the site-related ads as a backup.
    
    And our ad optimization engine (YieldBuild) will try eBay ads and other formats for your Google ads to see which performs best. If they don't perform well, you'll eventually see them phased out.
    
    - Jason

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15. 84

    Isabella Snowposted 16 years ago

    Thanks for that Jason, but I think we may be talking about different types of ads..
    
    They aren't dog food ads, really - they're ebay ads.
    
    They literally are a big white space with the word "dog food" written there and the ebay logo.. ??
    
    Is that the same thing you mean?

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16. 63

    Mishaposted 16 years ago

    Jason,
    
    People just plainly don't understand how YieldBuild works. I think somebody from the team should come up with a detailed explanation for beginners, since I see related topics more and more lately...
    
    PS I wish I could have it on my site...

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17. 84

    Isabella Snowposted 16 years ago

    I dont personally care what ads show up where on my hubs. I dont care if they are huge towers in the middle of everything, or I wouldnt use capsules.
    
    I just dont see the point in those specific ebay ads that only say "dog food".
    
    Who would click on that??

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    1. 63

       Mishaposted 16 years agoin reply to this

       Isa,
       
       To be able to tell a crap from gold, you have to test crap, too. And it takes some time...

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       1. 60

          Jason Menayanposted 16 years agoin reply to this

          Exactly. YieldBuild will phase out worse-performing ads, so those eBay ads will vanish if they truly don't perform. But sometimes they do. Like Misha said, you really don't know if they will perform until you test them, which is exactly what YieldBuild does.
          
          Misha - You can apply to use YieldBuild on your site by using this form.

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          1. 63

             Mishaposted 16 years agoin reply to this

             Jason,
             
             Thanks, I tried yesterday. My measly 75000 monthly pageviews were not enough to pass the threshold... So, David just kindly put me on a waiting list until you guys start working with small folks like me
             
             Meanwhile I'm trying Pubmatic. Just installed it today, so no opinion so far...

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    2. 69

       waynetposted 16 years agoin reply to this

       A hungry dog would click on it...!
       
       It just depends on whether the dog had a can opener or the necessary means to open the tin....we must be there for our dog friends as they are the future of the world and really are the friends I never had....make sense...good...thank god for red wine...I feel slightly sick now...drink is bad now when binge drink becomes too much....must sleep! good night!

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18. 84

    Isabella Snowposted 16 years ago

    Thats such a slavic reply, lol!!!!
    
    Ok, I'll just have to find something to entertain me while the time passes!

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    1. 63

       Mishaposted 16 years agoin reply to this

       And what did you expect from a slavic person?

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19. STAFF

    pauldeedsposted 16 years ago

    Those ads are just a subtle suggestion that you write more hubs about dog food and tattoos, our two favorite topics here at HubPages (actually between us all, I think we have 2 dogs and maybe 1 tattoo).
    
    But in all seriousness, those ads should be fading away now.  I think someone may have misplaced a decimal point when estimating the earning per click for the ebay ads yesterday.

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    1. 0

       Terri Paajanenposted 16 years agoin reply to this

       These ads are still all over the place, and given their virtually useless content, I'm sure they are hurting everyone's earnings.
       
       I've surfed around and pretty much every ad that comes between capsules is showing a senseless ebay ad like this. They are not fading away.

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20. 83

    Whitney05posted 16 years ago

    Isabella: I agree. I don't understand who would click an ad with only 1 or 2 words with no description.
    
    I've been waiting 2 days for my last 2 hubs to have accurate google ads. Should I just continue to wait?

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    1. STAFF

       pauldeedsposted 16 years agoin reply to this

       Yes.  We have control over what type, color, and where ads appear, but the contextual accuracy of the ads isn't something we have much influence over.   Normally it doesn't take very long for google to line up some relevant ads, but maybe they are having trouble getting new stuff crawled right now.

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21. 83

    Whitney05posted 16 years ago

    Paul- I have older hubs that seem to have reverted back to blogging ads and such. Hubs that I've never had a problem with these hubs and the ads on them updating.

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    1. STAFF

       pauldeedsposted 16 years agoin reply to this

       I'll see if I can figure anything out.  Have you noticed a significant decline in click through rate?  A big CTR changes without a significant change to traffic composition would be worrisome.

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22. 83

    Whitney05posted 16 years ago

    Paul: I have noticed a decline from say last week. I just checked out the adv. report, and saw about a .2 - .3 percent decline.

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23. STAFF

    pauldeedsposted 16 years ago

    That sounds like it may be in the range of normal fluctuation.
    
    There is another good report you can run, under advanced reports, select show data by "individual ad" and then check the "show data by targeting type - contextual or placement"  box.  This will show you the number of ad impressions that were "contextual" and the number that were "site" based.  Look at the numbers over the last week or so, and let me know if there was a significant move.
    
    Across HubPages it bounces around a fair amount but around 4-5% of the ads are "site" based lately.  There does seem to be a slight trend up in that percentage in the latter half of November.   I'm not sure what the reason for that is.

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24. 83

    Whitney05posted 16 years ago

    Oops, Paul I looked at the wrong CTR percent. From the 19th till today, My Ad CTR decreased about 10%. Impressions are about a third of what they were on the 19th.

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    1. 72

       relacheposted 16 years agoin reply to this

       Whitney, in the decade I've been doing web sites and watching web traffic, I can attest to the fact that you will often see both web traffic and clicks go down around the holidays, as people have a lot of other things to do than be online.
       
       You'd be surprised how much web traffic comes from when people are at work versus when they are at home...LOL...

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25. 83

    Whitney05posted 16 years ago

    Relache: That's what I was thinking last night. That I noticed the decline after Thanksgiving, and attributed the decline to the holidays as so much is going on elsewhere.

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26. 57

    Mark Knowlesposted 16 years ago

    What does everyone have against dogs? Dogs need attention too.

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27. 58

    len7288posted 16 years ago

    My google earnings went down by almost 50% since the start of the holiday season and my number of clicks just went down by around 25%, my traffic is much the same. I guess advertisers are paying less now because there will be less people who will use the internet during the holiday season. Im expecting it to go back to normal early next year.

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28. 63

    Mishaposted 16 years ago

    I was trying to calm everybody on this issue, but now I myself think something is going wrong. Since I plugged in my ebay id into hubpages a few days ago, I got more than 6000 impressions and ONE click and no sales = $0.00. It would have brought me at least $50 at the current eCPM I have on HP. This can't be right, there is a bug somewhere.
    
    Guys, please look into this. It is taking too long. We all (including you) are loosing money...

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29. STAFF

    pauldeedsposted 16 years ago

    I've noticed that often the ebay ads run in addition to a full complement of adsense ads.  So you're not necessarily losing money as a result.  We actually saw the highest adsense CPM we've had this month yesterday.  That, said if you remove your ebay token the ads shouldn't run in your share of impressions.  If you want to run a little experiment for us and report back what you find (with and without ebay set), I'd be curious what you see.
    
    We are working with ebay to improve the contextual-ness of the ads.  It's still a relatively new product for them.

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    1. 0

       Terri Paajanenposted 16 years agoin reply to this

       I'm not sure what this means. Either there is an ebay ad in a particular slot, or a google one, not both. So if a bad ebay ad is displaying, is it not taking up the spot that an adsense ad could have been?
       
       Does this have to do with the fact that I just added an ebay affiliate code? I'm more than happy to take the thing out if it will bring back reasonable ads.
       
       As for the context-ness, it's not working at all. I have not seen one single ebay ad that made sense yet.
       
       NOTE: I just deleted my ebay affiliate id and I am no longer seeing the bad ads on my hubs. YAY.

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    2. 63

       Mishaposted 16 years agoin reply to this

       Paul,
       I would gladly run any test for you I need to understand exactly what and how you want me to test, though
       Please clarify, that I understand you correctly:
       You want me to remove my ebay id from my hubpages account and after a couple of days to report whether my adsense eCPM changed or not, right?

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       1. STAFF

          pauldeedsposted 16 years agoin reply to this

          Yeah, I'm just curious if you see any significant difference in your adsense numbers with or without your ebay token set.  It's a little hard to control for externalities, but as long as your traffic is relatively steady it should be a reasonable test.

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          1. 63

             Mishaposted 16 years agoin reply to this

             OK, I removed ebay ID from the system. will report here in a couple of days...

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30. STAFF

    pauldeedsposted 16 years ago

    Terri -- There is a limit to the number of adsense ads you can run on a page.  Once you reach the limit, they just won't serve an ad in that spot and the area will collapse away.
    
    I believe the current limit is 3 ads, plus up to 3 link units.

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31. 83

    Whitney05posted 16 years ago

    I'm still having problems with google updated ads. I have hubs that were published monday, and 1 minute I'll see content appropriate ads, and the next their blogging ads or some other default ad. Should I contact google, or just sit on them... I'm getting decent traffic to the hubs, I would just like to see ads that are related.

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32. STAFF

    pauldeedsposted 16 years ago

    Whitney, did you try running the adsense report that I suggested?  It will show you the ratio of "site targeted" ads to "contextual ads" over any period you specify.  Here's you do it:
    
    1. Login to adsense
    2. Go to the advanced reports tab
    3. Select a date range, I'd suggest "this month".
    4. Select "Individual Ad" under the "Show data by" drop menu
    5. Check the "show data by targeting type" check box
    6. Display the report
    
    It will show you the number of individual ad impressions for each day that were contextual, and the number that were site targeted (plus the click through rate, cpm, etc.) for each type.
    
    Across HubPages around 5% of the ads are site targeted.  If you're ratio (you'll have to do the math to calculate it) is way different, then there might be a problem.  There are two reasons google would show a site targeted ad, 1) they don't have any inventory that match your content, 2) they haven't crawled your content yet.

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33. 83

    Whitney05posted 16 years ago

    Paul, I tried did attempt to run the report. I pulled it up, but I guess what is confusing me as to what exactly I am to calculate to figure the percentage. What figures should I be looking at?
    
    I, also, considered that there may not be ad to put on these hubs, but one of the hubs is about a topic I have already written about, which has ads. The other topic is similar to that of what has been written by other hubbers, which have ads on their hubs.

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34. STAFF

    pauldeedsposted 16 years ago

    Whitney -- For each day there should be two rows in the report, one where the targeting is contextual, and one where it is site.  Add the ad impressions from those two lines to get the total number of ad impressions, then divide the ad impressions that were just site into the total.  That would give you the percentage that were site targeted for that day. 
    
    For instance, if  you had these two rows:
    
    Row 1 --
    Friday, November 30, 2007
    Contextual
    9,500 Ad Impressions
    
    Row 2 --
    Friday, November 30, 2007
    Site
    500 Ad Impressions
    
    The total would be 10,000 impressions, and then 500 / 10000 = 0.05 or 5% that are "site targeted".
    
    Do that for a few different days scattered through the month, and you should be able to see if there was any significant change lately.  If your percentage is a lot higher than 5%, then it may be worth investigating further.  If not, it's probably just normal.

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35. 83

    Whitney05posted 16 years ago

    Paul that's what I thought. When I calculated it earlier I got a ginormous tally, so I wasnt' sure if it was right, but i accidently multiplied one of the numbers versus add. But I finally got it. I'm not over 5% but WELL under...

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    1. STAFF

       pauldeedsposted 16 years agoin reply to this

       Well that's good.   I wouldn't stress too much about the occasional site targeted ads that you see then.

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36. 63

    Mishaposted 16 years ago

    Paul,
    
    I wanted to attach the file, but did not find a way to do this. Here is my Hubpages adsense data listed as a table. Today's data is incomlete of course. Overall I don't see any pattern related to ebay, so my fears probably were ungrounded
    
    Date    Normalized eCPM    Normalized earnings
    10/25/2007    0.8    0.019341801
    10/26/2007    0.356722689    0.033487298
    10/27/2007    0.526470588    0.006928406
    10/28/2007    0.609243697    0.053983834
    10/29/2007    0.590756303    0.09613164
    10/30/2007    0.762605042    0.174942263
    10/31/2007    0.830252101    0.205254042
    11/01/2007    0.609663866    0.156755196
    11/02/2007    0.678571429    0.172632794
    11/03/2007    0.633613445    0.136258661
    11/04/2007    0.793277311    0.290415704
    11/05/2007    0.812605042    0.525981524
    11/06/2007    0.697478992    0.400115473
    11/07/2007    0.673109244    0.046766744
    11/08/2007    0.718907563    0.043879908
    11/09/2007    0.582773109    0.039549654
    11/10/2007    0.571428571    0.026270208
    11/11/2007    0.522689076    0.033775982
    11/12/2007    0.787815126    0.373845266
    11/13/2007    0.869327731    0.521939954
    11/14/2007    0.728151261    0.461605081
    11/15/2007    0.592857143    0.382505774
    11/16/2007    0.487815126    0.285796767
    11/17/2007    0.633613445    0.278290993
    11/18/2007    0.52605042    0.202078522
    11/19/2007    0.583613445    0.432448037
    11/20/2007    0.615546218    0.450635104
    11/21/2007    0.595378151    0.359988453
    11/22/2007    0.606302521    0.236143187
    11/23/2007    0.634033613    0.332852194
    11/24/2007    0.78697479    0.454965358
    11/25/2007    0.617647059    0.357967667
    11/26/2007    0.578151261    0.50721709
    11/27/2007    0.609243697    0.551096998
    11/28/2007    0.807142857    0.670034642
    11/29/2007    0.831932773    0.702944573
    11/30/2007    0.842016807    1
    12/01/2007    1    0.508371824
    12/02/2007    0.763445378    0.279157044

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37. STAFF

    pauldeedsposted 16 years ago

    Thanks for doing that Misha.

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38. 63

    Mishaposted 16 years ago

    you are welcome

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39. 61

    Apaeposted 16 years ago

    Well, people do need to buy dog food on a regular basis, if they have a dog. So dog food ads are not completely out of place. What is, though, is the sheer throught that someone would buy dog food online. I find that a little absurd.

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