Thread: Spooky Email From AdSense

This email didn't do a lot to set my mind at ease:

Hi,

We're writing to let you know about an upcoming series of refinements to the contextual ad targeting system that should increase the relevance of ads that appear on AdSense sites. As you may know, contextually-targeted ads are matched to your site's content so that they're useful and relevant to users.

While contextually-targeted ads make up one of several components of your earnings, we've identified that this change may have a noticeable negative impact to this portion of your revenue. Ads will become more relevant in the long run, but it's possible that fewer ads will be available to show on your site.

We believe these changes will help advertisers improve the performance of their contextually-targeted ads and encourage them to bid more confidently on AdSense sites. While there's no guarantee of how this change will affect your revenue in the long term, we encourage you to continue developing useful and valuable content for your users.

Thanks for your understanding.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

My brain interpreted this email as:

Blah blah this change may have a noticeable negative impact blah blah.

Google's PR department sells the story about how Google tests everything scientifically to make the entire Google experience perfect. I don't think they know about emails like this one.

And I'm still wondering what they mean here:

Originally Posted by Will.Spencer

Ads will become more relevant in the long run

• How long will be the run?
• Are their systems so slow that they need a long time to adjust ads to sites?
• Will they need to search for new advertisers as their current inventory is not that large?

Also, anyone else got this message yet?

My guess is that it means that AdWords advertisers will have to change the way they target ads.

I am thinking that they are modifying their ad targeting algorithm from "more broad match" to "more exact match" and that this will require each advertiser to bid on a lot more keywords to maintain their current ad buying volumes.

As usual a very vague email from the G with no specific details about what they are doing.

Originally Posted by Will.Spencer

My guess is that it means that AdWords advertisers will have to change the way they target ads.

I am thinking that they are modifying their ad targeting algorithm from "more broad match" to "more exact match" and that this will require each advertiser to bid on a lot more keywords to maintain their current ad buying volumes.

That sounds like a very probable explanation for this.

When did you get this email? I sure haven't seen anything like this.

Originally Posted by cldnails

When did you get this email? I sure haven't seen anything like this.

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 15:46:31 -0600 (MDT) (Fri, 05:46 SGT)

As an adword user I turned off the contextual ads long ago. This was due to all of the scammer/spammers I was seeing on DP and how many were banned for clicking on their own ads or having bots doing it for them.

Originally Posted by Shawn

As an adword user I turned off the contextual ads long ago. This was due to all of the scammer/spammers I was seeing on DP and how many were banned for clicking on their own ads or having bots doing it for them.

Personally I love Contextual Ads, pennies for a ton of converting traffic, much cheaper than on the SERP page.

But this email has me stumped, especially why this didn't go out to all Adsense users and only you Will. I'm not a big player, but probably earn close to $800 per month through Adsense, I would think I would be notified of big changes. That is unless there are just suddenly a larger number of Adword advertisers buying advertising specifically on your site.

It is pretty clear to me. They are saying, "Thank you for being a loyal AdSense partner. You will likely see your AdSense income get cut in half and we hope that will not upset you too much. Google needs higher profits, but you do not."


The apologetic tone of that message says it all.

It sounds like economy is affecting G and they are trying to keep more of the ad revenue for themselves.

Let say someone was spending 25k a month and now they are spending 5k. They probably want to stop showing the ads on your network and keep the ads with the organic search. So that they can stay with the 5k.