AdSense not showing relevant ads for your website?

One of my daily activities includes going through my webserver logs and statistics. I most certainly cannot deny being quite curious about how and why people end up on my website as well as what it is, they wanted in the first place. What I find especially insightful in this regard are search engine referrers. They typically do not only provide keywords for ideas to write new articles about, but also show what real people are actually looking for. The lesson to learn here is, that if you want to make money through AdSense, then you should also pay close attention to your logs to find out how to get more visitors.

Lately I have seen a couple of AdSense related search phrases like "my adsense does not have the right content" and "optimizing your articles for adsense". Having banners, that do not fit the website's content seems to be a common problem, a lot of publishers face and to be very honest, it is not always possible to get the desired ads, as Google does not allow publishers to choose directly (naturally, as this way everybody would only pick financial or health related banners, that promise a high payout). So, what can a publisher do to indirectly influence placement? To answer the question, let's first look at the webserver logs again. Those readers, who actually have access to the raw log files might have noticed entries like the following:

66.249.71.73 - - [22/Sep/2008:09:19:53 +0200] "GET /newsletter HTTP/1.1" 200 3263 "-" "Mediapartners-Google"

For those, not familiar with the apache webserver server software, this line reads as:
On September the 22, at 4:38 AM (GMT timezome), a software identifying itself as "Mediapartners-Google", running on the computer with the IP address 66.249.71.73 successfully accessed the URL http://www.onyxbits.de/newsletter.

The software in question is one of Google's AdSense robots, which must not be confused with the indexing robot, responsible for feeding the Google searchengine. The "Mediapartners-Google" bot will only visit those pages serving AdSense banners, analyze their content and then update the list of ads, that seem suitable to be shown on the page in question. There are a couple of things to note here:

• The bot will only download the page itself, no graphics, flash or other referenced files.
• The bot visits regularly, but more often for pages, that are also visited by humans.
• The AdWords program (which is the peer to AdSense - the source for banners) is keyword driven. Advertizers basically tell Google to place their banners on websites featuring a specific set of keywords.

From these observations, two rather obvious conclusions can be drawn:

1. Any hints as to which advertisement might fit the content of the page must be given in textual form on the page itself (not surprisingly, Google points that one out in their documentation). The more (coherent) text there is, the better. Pages mainly consisting of images or other rich media will usually not provide enough input for the AdSense bot to make much sense of the page and hence, the advertisement will be rather untargeted.
2. No change to the page in question will have an instant result. Banners will not change until the bot returns to analyze the page again (assuming that advertisers do not start or stop campaigns). Text optimization is a trial and error game, that takes some time.

So, leaving the technical stuff behind, the question still remains as what can be done to get fitting ads. Obviously, a fitting advertisement must match the topic of the page, but that's only half of the truth. The other half is, that it must also appeal to the mood of the visitor.
Consider writing a review for mobile phones for example. It might seem, that an advertisement for ringtones fits the topic. However, someone, who is looking for cellphone reviews, will more likely be interested in buying a new mobile then buying ringtones.
Taking this example into account, the question is not, what advertisement would fit a page, but which products could be sold through that page and how to attract the appropriate banners. Fortunately, it becomes rather trivial from here on:

1. What is your page about? Does it get visitors already and if so, how do they discover the page?
2. After reading your page, what do your visitors know? What could they be interested in next? Make a list of products, that they might want to buy.
3. Use Google to search for suppliers of those products. Analyze their pages to find out, which keywords they might target. Google's own keyword tool can be of great help here.
4. Try to put the keywords you discovered in the content of your text. You want at least one keyword rich paragraph on top of the page (as naturally that is where visitors look first). However, keep Google's golden rule in mind to make website for humans and not robots.
5. Analyze the banners currently showing on your page. Isolate those you deem unfitting and find out which keywords triggered them, using the same methods as above. Eliminate those keywords where possible (a thesaurus can be of great assistance for this). If you cannot do it, without disrupting the flow of text, then try to exclude the paragraphs, they appear in using AdSense's special comments.

Keep in mind, that you might have to repeat these steps several times, till a satisfying result is reached. You will also not see instant results. It might take anywhere from hours to days till banners adapt. Also keep in mind, that new pages will rarely have targeted ads, as long as the AdSense bot has not visited them. Instead they will get advertisement, that best fits the overall theme of the website.