I'm tired of seeing totally irrelevant ads. It seems that the art of figuring out what a web page is about as a basis for selecting ads has been lost under the massive pile of personified ads. But when I'm looking at a page comparing different kinds of high-end cameras, odds are I'm interested in buying a camera, or something camera-related. Yet going to e.g. https://www.techradar.com/news/best-full-frame-camera, I see ads for Windows 10, home insurance, ice cream, and learning English. That's when I use an incognito window. With my normal account, having declined cookies and turned personalized ads off in my Google account, I get ads for learning English, ice cream, car insurance, and gambling. You'd think an ad for camera gear would work better?
It's not because the subject of this page is hard to figure out. It has all manner of metadata, including subject tags, but they seem to be mostly ignored. I'm going to see if I can play around with ads a bit and find out if there is some way to get at least Google ads to understand what the site is about. I'm going to set up a small ads budget for ads pointing to this blog (because why not) and try to see what I get on https://repstrapdk.blogspot.com/2021/01/an-unicofil-vase.html, on https://repstrapdk.blogspot.com/2020/07/replace-all-things.html, and https://repstrapdk.blogspot.com/2020/03/perfect-prints-produced-by-prusa-printer.html. These posts have some amount of product names in the text, but no tags yet. I'll try to get my ads to show on them, then I'll update the tags and request a re-index, then see a week later if the ads have improved and if indeed my ads are showing.
I'm using Google Ads, setting up a "Website traffic" goal for a "Display" type campaign. After fiddling around a bit to get my campaign reactivated, it's now running, but apparently needs some time to learn a bid strategy. Hopefully it will learn well. I'll check in later on how it's doing.
After setting these up and going to the three posts above, I sometimes just see some blank space for the ads, but on the latter one ad for actual 3D printing (yay!) and one for Frankfurter Algemeine (wut?). I'm not sure why it sometimes shows no ads - isn't the spot supposed to go to the highest bidder? Can there simply be no bids?
Update 2021-04-22: I got a mail that my AdSense account had a limit on ads due to suspicious traffic. I check on it, and there has been traffic due to my ads. I didn't buy anyone's labor to get clicks, or click a lot myself, or anything like that. I just let Google do the ads thing. The weird thing was where the clicks came from:
Bangladesh? Pakistan? Ethiopia? My ads were in English, as are my blog posts. Why are these countries suddenly so interested? And what's with the Philippines that makes the RPM be two orders of magnitude higher? This is all very weird. I turned off the ads again, having earned about half of what I paid for the ads.
Update 2021-05-02: I added tags to the three pages. Now we shall see if the ads improve (or are there at all). Right after the update, no ads appear, not even in incognito mode.
