Google Adsense Targeting Fail – Wordpress Caching Tips
Today while reviewing my Google Adsense statistics for my Wordpress news aggregation site focused on the Apple iPhone I noticed that the CTR and RPC had dropped dramatically the past 24 hours. This site is a very consistent performer so it was an obvious drop even though it was only over a short period of time. Initially I dug into the Awstats and some other tools I use and could not quite put my finger on it then I took a look at the front page of the site and realized that for the last 18 hours a few of the front page articles were either on the iPhone sexual offender app or an app used for locating criminals.
Based on this Google Adsense had targeted the ads on the site exclusively on sexual offender sites, criminal record sites, and other ads such as that. As you can imagine on a site that has thousands of pageviews a day all focused on iPhone apps the CTR dropped like a rock. This site has been up and running for over 2 years and I have never had this happen. Did not take long to figure out but still a bit of a pain and a shock to initially see such a drop in revenue before I could see the problem.
On another note, if you do happen to run a high traffic news aggregation site on Wordpress and seem to be having page load time issues and general performance issues there are a few things you can do. At one point around a year ago I was having constant issues (HTTP server dying, MYSQL issues, etc) with this site. After trying everything that could be done to tweak the server (it was on its own VPS) I went with the obvious, I installed the WP-Supercache plugin. Almost immediately the site performance was better. Remember that if you ever into Wordpress performance issues.
Hi Bruce,
Would be keen to read in a blog post about how to build news aggregation site on wordpress.
@Rosco – I did a post awhile back, heres the link http://brucemarler.com/free-minisite-ebook-wordpress-news-aggregator-in-15-minutes/ . It could be a bit more expansive but it works.
Bruce, I’ve had the same experience before and although I could never put my finger exactly on the problem, I did notice that it happened most often during the development phase, where I would stick in my test Adsense ads which I do in order to round out the esthetics, gauge spacing, etc, etc. The point is, the site wasn’t available to Google (no spidering available and blocked by robots, etc) and it was spitting out whatever it could. It happened yesterday actually, a site with a distinct set of keywords was pumping out nothing but police, guns and sex offender ads. Within a day of being live, of course, all this changes and the ads are appropriately served, but strange that this type of ad should appear when nothing else is better to offer.
And on another strange note, I sometimes get ad ghosting, where test banners I use for site “A” might again generate site “A” topic ads, but on test site “B”, which is on a completely different topic. Of course none of this matters since they are in development and there is no clicking, but still curious as to how and why these things happen.
Michael
@Michael – That ad ghosting thing is strange. Even though it doesnt matter since it is in development that is just odd.
Luckily within a day all my ads are back to normal and revenue is back to where it was. Sex offender ads just do not work on an iPhones site:)
Wp-SuperCache is rocking