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.