AdSense to Deploy Improved Contextual Targeted Ads

Google may be a sprawling giant with interests in many different areas but it still makes the overwhelming majority of its revenue from advertising. So, while it may not get much of the spotlight, it takes its advertising products very seriously. The company is now announcing that its affiliate advertising program AdSense is getting some important improvements to be rolled out this week.

“I'm excited to let you know that this week, we'll be rolling out a series of enhancements to AdSense's contextual targeting capabilities, which will more accurately match relevant ads to webpages. You won't need to update your AdSense account or ad code, as these changes will be applied automatically. In many ways these types of improvements are par for the course at Google - but I wanted to let you know about the kinds of improvements we've been focusing on,” Woojin Kim, AdSense product manager, wrote on the AdSense blog.

The contextual targeting technology powering AdSense ads is one of the most important components of the product. It scans and analyzes the pages where the ads are deployed to find which of these are more suitable for the content and thus more likely to be interesting to the users. Interested users means more clicks on the ads, which in turn means happier advertisers and wealthier web site owners. After AdSense determines the type of content on the site it does an automated auction to decide which of the ads that match it to display.

The system, though, isn't perfect, as with all machines trying to understand human behavior, so it may end up serving a less relevant ad, thus not helping anyone involved in the process. The improvements Google will be unveiling this week should help with the relevancy of the ads and the changes should be, more or less, visible as soon as they are implemented. Google also assures its users that the changes are strictly specific to the contextual targeted ads and won't affect other ad types.