AdSense Oddities

Do you ever look at the ads Google's AdSense puts up on your page? Looking at the ads placed on your page gives some real insight into how hard it must be to find suitable places for some ads and how some of the AdSense ad space auctions must go.

You might remember that I wrote about breaking my tooth a few days ago and then making my subsequent dental appointment. Since that time I have seen nothing but dental ads on this page. Given the relative paucity of dental terms amidst all the other possible terms in this blog, I'm left to conclude that dental ads must have some interesting attributes. After all, before I wrote about my dental issues, I got ads for things like automobiles and how-to setups. Even one about the joys of scabies treatment (and boy oh boy must that be a hard one to sell via keywords). And after all the occurrences of the words dental and tooth in this post, I'll probably be doomed to see nothing but dental ads for the next several weeks. Hopefully all my readers have bad dental health and will diligently visit the fine sponsors of the rampaging dental ads.

What do *I* deduce from the ads I see? Several things that may or may not be interesting to anyone but me in my peculiarly demented way of thinking. And for that matter the deductions may or may not be true. Caveat Emptor.

The first deduction is that the auction for dental terms must be fairly expensive relative to other ad types that might apply to this page. Otherwise the other terms should show up in preference to the current dental mania. Two other possibilities come to mind. It could it be that Colorado dentists are more ad happy than others and/or it could be hard to find occurrences of the dental/tooth keywords for ad placement. After all, I have only viewed the page from an ISP that can be attributed to Colorado. And I did use the words dentist, dental, and tooth.

The second deduction is that the regional division of the auction must be a bit coarse. I get dental practice ads for places like Summit county, Fort Collins, Greeley, etc. Given that those locations range from 250 miles to 100 miles from here, it hints to me that the auction may have included the word /region Colorado as a qualifier. At least one reader from the Summit county area emailed me that the ads must be prescient since they knew to target her with Summit county dental practices. I felt bad when I had to disabuse her of the idea of prescience by pointing out that *I* also saw the same ads out here on the plains. (For those who aren't familiar with Colorado geography/locations, I am located on the eastern plains of Colorado in the area sometimes referred to as the armpit of Nebraska. {Look at a map! } On the other hand, Summit county is in the mountains in the area of the Key Stone, Arapaho Basin, and Breckenridge ski areas. About 250 miles apart as the automobile drives.)

So let me pose the question to those of you who use AdSense on your pages or who read blogs with ads by Google - do you see such odd spates of keyword/region mania? I intentionally used the word automobile four times (including the two in the paragraph)  in this post. It will be real interesting to see if automobile ads start appearing once in a while. Likewise will "ski area" trigger some hot dogging ads with snowboards?