Google Ads and Geotargeting

Google has been using geotargeting in the AdSense program and now the RSS feeds have geotargeted ads. The ads are specific to the location of the consumers.

“The AdSense program uses geotargeting to serve Google ads to your pages – ads are specific to a user’s region and language, based on their IP address.

This means that the ads that are served to a user from Australia may be different than those that appear for a user from Canada.

Geotargeting makes the ads even more relevant for visitors to your site, and also means that you may not see all of the ads that can be served to your pages”. [source]

To check what ads consumers from other regions see Google offers an AdSense preview tool. Using this preview tool it is possible to see “the ads that would show on any web page, from a number of different locations”.

“Geo-targeted locations : select the geo-targeted location from which to view ads, allowing you to see what users in Canada will see, even if you live in Japan”. [source]

Clickz has referred to Shuman Ghosemajumder, a member of the product management team at Google, and said that advertisers cannot specifically target RSS ads locally.

But when the advertisers choose the location for the ads in Google’s content network it applies to RSS feeds and Web sites.

While targeting ads Google takes into account two things:
1. content of the RSS feed
2. location of the user

Content of the feed is the primary factor in targeting ads.

Clickz has quoted Jennifer Slegg of Search Engine Watch, who said, “From a publisher perspective, CTR is extremely low with RSS ads, so I would be surprised if any advertiser is receiving a significant amount of traffic from RSS, except for cases of high traffic blogs that have been site targeted by an advertiser.

From an advertiser perspective, there hasn’t been much buzz about RSS ads at all, either geo-targeted or otherwise. RSS ads are easily trackable in logs, so advertisers can track any clicks coming through RSS ads to determine ROI”. [source]

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