Sometimes Nonsensical AdSense

I saw that this week’s lecture was about paid search before I watched Professor Moore’s lecture. I therefore think I had a primed mind before I planned to watch the lecture on Thursday night.

Around 2PM on Thursday afternoon, an article titled “Man Wins ‘Popcorn Lung’ Lawsuit” on the Chicago Tribune immediately caught my eye. When I clicked on the article, the first thing I noticed was not the video at the top or the article itself, but a contextual ad on the right-hand side of the screen…..for Garrett’s Popcorn!!

I, of course, began laughing over how absurd it was to see an ad for the most popular popcorn shop in Chicago built within an article talking about the dangers hidden within popcorn!

Finding the irrelevant popcorn ad inspired me to search for more blunders. Here are two more I found:

 

Although we did not learn about blunders within paid search this week, I did gain a much better understanding of contextual advertising. In researching this topic after the lecture, I learned that AdSense is Google’s contextual advertisement feature, where ads are displayed based on user search terms. Since users are searching specific words, the hope is that the contextual ads will illicit more attention, higher clickthrough rates and higher conversion rates.

Contextual marketing can also use a behavioral targeting tactic to create more relevant advertising. In this approach, cookies are used and stored on the user’s computer to track her/his activity. These cookies create a behavioral profile of the user for marketing purposes. Contextual advertising programs use algorithms to display relevant ads and therefore, if the algorithm is mediocre, the ads may be rather irrelevant. And so the better the algorithm, the better the contextual ad.

I tend to truly dislike these tactics. If I search for a pair of shoes on Amazon, I do not want to see those shoes or similar shoes advertised to me when I am visiting the Chicago Tribune or when I am looking for cool events happening in Chicago that weekend. I hate the feeling of being followed, and so I am an obsessive cookie-clearer. I typically do not go more than 20 minutes without clearing my cookies. I, as an aspiring marketer, am not a marketer's dream myself!

Contextual ads, as shown above, can increase conversion rates, but they can also create major blunders. Since algorithms and robots are spitting out these ads, it is hard to monitor the relevance and sensitivity of the ads. To avoid these blunders and oversights, Google reviews its contextual ads to ensure that professional, ethical and editorial standards are met. 

But, as in the case of Garrett’s Popcorn, it looks like Google was out at the movies while that ad was being displayed!