Google announced (subtly) that it is rolling out a series of enhancements to AdSense’s contextual targeting capabilities to more accurately match relevant ads to AdSense publishers’ pages.
Unfortunately, not many details about these enhancements were given away, but Google says AdSense publishers will not have to update their AdSense accounts or ad code. Changes will be applied automatically.
“Our machines are very good at the matching process, but there are still a few cases where their definition of relevance differs from our human definition of relevance,” says AdSense Product Manager Woojin Kim. “In these few cases, the system might end up serving ads that don’t seem immediately relevant to users. We understand that increased ad relevance contributes to a positive experience for users, publishers, and advertisers, so we’re continuously working on ways to improve the relevance and quality of ads that appear on your sites.”
The changes will not affect how other types of ads are matched to your sites. Placement-targeted ads that advertisers bid on to appear specifically on your page, for example, will continue to appear.
These relevancy-determining changes are not the only thing the AdSense team has been up to. This week, they announced that they have tweaked the default fonts for different ad formats, in order to trigger better performance. Category filtering was also announced for AdSense for Feeds.
