Ads don't seem to be targeted on phpBB forum.

My website has been active for about 3 years now, always stayed clear of advertising but now I've added Google ads so I can cover my rising costs.

Anyways, the heart of my site is a phpBB forum and although ads show up they don't seem to display any relevent information to my content at all.

I've only installed this yesterday.

Google states that you get PSA's and therefore no revenue but I have received some clicks and got money for it so I assume they are no longer PSA's?

90% of my forum requires a login to get to the content so could this be causing it?

Do ads scan the page every time they are being displayed or do ads base their content on google crawls prior?
I'm a bit confused about this, I thought it was done on the fly?

Bottom line what can / should I do to get more targeted ads?

Cheers.

 

Google scans the page each time it loads and dislays relevant ads.. hence the term "contextual advertising".. it works quite well.. AdSense always serves up relevant ads on my forum. You can point AdSense to look at certain secitons of your site to get the info for the ads.. I don't have the link to the instructions on Googles' AdSense page for this, but it will probably do the trick for you.

 

Well, it doesn't seem work well at all.

If you go to my site

www.theoldergamers.com and then to forums you will see one add banner on the top only, the bottom one even remains transparent.

I my humble opinion there should be enough content on that page to actually display some relevant gaming related ads at least.
And the full display of the forum listing is visible to all.

Instead I get some basic ads for a whois service or a geographic locator.

Been like that for 2 days now, is this normal?

Ta

 

It works fine to get target ads.

1. Edit file overall_footer.tpl and overall_header.tpl.
2. Ad metatags <meta name="DESCRIPTION" content=" ">
<meta name="KEYWORDS" content=" "> in the overal_header.tpl file.
3. Ad some eyword for your site. Top 10 keyword for your site in footer and header.
4 Go to your General Configuration page and ad the keyword in "Site name" and "Site description"
5. Go to "Forum Administration" and ad the keyword in the top forum name.

After some minutes or days you will have target ads. This works for mine 12+
forums.

 

that's your problem. the ads are being targeted to your login screen. the bot can't login. you could optimize it until it bleeds, but it's never going to help if the bot can't even read the content.

 

If the statement above

Google scans the page each time it loads and dislays relevant ads.. hence the term "contextual advertising"

Then I would assume it should not matter as when I logged in member displays the page, that content should still create a relevant ad?

I'll have a look at the header and footer thingies.

 

uhhh no. because the google bot needs to access it as well. try logging out. that's what the google bot sees.

 

I guess that would make sense but what I see based on this does not.

My forum index page is fully readable without a login and here I get these generic ads.
The bot should be able to get some targeted ads from here.

The forum content which requires a login is exactly where I do get a lot more relevant ads strangely enough.
Here it seems that the bot did manage to pull relevant info.
Totally weird.

This in the robots.txt which allows google to crawl everything and according to the manual it can read pages requiring a login this way? Not sure.

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*
Disallow:

Also the meta tags are apparently ignored by Google but are they used by adsense maybe?

Ta.

 

yes eventhough your forum is with SEF and did SEO , google can spider only the guest allowed forums , so you won't get any contextual until do that.
you can see this in phpbb admin panel (i found this practically with my forum) a guest with some IP always waits in login section ,when i traced it , i found that is a google bot.
so i recommend open atleast some categories to crawl.

 

Eh im having the same problem, shows programming ads on a football (soccer) site... 90% of the site doesn't require you to login so thats very weird... the site has 22,000 pages crawled by google... meta tags and proper titles and no relevant ads.

I think its because for some reason sessions show up for guests so it messes it up. I tought i removed them.

 

I removed session ids for guests now too... so it is not showing SIDS at all anywhere. Hopefully soon it will start working. If you need to know how to remove SIDS Here:

#################################################################
## MOD Title: Guest Sessions MOD
## MOD Version: 0.04
## MOD Author: CyberAlien <no@public_email> (Vjacheslav Trushkin) http://www.phpbbstyles.com
## MOD Description:
##      This mod removes session id for guests from url and this way
##      guests who don't have cookies like different robots will use
##      correct urls. It can be used to allow googlebot and other
##      search engines to spider your forum correctly.
##
## Installation Level:   Easy
## Installation Time:   1-2 Minutes
## Files To Edit (1): includes/sessions.php
##############################################################
## For Security Purposes, Please Check: http://www.phpbb.com/mods/ for the
## latest version of this MOD. Downloading this MOD from other sites could cause malicious code
## to enter into your phpBB Forum. As such, phpBB will not offer support for MOD's not offered
## in our MOD-Database, located at: http://www.phpbb.com/mods/
##############################################################
## Before Adding This MOD To Your Forum, You Should Back Up All Files Related To This MOD
##############################################################

#
#-----[ OPEN ]---------------------------------------------
#
includes/sessions.php

#
#-----[ FIND ]---------------------------------------------
# around line 157
   $sql = "UPDATE " . SESSIONS_TABLE . "
      SET session_user_id = $user_id, session_start = $current_time, session_time = $current_time, session_page = $page_id, session_logged_in = $login, session_admin = $admin
      WHERE session_id = '" . $session_id . "'
         AND session_ip = '$user_ip'";

#
#-----[ REPLACE WITH ]---------------------------------------
#
   $sql_ip = $user_id == ANONYMOUS ? " AND session_ip = '$user_ip'" : '';
   $sql = "UPDATE " . SESSIONS_TABLE . "
      SET session_ip = '$user_ip', session_start = $current_time, session_time = $current_time, session_page = $page_id, session_logged_in = $login, session_admin = $admin
      WHERE session_id = '" . $session_id . "' $sql_ip
         AND session_user_id = '$user_id'";

#
#-----[ FIND ]---------------------------------------------
# around line 210
   $SID = 'sid=' . $session_id;

#
#-----[ REPLACE WITH ]---------------------------------------
#
   $SID = $user_id > 0 ? 'sid=' . $session_id : '';

#
#-----[ FIND ]---------------------------------------------
# around line 288
            $SID = ($sessionmethod == SESSION_METHOD_GET || defined('IN_ADMIN')) ? 'sid=' . $session_id : '';

#
#-----[ REPLACE WITH ]---------------------------------------
#
            $SID = $userdata['user_id'] > 0 ? (($sessionmethod == SESSION_METHOD_GET || defined('IN_ADMIN')) ? 'sid=' . $session_id : '') : '';

#
#-----[ FIND ]---------------------------------------------
# around line 340
   //
   // If we reach here then no (valid) session exists. So we'll create a new one,
#
#-----[ BEFORE, ADD ]---------------------------------------
#
   elseif(empty($sessiondata))
   {
      // try to login guest
      $sql = "SELECT u.*, s.*
         FROM " . SESSIONS_TABLE . " s, " . USERS_TABLE . " u
         WHERE s.session_ip = '$user_ip'
            AND s.session_user_id = " . ANONYMOUS . "
            AND u.user_id = s.session_user_id
               LIMIT 0, 1";
      if ( !($result = $db->sql_query($sql)) )
      {
         message_die(CRITICAL_ERROR, 'Error doing DB query userdata row fetch', '', __LINE__, __FILE__, $sql);
      }

      $userdata = $db->sql_fetchrow($result);

      if ( isset($userdata['user_id']) )
      {
         if ( $current_time - $userdata['session_time'] > 60 )
         {
            $sql = "UPDATE " . SESSIONS_TABLE . "
               SET session_time = $current_time, session_start = $current_time, session_page = 0
               WHERE session_id = '" . $userdata['session_id'] . "'";
            if ( !$db->sql_query($sql) )
            {
               message_die(CRITICAL_ERROR, 'Error updating sessions table', '', __LINE__, __FILE__, $sql);
            }
         }
         return $userdata;
      }
   }

#
#-----[ SAVE/CLOSE ALL FILES ]------------------------------------------
#
# EoM

Code (markup):

 

Nice find, will certainly try that later. Let me know if it works for you.

Cheers

 

Well its still not working but i suppose thats because google has to recrawl all the pages? Im not sure ill wait until tomorrow before contacting google support....

 

Also a newbie...not only to adsense but to the having a website, et al...I created a site, had adsense ads that matched my content, added a new header to a few pages and all the sudden the adsense ads have become irrelevent to my site.

What would make a header (which matches my content) change the adsense ads so drastically.... I will delete the headers if necessary to get back to original ad placements but think I need them for ranking purposes?

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thank you.

 

If it's the recrawl that you're waiting for it might take up to two weeks to find out, but if it works for you, please let us know!

 

Use that code i posted... most my site is displaying relevant ads now.... well like 85% id say ..... if it works for you i wouldnt mind some reputation

 

95% of my site is working now, so it indeed works

 

Cool mate, thanks for the follow-up. I'll give that a go then!

Would there be any security issues with SID's btw?

Cheers

 

Sorry for not responding earlier... no issues with SiDs, well i havent had any.