Google’s ad serving technology has a long way to go if it is going to be widely used on opinion sites that discuss current events and politics.

After not-quite-three days, it became clear that the mistargeted ads I wrote about earlier are considered a feature of AdSense and not a bug. After writing Google about the problem, I got this response:

We understand your concern with the types of ads that are being displayed on your site. Please note that at this time, AdSense only targets ads
based on overall site content, not keywords or categories. Our AdSense
crawlers automatically determine which ads to display after gathering
information about the content of your pages.

If you’d like to display ads related to specific topics on your website,
we recommend including more text-based content about these topics on your
site to assist our crawlers in gathering information about your pages and
determining relevant ads to display. Complete sentences and paragraphs are
helpful to our crawlers in determining the content of a page.
Unfortunately, we cannot guarantee the results of any changes you make to
your pages.

Well, I can’t imagine this site getting much more text-heavy than it already is, so it’s obvious that the system is working as Google intends. That’s fine, but I don’t think that system is going to work for a vast majority of sites like mine.

I could live with the occasional mistargeted ad, but it seemed that a vast majority of the political ads were inappropriate for large segments of this site’s audience. I could even live with the many ads that highlighted positions different from mine, if some of them weren’t so downright insulting. One ad referred to Bush voters as “dumb,” while another sold t-shirts that labeled Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld “asses of evil.” Now, I may not be a wise Big Media professional, but even I know that insulting your audience is not a good way to encourage it to stick around.

I had planned on running the Google ad test indefinitely to see what kind of revenue it would generate. Frankly, I was encouraged by Google’s compensation on these relatively low-volume days (volume spikes when new articles are posted or when sites like Instapundit link), but I suspect I can do just as well—if not better—by a system that accounts for the preferences of this site’s audience. After all, isn’t that what advertisers are paying for, a distinct and well-defined audience?

I hope Google eventually allows sites to describe themselves better so that the ads can be more accurately targeted. It wouldn’t take much, just allow site owners to tick off a bunch of checkboxes that help categorize things, and allow advertisers to do the same. If online dating services can automate that sort of matching, why can’t Google?

Just about everything else about Google’s system was a pleasure to use. It’s simple, it’s easy to integrate, the reporting tools are great, and the compensation is decent. But this one big glaring omission is the deal-killer for me, and I suspect I’m not alone. If Google fixes this problem, I might be back.