Use proxies to check you Adsense ads.

Posted by stuart as , , , ,

I had (another) little problem with my web host today. I couldn’t access any of my sites (again), so I placed a support ticket, and got a response that my sites were working fine from their end, and it must be a problem at my end.

So I toodled off to an anonymous proxy, and checked one of my sites: lo and behold, it worked fine!

So I fired off another email to my host, suggesting that my IP may have been inadvertantly blocked from their server - which turned out to be the case, and proceeded to surf some of my sites through the proxy.

What I saw was interesting. Completely different ads to those that I was used to seeing. It was a real eye opener to see your sites the way someone in another country would see them.

This would be the result of Adwords geo-targeting. Now when I’ve set up my Adwords campaigns, I usually just select “All countries and territories” without thinking about it too much. Obviously, not everybody does the same.

It’s quite obvious that a lot of advertisers don’t think it’s worth advertising to those of us on the bottom end of the world (I’m in Australia - just hang on, there’s a koala on the roof which knocked off the tin-can I use to get my wi-fi signal - SHOO!).

This is a shame, as although Australia only has a small population (around 20 million), Australians are amongst the most tech-savvy people on the planet, and I would imagine have some of the highest discretionery spending levels in the world.

The interesting thing is that just over half of my traffic comes from the USA, the majority of the rest from Europe. Are these advertisers missing out on this market as well.

If you live outside the continental USA, it might be well worth your time to have a look at your sites through a US proxy, as it appears that this is the only market which a lot of advertisers are interested in.