Hi All.

On my site at bookandreader.com/forums there is one Google Adsense ad that keeps showing up a lot more than others. It's an ad for a company selling bookmarks.

They did contact me a while back about advertising on the site, but then never got back to me. I suspect they've set their adwords to target our site in the hope of getting more hits.

Does this kind of targetting have a bad effect on my clicks? I'm guessing that my visitors keep seeing this ad and not clicking on it, rather than seeing fresh ads and clicking on those?

What do you think?

Well it appears to me that the ad is targeted, so it shouldn't affect your CTR. But why don't you just check your stats?

This happened in a friend's music forum, and the ad was about selling paintings, so that did mess up the ctr.

Adwords users have a beta option right now allowing them to site target you on a CPC basis. So if they are in the beta, and have site targeted you, and the clicks are not converting, then it could have a negative effect.

As mentioned in the above post, check your stats and see if you are earning an increase in site targeted revenue. If they are targeting you, and using the regular adwords method of CPM, then it isn't hurting you at all because you are getting paid per impression.

Yes, I do not see any harmful effect as long as the ads are relevant and you are generating revenue from them

Maybe it could be one of those big CPM ads and they are paying good CPM rates for your adspace to keep showing up.

Sounds targeted to me, but you will have to check your Advanced Reports tab, then select Individual Ads and check the targeting box. Then you can see if it is contextual or site targeted. If your stats show you aren't earning anything from it, simply use your competitive ad filter tab to ban it, and someone else's ad will start showing up in it's place. If you do that and your earnings start to drop, you can always unban them later if you change your mind.