Matching Advertisers ( Adwords ) sites with Promoters ( Adsense ) sites

[murphypj]

I hope this is the right forum for my question.

I have subscribed to Google Adsense, and placed the code for the relevant Ad Unit ( medium, 4 links ) on all of my pages.

My website is a popular guitarist resource, mainly aimed at early learning guitarists. It has been around for 13 years and has had over 17.5 million viewers. I had previously subscribed to AdSense, but at the time had several sales-based affiliates, which were generating good revenue, and AdSense was just an afterthought, to fill some unused webpage real estate.

When the recession hit, most of my affiliate programs pretty much died, no-one could afford guitar lessons, no-one was buying guitars or accessories. I hadn't built the site to make money, so I removed all advertising a few years ago.

I recently decided to include Adsense ads, if only to cover my hosting costs. I'd had the foresight when removing all ads to leave an 'include' page, which I had then just left blank, so I was able to easily restore the Google ads to about 400 pages, by just updating the 'include' page.

My problem is that I am now looking at the ads being served on my site, and while the majority lean toward at least the musical end of the spectrum ( voice lessons, sites with advice/help for new bands etc. ), I continue to see a whole bunch of ads totally unrelated to my website. Adsense now has a URL filter, which is useful, but means checking each of my pages, mentally recording the offending URL, then clicking to a tab with my Adsense account loaded and typing the site URL into the filter area.

My real problem is that the more I filter, the more I have to filter. I live in Ireland, so all of my Google accounts are accessed from an Irish IP address. But my site is aimed at the global guitar playing community, only about 5% of my visitors are from Ireland, while around 65% are from the UK, US and Canada. So ... Google inundates me with Irish sites - holidays, plumbers, builders, anything you can think of. There are some 'category' level filters, but none of them location based - and in any case I would not want to block Irish websites who had global reach - online guitar lessons, online guitar stores who delivered worldwide

Also, when I re-installed the code about 2 months ago, there was a large trend of Asian Bride, Interracial dating type ads. I went thru every page and keyed in the URLs for these sites on the URL blocker option. Checked after a week, and these had been replaced by Web hosting sites. Blocked these. Next were tourist sites, cruises, adventure holidays. Once again, I blocked each URL.

Checking today, I still see many Irish-based sites, rock-climbing sites on my 'Rock Songs' page, Oasis holidays on my 'Oasis' page and some URLs which just leave me scratching my head.

I have never used Adwords, but I'm assuming that advertisers have a similar control panel page where they can see which sites their Ads are placed on? Maybe not. But if you're the person with the rock climbing website, I'm pretty sure you wouldn't be happy that 2,000 guitar players are ignoring it every day ( Ok, maybe 1,999 ). Google claim that relevance is their thing, but I'm not seeing this either in search or in advertising.

Again, apologies from a non-Adwords person, but I'm hoping for some feedback, maybe from someone who has had issues with where their AdWords ads were being placed, and how their situation was resolved.

Thanks,
PJ