What is an effective way to insert ads into web app? Is AdSense suitable?

Question

Since content of web applications is dynamically generated it would appear that AdSense is not going to produce relevant ads.

Is there a way to increase relevancy of the AdSense ads for the web application?

Is it possible to achieve Gmail-like ad functionality at all for third-party applications?

Is there a better ad provider for web apps than Google?

Answer 1

No, it's not really suitable. As you know, AdSense is based on page content and that's rarely going to target the correct ads unless your site is very focused on one advertising niche.

If you run a huge web-app that gets many millions of pageviews, then you might be able to get something worked out with Google privately. Otherwise, you're left to see what the best of the rest has to offer.

Chitika does have the power to let you specify what niches you want to display adverts from... But their rates and even their quality of adverts aren't up there with Googles. Have a look around. There are thousands of advertising providers and I'm sure you'll find one that fits your model.

... But it's not Google at the moment.

Answer 2

There are many niche-specific advertising network available, or channels within larger networks such as TribalFusion. For instance, my company, Lake Quincy Media, specializes in advertising solely for Microsoft Developers. Thus, if you go to an article on one of our sites that is about inheritance, you won't find the usual Google ads suggesting that you update your will and find a good lawyer to discuss ways to transfer your wealth to your heirs. You'll find ads for tools like Resharper and Visual Studio, or perhaps some components or a technical job ad. The key here is that the entire pool of ads available to the site has been narrowly targeted to the specific niche that the web site serves. This allows for targeted ads without the need to index the content and try and use keywords to "guess" at what might be targeted.

Answer 3

Sure it is possible to get relevant AdSense ads on dynamic pages. Only because we call some site "dynamic" (= we generate content on-the-fly), it doesn't mean it is not crawlable by AdSense. It all depends on how URLs on your site are constructed, and how you access pages.

Here's simpified sequence of how AdSense publishes ad on some page :

1. The user inputs some query/klicks link/whatever is necessary to access dynamic page
2. The browser sends the request to server and gets the page with some dynamic content
3. AdSense javascript embedded on this page will call AdSense clawler, and request him to visit URL of the page
4. The crawler gets this URL, grabs the page, analyzes it to match and display relevant ad (in most cases it has already clawled it before, so it brings proper ad from index).

So to get relevant ad, you must make sure AdSense crawler gets the same URL that user opened, and this URL have to lead to the same content. It is possible as long as you avoid:

• pagew with URLs using session IDs, (eg. www.yoursite.com/index.php?pageid=123&sessionid=64875684756)
• pages that change content over time, when using same URL
• pages that need to be logged to, and modify its content to user profile

• pages that use POST to send forms

  Check this link from google support to read more about it.