When I started using Google Adsense, my ads were set in the wrong language: in stead of displaying ads in English, Google sent me ads in French. Even more: in stead of calling the whole thing “Ads by Google“, it was called “Google Annonces“. And all this happened on a site with not a single non-English word. It took me some time to find out how to change this, even though in the end it was pretty trivial. That’s why I decided to list some items you’ll want to check when the language of your ads are not the language you expected.
Google is pretty good in keeping secrets, so I expect there are not a lot of people outside Google that know its recipe for selecting the language of ads they send you. We do know, however, that it is based on a range of different factors, and changing only one might not yield the result you were hoping for.
- First of all, there are the -very- obvious ones: your personal settings in your Adsense account. Even though this site is hosted on a server in Seattle and fully written in English, it still received French advertising. I think this is due to the fact that that is the closest they could get to my mother country. Mind you, the language in my account was set to English. You can’t move to another country, in order to have your ads displayed in another country, of course (or if you do, you must have a great website, can I join?) but keep it in mind anyway.
- Then we go to the – for the less web savvy users – less obvious ones: the meta information in your sites headers. Every webpage starts with a bit of information about itself. This information is formatted in tags, that are called the meta tags. One piece of information you can share with the world, is the language used on the page. I found that my WordPress header didn’t include this information by default. You can change this by adding it to your header.php file. You can find this file in the directory of the theme you’re using (e.g. wp-content->themes->default->header.php). You can open it with any text editor, and then you want to change the line that looks like this:
<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml” <?php language_attributes(); ?>>
into this:
<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml” <?php language_attributes(); ?> xml:lang=”en” lang=”en” >Now you let the browsers of your visitors and Google or any other robot know that the language of your webpage is English (If you want another language, you’ll have to change the “en” of course). That’s what did it for me.
- And now we go into the really obscure parts: the things you display on your page. It seems to make sense that Google looks at the words you use, and tries to link them to a certain language. So if your website is in Spanish, then it makes sense that the ads are in Spanish, right? But if that’s what they do, then that’s only a part of the story. Apparently, the use of non-English characters can upset the Great Googly Moogly language detector as well. So if tweaking of all the above setting doesn’t help, you might want to check on what exactly you’re displaying.
- There’s another factor influencing the language of the ads shown on your site, but there’s not much you can do about it yourself: the locality of the visitor. A visitor’s location is obviously a strong indication of his language. So if you’re located in a Spanish speaking region, and visit an English website, you can still receive adds in Spanish. If you want to check what people in another region will see, you might try to use some kind of a proxy service. (The last time I checked www.webproxy.pro for example, its IP address returned an address in the States.)
- If after all these great tips, you’re still receiving ads in click language, then alas, I don’t know what to do. If you do have other tips, though, do not hesitate to put them in a comment!
Cheers
