Google ads, Yahoo ads and most of the rest of the gaggle of ad services out there strive to serve ads based on the content of the pages on which they appear. The theory is that someone reading a page about, say, storm windows may be more likely to click an ad for Pella Windows than an ad for, say, chewing gum. The way these ad systems work is they spider the page, read the content, attempt to prase for keywords, then match those keywords to whatever keywords are associated with the ads in their system. Often times this works perfectly. Other times… well, look at the image to the left there (click on it for the full page version). This was taken from a story I found today on Fox News (I was only reading it for the pictures, I swear).

When you’re wo9ndering why your Google ads aren’t converting quite as well, keep in mind that these keyword matching systems are only good at keywords, not context. And keywords don’t always equal context.

For the rcord: The company serving this ad was neither Google nor Yahoo, but a product called AdSonar by a company called Quigo - neither of which I had heard of before this.