Targeted Mobile Ads And Encoding Issue
Yesterday I noticed some mobile ads in Arabic for the first time, but it was not displayed correctly on many websites. I took a screenshot that you can see below from two websites displaying the same ads, in the beginning I thought it was encoding problem in the websites but when I look inside it I found that both are using UTF-8 encoding.
So why it doesn't render correctly ? Well, after checking I find that it was a bug in the website because as you can see the letters are separated by a logic and, which have not been served by AdMob. Just be aware because such issues can have a negative effect on Ads displayed in your website and of course on your revenue.
I wanted here to talk also about targeted Mobile Ads, because I find it very relevant to display Arabic ads for people who understand Arabic, even if they are visiting an English website. But in the other side you won't always find this information easily available of client language.
The possible solution is to detect the client language, and show ads in the supported language if available, then in second place show English ads. This will generate certainly a higher number of clicks especially for new websites and businesses that want to launch in their country specific language such Spanish, French, Arabic, Farsi ... etc.
The second possibility is to detect the page language, which could be set by publishers. And for the results it's always the same. You have targeted ads in the same language of the website content and so visitors are more likely to click on them.
Finally to be back on the encoding issue, I'm not sure if any publisher is using for example ISO encoding or other, this will be a bug in displayed ads especially if it's using special characters not available in that encoding. There is lot of solutions here you can use iconv for example, or it can be bundled in your application code easily as I did in the icalendar project to convert from windows-1256 to utf-8.
