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Sites about farm animals, fat people, and casualties of war should not all feature the same ads.  But if they all use the term “cow,” they might.  And so Google’s trying to update AdSense’s contextual targeting capabilities for the sake of serving better ads and letting advertisers and you make more money.

A post on the Inside AdSense blog states, “[T]his week, we’ll be rolling out a series of enhancements to AdSense’s contextual targeting capabilities, which will more accurately match relevant ads to webpages.  You won’t need to update your AdSense account or ad code, as these changes will be applied automatically.  In many ways these types of improvements are par for the course at Google - but I wanted to let you know about the kinds of improvements we’ve been focusing on.”

The post then continues, “Please keep in mind that these changes won’t affect how other types of ads are matched to your sites; for instance, you’ll continue to see placement-targeted ads when advertisers bid to appear specifically on your pages.”

Google’s interested in hearing your feedback if you notice any differences.  And hopefully you will, because misplaced ads of the sort we mentioned earlier really don’t do anybody much good.

This might be a good time to do a little research and make sure (if you haven’t already) that your keywords don’t have multiple meanings, too.

Last time, we talked about Twitter as a promotional tool, and ended with a joke about not using it to target David Letterman.  It turns out, though, that you might be better off targeting Letterman than a teenager, because new numbers indicate that Twitter isn’t popular among kids.

Note: the fresh report doesn’t challenge the idea that Twitter’s a good marketing tool.  So we’re not doing a 180.  This is just to help you refine your use of the social site.

Nielsen’s David Martin and Sue MacDonald stated, “In June 2009, only 16 percent of Twitter.com website users were under the age of 25.  Bear in mind persons under 25 make up nearly one quarter of the active US Internet universe, which means that Twitter.com effectively under-indexes on the youth market by 36 percent.”

Meanwhile, 64 percent of Twitter’s users fall into the 25 to 54 age group, and 20 percent are 55 or older.

So if you want to try to make money using Twitter, just carefully consider what sort of people it is you’re trying to reach.  Martin and MacDonald wrote, “The fact remains that Twitter has grown to be a major online presence and is being driven forward by significant buzz.”