adMob contentURL parameter purpose

Question

Reading the official documentation regarding the adMob contentURL parameter it is not clear what is the purpose of passing a URL.

The doc says:

Content URL

Applications that monetize content matching a webpage's content may pass a content URL for keyword targeting.

For example, if your app serves blog articles and is requesting an ad while showing content from the article http://googleadsdeveloper.blogspot.com/2013/10/upgrade-to-new-google-admob.html, then you can pass this URL to target relevant keywords.

Will they fetch the page in realtime or use historical data to look for keywords to use?

Answer 1

If you're asking if AdMob will, at the exact moment of each request, go out and hit the web page to get its contents, the answer is no. People hate waiting for ads to load, and it would add too much latency to do something like that.

Google constantly crawls and recrawls the web for its search engine, though. That's the data that gets used. So it's historical in a sense, but not ancient. :)