Increasing the Effectiveness of AdSense Ads through Section Targeting

Posted: December 13, 2005

One of the largest problems with AdSense is often the ads are irrelevant to your content.

This is especially true of blogs where the ads might be about blogging, or the rest of your navigation, and not about the specific topic on that page.

The more relevant an ad is to that exact topic, the higher the relevancy to your reader. The higher the relevancy to your reader - the higher the CTR (click through rate).

Alternately, the worse the targeting is, the lowerr the reader relevancy, and a lower CTR will result.

Pretty basic concepts.

However, if you make most of your money publishing, then a small change in CTR can have a dramatic effect on your income.

I found a tidbit on the AdSense FAQ page today (via Nick W’s interview with Matt Cutts) that I never knew existed - how to emphasize or deemphasize text on a webpage (or blog) to help AdSense show more relevant ads.

The feature is called Section Targeting.

After trying it out on a few pages, it’s very simple to implement on a webpage and does make quite a difference.

As most blogs are template driven, a few changes to a template to surround the post tags with the emphasizing aspect, and the navigation in a deemphasis is incredibly easy.

<!– google_ad_section_start –>
This text is weighted heavier
<!– google_ad_section_end –>

<!– google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) –>
This text is weighted less
<!– google_ad_section_end(weight=ignore) –>

For a wordpress blog, your template would look like this:

<!– google_ad_section_start –>
the_content <-- This section is your post content section

More template information

<!– google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) –>
get_sidebar <--- This section is your entire sidebar - should have a few tags

If you add those tags to a blog, and refresh the page a few times, you should begin to see some different ads show up.

If you’re not happy with them yet, you can also include your comments (depending on how many good keywords your community uses) in the weight-ignore tags and any other non-post based information.

This same standard can be applied to any webpage as well:

<!– google_ad_section_start –>
Main Page Content
<! –google_ad_section_end –>

<!– google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) –>
The rest of your navigation
<!– google_ad_section_end(weight=ignore) –>
</body>
</html>

These are very simple tags, and can dramatically increase the effectiveness of your advertising.

A few simple tests show the are working very well.

Enjoy - I’m off to add some code to other pages.

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