Adsense: Contextual vs Site Targeted ads

• Posted by Badi Jones on January 30th, 2007 - Comment on this Post »

When most people think about optimizing Adsense, they tend to focus on tweaking things to improve click through rate (CTR). Well, CTR is definitely important, but from my experience, the most important factor for Adsense earnings is the amount of page views you get, or increasing the number of ad impressions. The reason for this is because every Adsense ad doesn’t pay the same way.

Some ads pay a certain amount each time someone clicks it. These are usually contextual, Cost per click (CPC) ads that are automatically placed on your site by google’s keyword algorithm when your site’s keywords match those that the advertiser paid for. As I said, most people are familiar with these ads. The ads many people are not always familiar with are called site targeted ads (also known as cost per million (CPM) impressions ads). Targeted CPM ads are placed on your site when an advertiser chooses to display ads specifically on your site.

The choice to run is totally out of your control. Google decides what kind of ad to run at any given time, but that actually turns out to be a good thing, since Google is looking to make as much money as possible, and the more money you make, the more they make.

So how can you see what percentage of your income is from targeted ads? It takes a few clicks, but it’s not too difficult

1. In your Adsense control panel, go to Advanced Reports.
2. Under “Show data by”, select “individual ad”
3. That should give you a “Show data by targeting type – contextual or site” check box. Check it.
4. At this point you can either choose “Aggregate data” or “Channel data”.
5. Click the “Display Report” button to see the results.

At this point, you’ll get a new column in your results called “targeting”, and results will be separated into 2 new parts for each row: Contextual and Site (Targeted). Now you can see what percentage of your earnings come from regular contextual ads, and what percentage are targeted.

This just reinforces the fact that to increase your earnings, you need to focus more on increasing your traffic.

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