How To: More Relevant and Targeted Adsense Ads
- Posted by B Jones on October 16th, 2006 - Comment on this Post »
If there’s one question I often get asked, it’s this: “How can I increase the relevance of my Adsense ads?”.
In theory, you should just be able to sign up for an Adsense account, put the Adsense code on your page, and instantly get ads that closely match what that page is about, but anyone who has used Adsense knows that things don’t always go this way.
Thankfully, the Google Adsense team provides a way for webmasters to solve this problem. Adsense Section Targeting.
Adsense section targeting gives you the ability to specify sections of your content that you’d like us to either emphasize or ignore when finding Adsense ads to display for your site. So the end result is more relevant and targeted Adsense ads.
Here’s how Section Targeting works.
It’s really easy. You just add special section targeting start and end tags. These tags are only for Adsense, so they won’t affect the way your site looks at all.
The 2 main tags are the start tag <!– google_ad_section_start –> and the end tag <!– google_ad_section_end –>. These two tags should go around the main content that include the keywords that you want to target. This gives you the ability to ignore a lot of repetitive content, like the header, footer, and navigation, and focus more on the main content of that page.
Here’s an example of how to increase Adsense relevance with section targeting. Below is a simplified HTML document.
<html>
<head>
…
<body>
… Repetitive header and general navigation here gets ignored so you don’t get the same ads on every page…
<!– google_ad_section_start –>
<h1>Specific Title with Keywords…</h1>
<p>a great article about whatever goes here</p>
<!– google_ad_section_end –>
…
Repetitive content like the footer and other repeated content gets ignored here
…
</body>
</html>
Special Ignore Modifier
You can also use special ignore modifier with this tag, but I think this can tend to complicate things, and maybe do more harm than good. The ignore tag looks like this:
It basically works the in the same way.
I would suggest that you start out with the plain targeting tags first. Seeing any results can take up to 2 weeks to take effect, depending on how often you update your site, so be patient.
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