How To Display Relevant AdSense Ads
ADVERTISEMENTSAre you getting a low CTR (Click Through Rate) for your AdSense ads? One possible reason is that you could be getting irrelevant ads, which are caused by the text on other sections of your page (like sidebars and footers in the case of a blog).
Your visitors are likely to click on your ads only if they are relevant to the content of the page it is in. To improve your AdSense CTR and earnings you should implement , with which you can suggest (or ignore) sections of a page to the AdSense bot.
To suggest a section of a page, use the following HTML tags
page section you would like to suggest to AdSense bot
To ignore a page section, use the following HTML tags
page section you want AdSense bot to ignore
For a blog, you should suggest the title and content of a post and ignore sidebars and footers.
You can use section targeting to make suggestions about as many sections of a page as you like. However it may take up to 2 weeks before you see the results of the section targeting.
Google suggests that you need to include significant amount of content within the section targeting tags or you will end up with irrelevant ads or PSAs (Public Service Ads).
Have you implemented Section targeting on your blog? If yes, have you ignored the comment section?
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Posted on April 7th, 2007 | Category: Make Money Online |
Ashwin
April 7, 2007 at 1:55 pm
Been using this technique for sometime now. Honestly I didn’t find any increase in revenue.
There’s a WP plugin to do the job for you. AdSense Target (http://maxpower.ca/)
JohnTP
April 7, 2007 at 2:00 pm
Section targeting is an old technique but I still find AdSense publishers not using it. So I decided to blog it.
Mr.Byte
April 7, 2007 at 2:15 pm
I haven’t thought much about optimizing adsense ads. But how to declare the page sections within those html tags that you have mentioned?
JohnTP
April 7, 2007 at 2:21 pm
To ignore sidebars and footers, go to sidebar.php and footer.php (or whatever your sidebar and footer files are called) and place at the beginning of the file and at the end of file.
Mr.Byte
April 7, 2007 at 2:46 pm
Oh ok..Thanks John! That is simple enough to do.
Madhur Kapoor
April 7, 2007 at 5:41 pm
i have been getting low ctr so far . lets see whether it works .
siong1987
April 7, 2007 at 6:21 pm
What is the definition of “low CTR rate”?
Below 20%???
JohnTP
April 7, 2007 at 6:36 pm
I consider anything below 2% CTR as low CTR
Anand
April 7, 2007 at 7:37 pm
Section targetting is not foolproof. Google still needs to work on them. By the way, You can now find optimization reports in Adsense which suggests you about ways to increase your Adsense revenue. Maybe that will help…
Ashwin
April 7, 2007 at 8:51 pm
For Blogs I consider anything less than 5% as low CTR.
I dunno abt other blogs but my CTR is always over 9% in recent times and after the new ad formats, it’s even higher.
Ryan J. Parker
April 7, 2007 at 9:30 pm
My problem is that some of my pages have some “high competing” keywords that Google decides to show ads for, even though no one is ever going to click them! Still no idea how to solve this.
Manas
April 8, 2007 at 12:25 am
Was using Section Targeting in my old Blogger blog. I don’t think it resulted in more relevant ads.
So I have not yet thought of implementing it in my Wordpress blog.
Ashish Mohta
April 8, 2007 at 1:26 am
I have been doing this since 2 months. Works good. But we seriously need to think what you want to ignore. My tip is if you are explaining things where the use of keyword is less put it under ignore, but then when you start using keyword in a paragraph which contains words like “3g, Phones, intel etc” Target it.
Few of post I made, I have only one paragraph which i have targeted for adsense, rest of them I had placed ignore tab around it
Kyle Eslick
April 8, 2007 at 5:42 am
I do use targeting, but I’m guilty of not targeting the comments section. I’ll have to go in and update that soon.
Robert Irizarry
April 8, 2007 at 3:35 pm
I’ve used this in the past on my Blogger based blog and I’m not sure it really helped at all. However, I just cut over to a Wordpress based blog yesterday so I’m waiting to see the results of before implementing Adsense targeting. One thing that’s interesting right off the bat - I got far more Adsense impressions yesterday than I normally do. With the old Blogger blog, certain entries refused to display anything but PSA ads. For the moment, these are now showing relevant ads.
Everyday Weekender
April 8, 2007 at 8:53 pm
thanks for the post.. I’m going to try this out.
Dan and Jennifer
April 9, 2007 at 12:29 am
Hey John,
Glad you brought this up - I still find that very few bloggers know about this.
And I have seen bloggers’ CTRs improve after doing this (right away actually) since their ads got to be more relevant (i.e. not just ads about blogging
).
We’ve been using section targeting for a while and it’s worked great to increase ad relevancy - but we’ve only used section suggestion. I still need to add section ignore directives for nav bars, etc.
Have an awesome day!
Dan
jake
April 9, 2007 at 12:36 am
im going to do this because i was only getting 10c a click the other day
Ronald
April 9, 2007 at 10:23 am
I’ll try this one, thank’s John
ram
April 10, 2007 at 7:43 pm
I am using this for one of my site and it works pretty good.
Ronald
April 11, 2007 at 10:20 pm
Hi John,
Could you please explain me how to become a affiliate member at blogads.com?
Many thank’s
Vijay
April 12, 2007 at 1:55 pm
I did not have much luck getting relevant ads using this.. i tried it for a couple of weeks though
sourcer
April 12, 2007 at 5:34 pm
I’ll give it a try, I hope this will increase my AdSense earnings.
Thanks John
Gili
April 26, 2007 at 3:06 am
This is an extremely useful post. Thanks.
egon
May 8, 2007 at 4:45 am
Yeah I wish Google promoted this more, I’m glad it’s around.
khairilz
May 26, 2007 at 6:32 am
i will try whether this method is working or not…
Matt
June 7, 2007 at 2:43 am
I had an issue using the prosense template with adsense delivering irrelevant ads about rss, wordpress, blogging etc.
I have used the advice above in my sidebar and footer and im also going to experiment with the target adsense plugin.
Hopefully this works or im back to scratching my head.
Thanks for the help guys
RandyMarsh
July 16, 2007 at 3:11 am
Hello !
I’ve got a blog on Blogger :
http://acouphene-hyperacousie.blogspot.com
but since the beginning (march 2007) I just can’t get any relevant ad !
Can you help me ?
I looked on a lot of forum, and of course I let a message here :
but I couldn’t find any answer…
Thanks for your help, I’m getting really MAD ^^
Regards
Randy
Hammad
October 21, 2007 at 9:59 pm
well my ctr is also low
lets try this thing lets see…..
D'Juan
January 9, 2008 at 12:49 pm
I’ve just implemented many of the suggestions you have on your site, and I’m extremely appreciative!
If there are any significant changes in visitors, ad revenue, etc, I’ll be sure to come back and thank you again!
I also added you as a friend on StumbleUpon. DeejayKnight
G-man
February 22, 2008 at 9:00 pm
I haven’t heard anyone talkiing about the directory structure.
I don’t know about it increasing the CTR but I too had a problem wih my WordPress blog displaying relevant ads on the index page. I kept getting ads about “WordPress, Blogs, blogging,” etc. I went in and changed the directory in which my blog resides to a keyword that reflects my topic ie., http://yoursitename.com/bicycles versus “/wordpress” or “/blog”
Once I did that, I started getting relevant ads on my index page.
I would think now with relevant ads on the index page the ctr will increase. Too early to tell right now though.
Yan
March 26, 2008 at 4:47 pm
Great tips you have it here. I didn’t know that I could specify which content to target the adsense.
I always had unrelated ads appearing on my site before and now I have included the section targeting. Let’s see what happens after 2 weeks for it to take effect.
Dave from Welcome Back Rosenthal
April 2, 2008 at 5:40 pm
Wow, it’s been a minute since you originally posted this but this issue is still a problem. So that tells you something. I’ve been looking for a solution to solve my adsense relevancey for a while now.
I’ve been trying the technique you described here for about a month-no better results, but I imagine different people will have different results. In fact your 11th commenter Ryan has the same problem I do; pages with strong keywords dominate every other post’s keywords. So I’m thinking about trying something like G-man suggested; literally changing the structure, if not something WAY more radical like creating multiple blogs. Because my feeling is if you have multiple topics adsense will focus on the popular keyword topic.