Targeting AdSense Ads

Posted by SEO Dave on December 25th, 2007 at 04:19pm

Google AdSense has added the ability for publishers to target their AdSense ads to the content they think best suits their site so ads shown on their sites should only show relevant AdSense ad units.

Many sites have a lot of recurring content: headers, menu, footers and anything else you might find on every page of a site.

This can cause problems for your SERPs (diluting your keyword rich content) and the relevancy of your AdSense ads.

For example this site has a variety of content including a few posts about the World of Warcraft Gold and Leveling guides and I see a lot of ads that match this content on pages that have nothing to do with this content.

This is mainly caused by the links in the menu, those pages make me money through Clickbank and so I want links to them.

If someone comes to my site looking for AdSense templates and sees ads selling World of Warcraft gold on pages not about World of Warcraft they are highly unlikely to click those AdSense ads!

So being able to tell AdSense what part of a page should be used to create an ad unit is a great feature that should increase the relevancy of AdSense ads dramatically.

How to Target your AdSense Ads

Google AdSense has supplied some HTML code-

Place your relevant keyword rich content here

Use this code within the body of the page (so no need to add it to your title) and the content within will be used to generate your AdSense Ad units.

AdSense have also supplied a way to exclude content as well-

Content to be ignored, for example a menu with a lot of irrelevant links (irrelevant to the main content).

I see two obvious ways of using this code automatically rather than on the flay page by page (I’m lazy, don’t fancy adding this code one page at a time :-)).

1. Us the first code around the main content, for example a blog page (like you are reading now) may be from the header (”Targeting AdSense Ads”) to the comment header below. This would then only include the main content of this post ignoring the title of the blog, menu, comments and footer content.

2. Use the second code around the header, menu, footer and other non main content so only the main content is considered by AdSense.

Since I make a lot of money from Google AdSense and many of my pages do not show relevant ads I plan to convert everything I own to use this code.

For example the WordPress SEO/AdSense templates I sell at Google AdSense Templates will have this code added soon. This should result in highly targeted/relevant AdSense ads on the websites of the customers who buy my templates (all past customers will receive an update for free so no need to ask).

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Under Google AdSense

7 Comments for Targeting AdSense Ads

1. James Hunter | January 2nd, 2008 at 3:48 pm

Yoiu are right! But adsense requires a nich more so and the content keep feeding that niche! How I have made money off od adsense is by leveraging little niche sites that make like $10 a day and building them to scale for a decent income!

I recently discovered a new way to generate income just of shear traffic of your site with better payout than google.

Link removed, comments not here to advertise your products.
2. Shinya Wong | January 15th, 2008 at 11:31 am

I was wondering how to put adsence in post …I have read alot of blogs but i can’t understand how to really put adsense in the post it seem too techincal for me , do u have anyeasy way to do …?
3. Singapore SEO | February 5th, 2008 at 3:11 am

I dont really get the purpose of that targetting function. I mean, Google should be good enough to be able to consolidate what a page is about right? -_-
4. SEO Dave | March 12th, 2008 at 1:51 am

Think about all the content within menus, footers etc… with a diverse site it takes away from the main content targeting. Now if all your pages are highly related and your menu helps out most of your sites pages then I can see the menu as a positive factor in both Google SERPs and Google AdSense ad targeting (from expereince sites like those tend to be quite small anyway and cover a very small niche).

The WordPress themes I use on my sites have been edited in a way that menus, footers and even the header on many pages (like this one the header is NOT a H1 on this page, but is a H1 on the home page) are given no extra SEO relevance (for example I use no header tags in the menu area) so that Google will not rank a page based on the menu (it still uses this content, but I don’t want it treated as overly important).

Yes sometimes a menu content is themed the same as the main content, but more often than not it isn’t. Taking the name of this post as the main target for this page-

Targeting AdSense Ads

Currently the menu has those words the following times-

Targeting - 1
AdSense - 6
Ads - 1

Other than the word AdSense that menu is not particularly well optimised for the main keywords for this page and is terrible for the main search phrase (see it once).

Compare that to the main content and you can see if I want Google the search engine and Google the ad supplier to use the best content related to this pages SERPs it’s not the menu.

David
5. SEO Dave | March 12th, 2008 at 1:56 am

Shinya Wong I give away free WordPress AdSense themes on this site (see the link to the Blix theme on the menu) that has AdSense ads within the main content (like you see on this post).

I’ve since updated all my themes to use much better coding (like using the target code above) and sell those themes at Google AdSense Templates for a small fee. If you paid me to convert a site into a SEO/AdSense money making machine (like my themes are) it would cost you at least £1000 (that’s if you used WordPress, much more if you did not as it’s a lot of work).

David
6. Rashmi Mehta | April 17th, 2008 at 8:33 pm

Your post is really insightful, in the sense, with the added flexibility that the publishers get, the relevance of the ads with the content definitely would increase .
And that said, as a consequence,the click thru’s to the ads would also improve, since itthe ads would be viewed by the relevant target audience, improving the ad revenues. Infact It’s a win-win for all involved.

regards
Rashmi
7. Eddy Teh | April 20th, 2008 at 12:51 pm

This is a great post. The informations you provided are very useful.
This is the needs for adsense publisher.
Thanks.