Section Targeting

The first-line method to improve targeting of your AdSense ads is to rewrite your content. In some cases, however, this may not be enough. Google provides a tool to help us in these cases: section targeting.

Section targeting allows you to mark parts of your page as being particularly important (or particularly unimportant). If your ads still don't seem relevant after optimizing your content, you can draw the AdSense bot's attention to particular parts of your content with section targeting.

To implement section targeting, you will need at least a basic knowledge of HTML. You need to insert special HTML comments into your page to define your sections. The following comment:

<!-- google_ad_section_start -->

marks the start of a section, while this comment:

<!-- google_ad_section_end -->

marks the end of a section. So, if you have some content that you want AdSense to pay particular attention to in the process of matching ads to your page, you would wrap it in the section start and end tags shown above.

Conversely, you may have content that you want AdSense to ignore completely. An example of this would be your site's navigation. Just because your site has a section called "introduction", doesn't mean you want AdSense to show ads for introduction agencies on your site!

To mark a section you would like to be ignored, you mark the start of the section with:

<!-- google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) -->

and as above, mark the end of the section with:

<!-- google_ad_section_end -->

I would still recommend that you rewrite your content as a first-line approach to better targeting, and only resort to section targeting if that doesn't help.

So when might you need section targeting? As in the example above, if AdSense is picking up keywords that are meant to be part of your site's navigation, you might need it.

If you're running a dynamic site, a community site or a forum, you might not know in advance what content will appear in parts of your site. This is another case where you might use section targeting to keep your keywords under control.

Finally, I should note that section targeting is only considered a suggestion to the AdSense software. In my experience, AdSense usually follows this suggestion. However, it isn't bound to, and may choose to ignore your section targeting tags. The best approach is to experiment and see what works.

Improving your targeting: AdSense as a foreign language

One of the questions many new AdSense users ask is how to improve the targeting of their ads. The ads may seem completely random, or targeted to a particular keyword that has nothing to do with what their site is about.

To understand what to do in this situation, we have to understand a bit about the workings of AdSense and the AdSense bot. AdSense is built on software. Like all software, it won't do what you want by magic. You have to help it to give you what you want.

The Google AdSense bot is in some ways similar to the standard Googlebot which crawls your site for indexing in Google's search engine. You might have seen the AdSense bot's activity in your website logs, listed as "Mediapartners-Google".

Like Googlebot and other search engine robots, the AdSense bot scans the text of your page to identify important keywords and phrases. Instead of indexing your page in a search engine, AdSense uses this information to select advertisements which may be relevant to your page. The bot doesn't "understand" what your site is about - it only knows that certain keywords appear more frequently than others, that certain keywords appear in more "important" positions on the page, and so on.

The AdSense bot is just software, and software doesn't really understand English (or any other natural language). Imagine listening to someone speaking in a foreign language - you might deduce that some words are particularly important to what's being said, because the speaker repeats them a lot, or uses a particular tone of voice. But you don't really understand what they're saying.

Rewriting your content to make it easier for the AdSense bot to "understand" is a lot like this. Here are 4 simple steps you can take, based on the "foreign language speaker" metaphor:

1. Repeat yourself. If a word or phrase is important to your page and you want the AdSense bot to pick up on it, use it often in your content.

If you don't repeat the keywords you consider important, AdSense may well consider all the words in your content to be equally important. In this case it will just pick a word semi-randomly, and the resulting ads may seem completely unrelated to the purpose of your site.

At the same time, it's important not to go too far with this. Make sure all the repetition you use would sound natural to your human visitors - who are, after all, your most important visitors.

2. Use word variants. For example: boat, boats, boating. The AdSense bot is smart enough to pick up on these, and the variety can help avoid annoying your human visitors.

3. Use related words. For example: ships, sailing, yachts.

4. Put important words in important places. The keywords that are most important to you should go in your page title, or in your headings.

If at all possible, try to put important keywords in the URL (Uniform Resource Locator, also known as a a web address) of your pages. AdSense seems to place a special importance on this and will often look to the URL before it looks to any other part of your page. For example, http://www.example.com/boats/

Greetings and Welcome

Greetings. I'm an AdSense publisher with a couple of sites which achieve pretty good daily earnings from AdSense. I'm starting this blog to share some of my experiences, tips, tricks and musings related to Google AdSense.

If you haven't heard of AdSense, it's Google's contextual advertising service that delivers earnings when visitors click (or sometimes merely view) ads on your pages.

Let me stress the title of this blog - AdSense and Sensibility. You won't find any "Secret Magic Adsense Formula" or "Become a Millionaire in 7 Days with AdSense" pages here. People who make preposterous claims like this are usually trying to sell you something.

You can earn a great deal of money through AdSense - but like anything else, it takes work on your part. The chances of becoming rich through AdSense without really trying are probably roughly equivalent to the chances of winning the lottery. So I'm going to focus on some sensible advice that may help guide you, as a new AdSense publisher, to get started in this work.

I know I found it frustrating in the beginning, when my earnings were just a few cents a day. But if you stick with it, give it some time and put in some effort, the results can be enormously rewarding.

This is also not going to be one of those spam blogs with articles republished from other sources - the posts will be my original work. Though if you're experienced with AdSense, you'll have to forgive me if I cover some topics you already know well. I'm hoping this will be a useful resource for people of all skill levels.

One of the most important things to understand about AdSense is that it's a market. You are selling some of your site's space and traffic to advertisers. Sometimes your earnings will be up, sometimes they will be down, and you may not have any control over some of the forces at work. But you can do a lot to control the value of the ad space you sell, and you do that by keeping your site content-rich, fresh, easy to use and attractive to your visitors.

So, welcome to the first post, and please do check back soon for more!