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.