Adsense Targeting. A Common Adsense Mistake.
Adsense Targeting is something that until recently, I didn’t even know existed. Not that I didn’t assume there was a better way to target your Adsense ads than just throwing them on your bog, and trying to target them by how you write your posts, but didn’t ever see it anywhere, and never really looked. Imagine having a Houston social security disability attorney site and having ads for blogging all over the place. It just wouldn’t be effective. The last few days I’ve been reading a bit more than usual about how to increase my Adsense revenue, and found this little nugget that surely can’t hurt my chances.
Adsense and Blogs
When you have a blog, or any website for that matter, you have many aspects to it that Adsense can pull their information from to try and give you the most targeted ads possible. Unfortunately, most blogs have a bunch of links on them that make this a bit difficult to keep ads relevant, if not impossible when you aren’t the best at writing posts in SEO fashion. Adsense looks at everything on your site to define its parameters for your Adsense ads. This means that the links on your sidebar, in your header, and your footer are included in this search. If you look at your own bog, you may notice that many of these links in those areas don’t necessarily reflect what your posts are about. You have to give credit to Wordpress and the template creator in your footer. You have tons of navigational links in your sidebars. In fact you may have much more than that in your sidebar such as links to other blogs, links to sites like Technorati, MyBlogLog, etc. that take away from what you want ads on your blog to be.
I get into the habit of just writing posts to write them as well, but in most cases I try to at least link to a few of my other posts in each one, and make sure I use my keywords as often as possible to help the search engines find their way. Doing this is very helpful to give yourself the keywords that describe your content, and to help search engine users find your content. The better you do it, the better you are found in the search engines. Of course that isn’t the only way to master the search engines, but this post isn’t about search engine optimization so I won’t cover that. In the same light as keyword density for helping your blog get found in search engines, Adsense uses many of the same things that their search side does. That is they take all your content and search it to find the keywords that will make their Adsense ads most relevant to your site, and in turn increase your Adsense revenue.
So what is Adsense targeting? Back to discussing your sidebars, footers, and headers, you are letting Adsense target a lot of information that you really don’t want it to target. On this blog it is difficult to show the effects of targeting since I write a lot about blogging, Wordpress plugins, etc., but on Wordpress related, or blogging blogs, you should see an immediate impact once you begin to target your Adsense. This blog really isn’t well optimized well as it is since I started it a while back before I knew many of the things I do now. Over time it should “fix” itself a bit, but at this point it is still improving.
How To Target Adsense
Now that all of that is out of the way I will tell you just how easy it is to target your content to help Adsense place more relevant ads on your blog. The process is insanely easy to implement and I am surprised it isn’t a more common, and visible tip from Google. Now that I know about it I consider it absolutely necessary, and one of the first things you should do when you create a new blog, or change a template.
Adsense targeting can be done many ways, but the most effective way for most bloggers would be to make sure that Adsense targets your posts, and not everything else. I believe that targeting your post titles, and your post content is the best way to do this. The codes that you are going to need are these:
<!-- google_ad_section_start --> To begin your targeting.
and
<!-- google_ad_section_end --> to end your targeting.
That’s it. No more code for the simple solution.
Now where do you put it? Like I said before I like to target the post titles, and the post itself. For most Wordpress templates you will need to do this in a couple different files. index.php and single.php.
Let’s look at an index.php file and decide where we want to put this.
If you are having a difficult time figuring out where to start and end this code the easiest way to do it is to put the start code after:
<?php get_header(); ?>
and before:
<?php get_sidebar(); ?>
<?php get_footer(); ?>
Why i say this is because it will exclude your header, sidebars, and footer from being read by Adsense bots.
I prefer to exclude the comments, and al the other post info such as my Sociable links, the line about my RSS Feed, etc. Some say that you should include your comments, but I don’t see any reason to do so.
So really what you are looking for is the tags like <div class="entry">, <h2><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" rel="bookmark" title="<?php the_title(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>, etc. The first is typically where your content starts for your posts and will be the most important. Many themes will have the title tags above this so you want to make sure you aren’t excluding these when you put in the targeting code. This theme has that situation so i had to include the section above that to make sure I got the title searched by the Adsense bots.
This is how mine is set up in my index.php file:
<!-- google_ad_section_start -->
<?php if(have_posts()) : ?><?php while(have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<div class="post" id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">
<h2><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" rel="bookmark" title="<?php the_title(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>
<div class="postdate"><?php the_time('F jS, Y') ?></div>
<div class="entry">
<?php the_content('Read more...'); ?>
<center><?php print sociable_html(); ?>
<?php if(function_exists('the_ratings')) { the_ratings(); } ?></center>
<p class="postinfo">
<?php _e('Filed under:'); ?> <?php the_category(', ') ?>
<!-- google_ad_section_end -->
As you can see from this I have made sure that it includes the post title, as well as the post itself. I excluded everything below that including my author name, related entries, and the comments. I may decide to include the related entries links later on, but at this point I don’t think I will.
I extended it a bit so that it would include the category, or tags, for the post, but I am not sure if I will leave it that way or not. In most circumstances it would probably be a benefit to include your tags int he targeting as they should be relevant to your blog. At least I hope they are…lol
On top of working with your index.php file, with many themes you will have to delve into your singl.php file as well. The file for single posts may even be more important than just the index file. This is because you have much less content on that page than you do on the home page of your blog. It has less to search to find content to target ads to.
In the single.php file you are going to want to target the exact same things. Title, blog post, and categories in my opinion. Look for the same tags and remember that at the very least you want to EXCLUDE the tags of <?php get_header(); ?>, <?php get_sidebar(); ?>, and <?php get_footer(); ?>.
In addition to targeting content for Adsense, they have also included a code to IGNORE certain aspects of your site in regards to Adsense. I haven’t had the need yet to implement this code anywhere, but I need to mention it as it is probably something I will utilize at some point. This code is used the same way as the others, but to exclude the content rather than include it:
<!-- google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) -->
This is by no means an exact science, and you will want to test this with different variations of what you include, but you should see some decent results immediately as to what your ads link to. Play a round with it a little.
There is actually a plugin available that utilizes this code as well, but I have not yet tried it. The Target Adsense Plugin is something that is supposed to simplify the process. I like to do it manually right now, but this plugin may be better for you. If I test it a bit I’ll write another post about it as well. IF anyone uses that now I would appreciate any feedback you have on it.
Spread the Word
Filed under: Blogging Tips and SEO by JMH
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i’ve done it . . . i’ll let you know how it goes!
Glad to see you testing it a bit too. I’m sure we’ll have to modify it a bit. I have been trying to figure out if I can target it even more. It says that you need to give a significant amount of content to do the deed, but it may be able to be done on more of a keyword basis? Per Post basis maybe rather than through your directory files?