Improve Your Google AdSense Ad Relevancy with Section Targeting = VirtuaCash

Improve Your Google AdSense Ad Relevancy with Section Targeting

There is a little known method to increase the relevancy of AdSense's ads on your pages without actually modifying your content visually. It forces AdSense to focus on or ignore certain sections of content. This is referred to as "section targeting".

What is Section Targeting?

Section targeting lets you highlight parts of your page or content that you want Adsense to emphasise or down play. Through handing Google AdSense your suggestions using targeting, you are assisting Google AdSense to improving the relevancy of your ads and as a result boost your ads CTR . Although it is quite easy to setup, I suggest that only people with at least some basic HTML knowledge should try to implement section targeting.

How do I use Section Targeting

To start using section targeting, you will need to add some HTML comment tags to your code. With these tags you can state the beginning and end of the sections you want to emphasise or de-emphasise.

The HTML you need to emphasise a section look like this:

<!– google_ad_section_start –>

<!– google_ad_section_end –>

You can also designate sections you'd like to have ignored by adding a (weight=ignore) to the starting tag like this:

<!– google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) –>

With the tags added, your final HTML code should look something like:

<html>
   <head><title>Section targeting</title></head>
   <body>

      Irrelevant text here

<!– google_ad_section_start –>

   This is the most important content of your webpage. You prefer Ads being shown related to this content.

<!– google_ad_section_end –>

      Other irrelevant or low-paying keyword-content here

   </body>
</html>

This is not a Quick Fix

You can use section targeting to make suggestions about as many sections of a page as you like. However, please be aware that Google AdSense can't guarantee results, and that it may take up to 2 weeks before Google's crawlers take any changes you've made to your site into account.

To use this feature properly, you need to include a lot of content in the section targeting tags. Using insufficient content can result in less relevant ads or Public Service Ads. Also, keep in mind that this feature should only be used to highlight significant sections of your site's relevant content.

It's against Google AdSense's policies to manipulate the ad targeting to result in ads that are not relevant to the content of your pages.

Conclusion

Use section targeting wisely. Do not wrap a single sentence or even a medium-sized paragraph in section targeting tags.

One example that I've tested is ignoring menus. NOTE that Google AdSense ignoring your menus does NOT mean Google's Crawler will so no worries there. I had a menu section with links to articles on a huge variety of topics. The topics were totally unrelated to the page / article. I wanted ads to be relevant to the article, so wrapped my menu in ignore tags and wrapped my article in ad_section targeting tags. After a few weeks, my Google AdSense ads did become much more relevant and I didn't see the same level of unrelated ads that where being shown because of the unrelated topics in the menu.