How To: Maximize Profit using Adsense Section Targeting for Blogs

This post was written to support the ‘Adsense Target‘ WordPress Plugin

Introduction:

This article provides a very brief overview of how contextual advertising works and then illustrates how a webmaster using section targeting can have more control over the advertisements served by Google Adsense. Specific recommendations for bloggers are made on how best to use ad section targeting code to maximize profit.

Full Text:

‘Targeting’ contextual advertisements refers to the ability of both website owner and advertising system (in this case Adsense) to match the best ad to the content that surrounds it. In its crudest form, think of contextual advertising as serving up ads that relate to the content of the page. So if this were a page about dog food, an Adsense ad for dog food would probably be the best contextually based ad to serve because it relates directly to the content of the page. After that, ads about dogs and dog products in general would be most relevant.

As a webmaster running any contextual advertising system you need to make sure that the ads shown on your pages directly relate to the page contents. More people will be interested and click on ads about dog food on a page about dog food than ads about yarn on a page about dog food. For those that use Google Adsense to server up contextual ads, Google provides a way to emphasize parts or sections of content on a page. “Section targeting” allows individual webmasters to have finer granularity over the types of ads shown on their websites. With greater control, a webmaster can tweak pages to show the most relevant ads to the content most valued by web visitors.

Section targeting allows you to suggest sections of your text and HTML content that you’d like [Google] to emphasize or downplay when matching ads to your site’s content. [source]

Section targeting is pretty simple, all you do is surround the content that you’d like to emphasize with specially formatted HTML tags. Here is an example:

content goes here, content goes here, content goes here, content goes here, content goes…

You can also de-emphasize certain portions of your content using a very similar method:

content to ignore goes here, content to ignore goes here, content to ignore goes here, content to ignore goes here, content to ignore…

As a blogger using Google’s Adsense program, there are some special considerations you should take into account in order to best target ads on your pages and therefore maximize profit.

Depending on how your blog is laid out, much of the content of the page can actually be comments by other people and whatever is in your sidebar. If your Adsense ads aren’t as targeted as you would like them to be, consider the following tips on using Ad Section Targeting. The goal is to have Google serve up more contextually relevant ads that web visitors will be more likely to click on:

Use the weight=ignore targeting code to tell Google to ignore the contents of your sidebar Use section targeting to focus Google more on the content you have actually written (your post content) than on the comments made by readers Wherever you employ section targeting code, make sure to include a significant amount of content within the tags. Google indicates that there may be a penalty of less relevant ads or Public Service Announcements if you don’t include large chunks of text between tags According to Google, you can use section targeting to target as many sections of a page as you like. So don’t be afraid to use multiple sets of tags It may take up to 2 weeks before Google takes into account any changes you’ve made to your site In the end, section targeting is merely a suggestion to Google by you. Google may or may not choose to take your advice on what you think is most and least important about your site

Target Adsense is a free plugin for WordPress (created here at MaxPower) that gives you the option to automatically target the content you have written on your blog as well as provide a way to target only specific portions of your content using the post and page editor.

References:

What is section targeting and how do I implement it? Display Relevant Adsense Ads Using Section Targeting Inside Adsense: Stay on target

Tags: adsense how-to MaxPower Features plugin profit targeting tutorial