Increase your Adsense Income through Section Targeting

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Increase your Adsense Income through Section Targeting

August 16th, 2007 | 10 comments

It’s a known fact that the Google media partners bot, that crawls pages injected with Google Adsense, delivers ads targeted to the pages content. But, did you know that you can now tell the bot exactly what to look at? It’s called “Section Targeting” and it can seriously increase your adsense income.

It’s incredibly easy to implement and even the newest newbie can do it. You simply add a simple tag (below) before and after the actual content that you want your ads to be based on.

Here are the tags:

< !**-- google_ad_section_start --**>

< !**-- google_ad_section_end --**>

(Remove the Stars)

So why use these tags? Lets say you have a page about article marketing but your sidebar, footer, header etc. has links or content about Blogging. The bot is going to see all of that and deliver ads that may or may not be relevant to what the page is actually about! So in the case above, you may have ads about blogging on your page that is about article marketing.

How can this increase your adsense income? Duh If your pages are serving up more relevant ads, your viewers are more opt to click on them!

You can add these tags in more than one instance on the same page and you can also ad the following tags to restrict the bot from crawling content:

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

< !**-- google_ad_section_end --**>

(Remove the Stars)

This is something new to me that I’ll be using on all of my pages from now on. I hope you appreciate the value of this and do the same!

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10 comments

Sean (5 comments.)
9th September, 2007 at 7:24 pm

You can also do some simple SEO like the header and footer optimization…
Stephen Cronin (33 comments.)
25th September, 2007 at 2:01 am

That’s a great tip, I definitely need to check it out! I keep getting ads for fixing glass scratches (my site is called More Than Scratch The Surface).
Net Marketing Toolbox (1 comments.)
4th January, 2008 at 8:17 pm

Josh, your reasoning on that is spot on! Use these tags on sites where you want the Adsense spider to index the more specific/relevant keywords in the post/page, as opposed to also indexing the wider range of keywords that might be in your navigation/categories section of the page (which would produce less relevant ads).

On a WordPress based site, it requires only a quick change to your posts.php or single.php template to insert the codes at top and bottom.

Cheers
Stephen Spry
Jordan McClements (6 comments.)
22nd February, 2008 at 9:53 am

Thanks for this.

I was aware of it - but it was one of the many things that I had been putting off!

Thanks for jogging my memory
Ryan (3 comments.)
17th March, 2008 at 8:22 pm

Sounds good.
I was not aware of this.
I have been having trouble with Adsense as it is though, so it hasn’t been an issue for me yet. I can’t get Adsense ads to appear on my sites.

Do you think you could offer me any help with respect to this? (if I should ask this elsewhere let me know)

Thanks,
Ryan
Josh Spaulding
17th March, 2008 at 8:28 pm

@ Ryan - Google just recently (in the past few months) changed their coding of the java adverts. Since they’ve made this change it normally takes 10 minutes or longer for ads to actually start appearing.

I’d imagine this is what’s happening with yours. Just add them and give them a few minutes and I bet they will
Adam Hefner
16th April, 2008 at 9:13 pm

I just came across this. When placing the tags for type of relevant ads to show, can you wrap them around just a keyword instead of a block of text that still might have other irrelevant keywords throughout?
carl (1 comments.)
3rd May, 2008 at 3:19 pm

Thanks for that Josh. I had no theard of it before. I have some pages with stories/creative writing — it’s hilarious to see what sorts of Adsense ads turn up. Could be for anything at all that might be mentioned in a story.
10 Ways to Increase your Adsense Income
26th May, 2008 at 4:26 pm

[...] Use section targeting to increase the relevancy of your adverts! This is something I don’t see talked about nearly enough because it really does work out for [...]
Steve (1 comments.)
3rd July, 2008 at 4:47 pm

This is one thing that I have not tried. I think I am going to give a look at all the pages and make sure (which I thought I had already) that the ads are being served up with the right content. Thanks for the heads up, I have read it before somewhere, but forgot to check it out.
Thanks
Steve