How to Get Relevant AdSense Ads (Especially For Bloggers)
This post is an offshoot of my ongoing series on using AdSense with WordPress and yesterday's post on ProductWiki AdSense optimization. The topic is ad relevance and it's not specific to either WordPress or ProductWiki, hence this separate post.
Bloggers often complain about irrelevant AdSense ads on their blogs, but you hear fewer relevancy complaints from non-blog site owners. Why is this? You have look at how AdSense works to see what might be causing those problems.
If you analyze the AdSense patent you'll see that a number of factors come into play when AdSense tries to determine what the page is about:
- The URL of the page
- The page title
- The anchor text of links on the page to other pages
- The anchor text of links to the page from other pages
- The content of the other pages the page links to or that link to the page
- The keywords that appear most frequently within the page
- The keywords on the page that appear less frequently across the entire site
- Search engine queries that lead to the page or to another page that links to the page
Sometimes all it takes is one word or phrase to trigger different ads. Look at these two examples I've concocted (the links open new windows): here and here. The pages differ in only two ways: the URLs are slightly different (abcde-1.html vs. abcde-2.html) and one phrase has been changed. Otherwise, they're identical. But you see different ads on them, don't you?
This is why section targeting is useful. Here are the same two pages with section targeting used to exclude the bolded phrase: here and here. The pages now show the same ads or none at all — use the AdSense preview tool to test different geographies. We've taken out some trigger words and there's not much else left in the content that corresponds to keywords that advertisers are bidding on. We could fix this by changing the URLs to include some descriptive keywords. Here are the same pages with meaningful URLs: here and here. See how important the URL is if there's no biddable content?
So if you're having trouble with ad relevancy, look objectively at your page and see what's on it that might be throwing AdSense off track. Do you have lots of links to feeds and other blog-specific stuff? Try excluding them with section targeting. Are your titles up to snuff? Make sure to include a keyword or two whenever possible. Do you have proper headings instead of plain text made to look like a heading via CSS? If not, fix it. Does the URL structure lend itself to giving AdSense good clues about your content? Fix it if it doesn't.
Remember that to do your testing you'll need to cause the AdSense crawler to visit a page so you can see what it thinks of the content by the ads it displays. The only way to guarantee that a crawl will occur when you want it is to use a new URL for the content. But you don't have to create new pages, you can just use the change the query parameter trick to quickly test changes to pages.
Hopefully this helps!
Sponsored Link: Have you tried Keyword Elite yet?
Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. If you like this posting, why not link to his blog or bookmark it as one of your favorites?
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One Response to “How to Get Relevant AdSense Ads (Especially For Bloggers)”
I realize this is an old post - but just so you know - the links don’t work - it looks for a redirection plugin.