On rare occasions I do some AdSense consulting. (Rare because I don't have a lot of spare time, hence I charge a lot for it.) But today I'll do some for free for U.S. News & World Report just to show you what anyone can do if they're willing to spend a bit of time.
Recently I landed on this page about peptic ulcers on the US News site. I can't remember how I got there, but I was immediately struck by the presence of a Google PSA (public service announcement) on the page.
Now, there's no reason for PSAs to appear on any site! You can easily define an alternate URL or an alternate color to make that ugly PSA disappear. Or you can try to figure out why the PSA is there in the first place.
There doesn't appear to be anything obviously wrong with the page. You're probably surprised to see a PSA on it. After all, it has a lot of content. And a lot of references to “ulcer” and related keywords. So you'd expect some ulcer-related ads. If you run a keyword analyzer on the page, such as this one, it confirms that “ulcer” is prominent, even though the page itself could use some work (there are no headings, for example). So what's wrong?
Well, you see, there's some JavaScript magic happening here that's not immediately obvious. So it's not the text that's the problem, it's how the ads are being served. That's the funny thing with these consulting gigs — the real problem is often not what you think. I could go and rewrite the text all I want and it wouldn't fix the problem.
As it turns out, US News is doing ad serving via JavaScript code instead of server-side scripting. Instead of inserting the Google AdSense code directly into the HTML (which you can do conditionally on the server side using PHP and similar technologies), they've got some JavaScript code that lets them insert the AdSense code from within the browser. Besides the fact that this is a definite no-no — they're modifing the AdSense code and it's unclear to me if they have Google's permission to do this — the fact that it's not working should cause them to look for a better way to do this…
If this were my consulting gig, I'd look into it more deeply, but mostly I was curious to know why the PSAs were showing on such an obviously well-targeted page.
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Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.