AdSense and Ad Relevance: Beyond Section Targeting ~ A Rich Idea

How can you make your AdSense Ads relevant to your topic when AdSense section targeting is not sufficient?

In my article called how to make money with AdSense about the fundamentals of making money with AdSense, I mention that one of the fundamental steps to earning income online through AdSense is to optimize the ads on the page.

There are several steps that you can take to ensure that this happens.

Of course, step number one is to write content about a certain subject. If your AdSense article rambles all over the place, the AdSense robot will never know what ads should go with your article. This is a particular pain for me sometimes because I like to use analogies and comparisons which don’t lend themselves well to an AdSense Relevance.

For example, you might say something to the effect of “I feel like a salmon swimming upstream when I am trying to make money online”. Well, that may illustrate well some of the challenges with making money online but it has one unfortunate side-effect. You may get AdSense Ads about salmon, which of course you do not want. You want to have ads about earning a living online.

So, what can you do about this?

Well, one thing that you can do is use AdSense Section Targeting. As I wrote about in the article entitled AdSense Section Targeting: How To Use It On Your Blog, this is a great way to filter out content that you do not want the AdSense Ad Bot to consider. For example, I use it on my how to video site because that site covers a wide variety of topics. Thus, I use AdSense Section Targeting there to filter out all of the content that is not from the article, like the sidebars and footer for example.

I do the same here on my blog which truly addresses every topic under the sun because, basically, I am interested in just about everything. However, a blog such as this make money with AdSense blog does not need this type of section targeting to generate Ad Relevance because this blog topic is singular in nature so the ads should always be relevant.

But sometimes AdSense Section Targeting is simply not enough to ensure Ad Relevance. Sometimes, more is needed to be done to make the AdSense Ads relevant to the topic at hand.

For those just beginning with AdSense, let me tell you why this is important, which may or may not be obvious. People who have found your page through the search engines want information on the topic that they searched for. If the ads that appear are not relevant, your visitors will simply not click them and you will not make any money.

So, what is an instance in which you effectively implement AdSense Section Targeting and still get ads that are not relevant?

Well, I will illustrate with this example and I will block out this example using section targeting so that the ads on this page will not be based on the following text (see HTML code for how I did this).

As a huge golf fan, this whole Tiger Woods incident fascinated me so I wrote about it in an article entitled Tigers Woods Human After All: Golf, Infidelity, and Voicemails? and this page to date has been accessed more than 100,000 times, which could produce some decent AdSense revenue.

However, this was not the case because the ads that appeared were not relevant.

Why? Because I mentioned the word “crash” a lot as the whole ordeal was precipitated by a crash that Tiger Woods had that led to this nationwide scandal. Also, I often referred to him as Tiger instead of Tiger woods which led to the AdSense bot thinking that the article might be about tigers–the animal.

Thus, in an article about Tiger Woods, I would see ads about “car crashes” and “tigers at the zoo”.

So, what can you do to overcome this Ad Irrelevance.

I basically did two things to get the ads more relevant. First, I changed most incidents of the word “crash” to something else, like incident. I then changed Tiger to Tiger Woods and I made sure that the term golf was boldfaced in certain locations.

In performing these steps, I was able to achieve a measure of ad relevance that I did not have before.

These were all minor changes to the content that did not effect the flow of the article but did ad relevance to the advertisements.

I have heard many people say that ads are simply not relevant and that the Google Ad Bot does not work. Well, yes it does.

You just have to check the content to make sure that you are emphasizing the proper words.

I have solved this problem in other ways too…stay tuned for a future article on removing particular advertisers to achieve ad relevance.

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Richard Cummings

Author at Obvious Conclusions

Richard Cummings is a writer, traveler, and web content developer.

Get your copy of his latest book entitled Obvious Conclusions, stories of a Midwestern emigrant influenced and corrupted by many years living in San Francisco and abroad. It just received its first outstanding review "...reminiscent of David Sedaris or Augusten Burroughs" on Amazon UK.