I recently decided to participate in Google Adsense program where Google shows its ads on my blog, and I get paid when somebody clicks the ad. This tool from Google is far from being fresh and new, but I think it has a very cool idea behind it:
– ad owner wins, because people go to her/his website,
– Google wins, because ad owner pays Google for a click (through Google Adwords)
– I win, because I keep writing stuff on my blog and get paid by Google for a click.
One of the main challenges and the main thing about any kind of ads from any place is their relevance. Will you buy milk on a porno site? Or do you need a pack of Marlboro Lights, when searching for a Whitening Toothpaste? Probably not really…
So you see the logic, the more relevant the ad is, the more chances people are going to pay their attention to it and, in the case of Adsense, "click it".
Relevance is mostly achieved by the Google algorithm that analyzes your page (the page where ads are going to be displayed) by reading its content and "data mining" it. Then it makes a decision on what exactly "this" page is about, and what ads Google has on that topic. Once all is figured out, Google places the resulting ads on the page.
But there are ways we can help Google not to "offer milk on the porno site" (although Google does not do porno sites – just a colorful example here :) ), but instead target its ads right to the point. One of such ways is "Section Targeting".
how Google explains it:
Section targeting allows you to suggest sections of your text and HTML content that you’d like us to emphasize or downplay when matching ads to your site’s content. By providing us with your suggestions, you can assist us in improving your ad targeting.
You can read their short tutorial here. The idea is simple: your html page has a lot of text, including links, other advertisement, people comments, etc. but what you really want Google to focus on is your content ( in my case it is my blog post ). So you can use three HTML tags that will focus Google Adsense engine on your content. These tags are:
Section start tag: <!– google_ad_section_start –>
Section end tag: <!– google_ad_section_end –>
Ignore section start tag: <!– google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) –>
Sample from Google:
<html><head><title>Section targeting</title></head> <body> <!-- google_ad_section_start --> This is the text of your webpage. Most of your content resides here. <!-- google_ad_section_end --> </body> </html> |
From the sample above you can see how (start, end) tags can be used to focus Google only on the main content. In order to ignore the content, wrap it with (ignore, end) tags as follows:
<html><head><title>Section targeting</title></head> <body> <!-- google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) --> This is the text of your webpage. Most of your content resides here. <!-- google_ad_section_end --> </body> </html> |
But there is something interesting, that is not included in Google’s tutorial, that you can do with tags – you can nest them, as well as focus them on multiple sections! I have spoken to the Google Adsense representative, gave him a couple of examples I would liked to use the tags, and he confirmed that it works.
So here is very cool and efficient things that you can do with adsense tags in addition to the usual stuff…
nest those tags:
<!-- google_ad_section_start --> my content I want to focus on ..... <!-- google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) --> content I would like to ignore <!-- google_ad_section_end(weight=ignore) --> my content I want to focus on ..... <!-- google_ad_section_end --> |
so, in the above example we ignored a part of the section (content) we actually want Google to focus on – cool, right? :)
That is not all, you can also focus on multiple sections, like this:
<!-- google_ad_section_start --> my content A I want to focus on ..... <!-- google_ad_section_end --> some other irrelevant content ..... <!-- google_ad_section_start --> my content B I want to focus on ..... <!-- google_ad_section_end --> |
This really opens the doors to finetune the relavence of your ads, which, who knows, maybe someday will make you a millionaire! ;)