There must be an ad pool for your market and on the assumption that there is, there are certain things that you can do to stress that your page is about X and not about Y: Stressing it in this way will improve the relevancy of the ads generated on your webpages and improved relevancy will result in an improved click through rate.
1. Include your target keywords in:
- Page title
- Meta tags
- Description tag
- H1 heading tags (plus include related keywords in H2)
- Body of the text several times (top and bottom)
- Bold and / or Italic tags a couple of times
- A link to the home page with the keyword anchor text
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How to Improve AdSense Ad Relevancy
The importance of relevancy
- AdSense is a ‘contextual advertising’ program and when it is working at its best it is highly effective because it serves up ads that are highly relevant to the content on your site - this results (ideally) in a higher CTR (click through rate) (the way I describe it to friends is that if people come to your site looking for information on a particular product they are more likely to click an ad for that product than if they’d come looking for something else that is unrelated to the ad).
The problem is that AdSense doesn’t always get it right when assessing what your content is about and it will from time to time serve up irrelevant ads (although I’ve noticed less problems with this over the past 12 months in comparison to when I started out with AdSense).
There are a number of things you can do to increase the relevancy of your AdSense ads:
Section Targeting
AdSense acknowledge the problem of irrelevant ads and have come up with a way of helping their ‘bots’ determine what parts of your site you want the ads to relate to (section targeting).
In short - section targeting allows you to put code around the most important parts of your page (ie the bits that you want the ads to relate to) and also allows you to put code around parts of your page that you don’t want AdSense to consider when serving up ads.
When I use section targeting on a blog page I generally put the code that highlights the important bits from just before my post titles to the end of posts. I also tell the bots to ignore my sidebars and footers.
Metatags
These ‘tags’ are a part of your page’s source code (the code that you don’t see that is the backend of your page. You can view them by using the menus in your web browser (on Firefox go View > Page Source for example). They are generally at the top of your source code with something like:
While many people debate the relevancy of metatags in modern day search engine optimization (I think it does have some - limited - relevance personally), there is some evidence to suggest that what you have in them has an impact upon the AdSense ads that are served to your site.
At the very least put in some generic keywords and a description that fits with the overall theme of your site. However if you want to get a little more technical there try tying your page title into your metatags. You can do this in some blog platforms by using the ‘title tags’ code or by using a plugin designed for manage your metatags.
Keywords
The main way of influencing the ads that AdSense serves to your blog is to think about the words you use on your blog. AdSense is not very good at reading between the lines of what your post is about - it needs to be explicitly told.
If your post is about digital cameras - use the words ‘digital cameras’ (and other associated with it including product names) throughout your posts. You don’t need to do it to the point of annoying your readers but do attempt to make it the dominant words on the page. Particularly pay attention to:
Content
It almost goes without saying but what you write in the main part of your post has an impact upon your ads. Don’t go over the top but use descriptive keywords in your posts that match the type of ads you’re looking for. Product names, brand names are particularly good.
Titles
Post titles are important for search engine optimization as the search engines assume that what you put in your titles tells your readers what your site is about. Similarly they are important for AdSense.
Sidebars
A common reason for irrelevant ads on blogs is that a blogger has a sidebar which has a high keyword density for an irrelevant term in their sidebar. One prominent example of this 12 or so months ago was that many bloggers had ads about ‘blogging’ appear on their sites even though they never wrote about the topic. Often this was a result of sidebars having ‘blog rolls’, introductory sentences telling people they were reading a ‘blog’, links to other blogs that contained the word ‘blog - etc.
Pictures
I’m not completely certain on this one - but it makes sense that if you are using pictures on your blog that you should name them with keywords that relate to your posts. This helps with SEO and I suspect would help with AdSense as it’s yet another word for the AdSense bots to analyze.
When I’ve done AdSense consulting in the past - one of the first things I’ll do when I come across a new page is check the source code of that page. It’s amazing what you’ll find when you do and it is particularly useful when looking at keywords.
Contact AdSense
If you’ve done all of the above and are still getting irrelevant ads served to your blog - consider shooting AdSense an email asking them to look into it. You might find it takes a little time for them to do it but I know of numerous examples of both big and small bloggers getting some results from this either with suggestions on what to do or with them flipping a switch somewhere at AdSense central that fixed the problem.
12 Tips for Increased AdSense Ad Relevancy
Pay per click advertising programs like AdSense, YPN and Chitika do rely heavily upon the positioning and design of their ads when it comes to performance - but another crucial aspect of them is ad relevancy. The principle is simple really - readers come to your blog in search of content on a particular topic - if they see an ad that relates to that topic they are more likely to both notice it and respond to it.
Irrelevant ads will almost always convert poorly so in the same way that publisher work on the design and positioning of ads they should also consider making sure ads are as relevant to the content they are positioned near as possible.
Each ad system will have different methods of getting ads more relevant. With a system like Chitika it takes some work and you need to choose keywords carefully (read a little more on how I recommend optimizing their ads here) where as with AdSense and YPN it has more to do with what you write than anything else as the ads are contextual. The following 12 tips for getting relevant ads are largely aimed at AdSense ads - but some will convert well also with YPN.
Section Targeting - AdSense brought in a feature called Section Targeting last year that I know has helped some bloggers quite a bit. The idea is simple - you place tags around the parts of your content that you want ads to relate to and other tags around content that you want their ads to ignore. You can learn more about this directly from Google here. My own experience with section targeting has been that I’ve not noticed it really to have much of an impact. In fact at one point after adding it I noticed a downward relevancy of ads so I removed it and relied upon the following strategies more.
Keywords in Content - Without stuffing your posts with keywords and thereby making them read poorly - it’s worth considering what words appear in your posts more than others because it is these words that are likely to be triggering your ads. To help AdSense out you might want to consider finding ways to use the keywords that you want to target more than once or twice in each post.
Keywords in Titles - I find that if a keyword is in my post’s title it seems to have a real impact upon the type of ads showing on a post. This is particularly true if your post’s titles actually are your page’s titles (learn more about this here). Of course the extra benefit of thinking about keywords in these ways is that it will also help you with SEO. Similarly using keywords in <h> tags also seems to impact relevancy.
Metatags - I’ve never seen the AdSense team talk about metatags but do know of a number of AdSense publishers who believe that AdSense does look at them in determining what a page is about. I’d recommend that you make sure your blog’s overall keywords are in your metatags in case this is a factor (it can’t hurt).
Check your sidebars, header, footer and menus - If you’re not using Section Targetting (and blocking your sidebars from being read by AdSense as a basis for your ads) you’ll want to consider the words you have in your sidebars and menus. One common problem that some bloggers have is that they get ads for blogging related products even though they are writing on other topics. One of the common reasons for this is that they have the word ‘blog’ or ‘blogging’ in their sidebar in numerous places. Unless your blog is about blogging you might want to avoid the ‘b word’ as much as you can. Also scan what other words are being repeated in your sidebars that might impact your keyword density.
Keep Posts to One Topic - The more focussed your posts are the more hints you’ll be giving AdSense about what you’ve written about. Posts that cover numerous topics tend to lead to unfocussed ads. This explains why sometimes front pages of blogs can be more difficult to get ad relevancy on than single posts. Front pages can be difficult and you’ll probably want to work on keyword density there.
Keep your Blog/URL to One Topic - Some AdSense publishers believe that AdSense looks not only at the page that the ad is on itself but the whole site that it is on. I’m not convinced that you can’t get relevant ads if you write on multiple topics on the one URL (I have done it with some success myself) - but it does seem to help to have a URL all on the one topic (ie it’s not essential - but worth factoring into your blogging strategy).
Check to see if Ads Exist - This rarely happens with AdSense as their inventory for ads is pretty wide (YPN has a smaller inventory so this might be more useful for those publishers), but occasionally I’ve done consulting for publishers who have struggled to get relevant ads and have found that there just are not too many ads in their niche at all because it is too specialized. It’s a little difficult to check this but one basic way to do so is to head to Google.com and do a search for the keyword that you’d like to see ads on. If the results page has ads on it that are relevant there is a fair chance that there are ads in the AdSense inventory on the topic. If not - they could be scarce and you might need to widen your niche topic.
Check what Ads others See - The ads you see on your blog are more than likely to be different ads than your readers are seeing. This is largely due to the fact that ads are geo targeted to your readers. Advertisers are able to choose which countries or regions that they want to expose their advertisements to. As a result sometimes your region might have fewer relevant ads than other regions and it can be worth asking someone else in another part of the world to tell you what kinds of ads they are seeing on your blog.
Block Irrelevant Ads - This tip is one of last resort and may not actually have much impact at all but I know of a few bloggers who do it. AdSense lets publishers block a ads via their Competitive Ad Filter. If you’re seeing ads that are irrelevant to your blog’s topic you can block them using this method. Of course you should keep in mind that the ads you see on your blog are specific to your location and your readers are probably seeing others - so blocking ads can be a somewhat pointless exercise.
Ad Relevancy takes Time - If your blog is a new one and you’re getting irrelevant ads then it could simply be that your blog is not old enough. I find that some blogs seem to get good ads straight away while others can take a week or two to settle down. So give it a little time to see if they right themselves.
When in Doubt - Ask AdSense - There have been a number of times when I’ve not been able to figure out why relevant ads are not being served to a blog that I own. In each case I’ve sent an email to AdSense via their feedback mechanisms and have politely asked them to take a look at the pages/blog I’m struggling with. I find that their responses can often be quite helpful. You might get a fairly automated response at first but if you persist and reply to that you tend to get a ‘real person’ responding.
‘To increase monetization on your site and improve the relevance of ads, AdSense now varies the number of text ads that appear in a given ad unit. In cases where we determine that increasing the size of the most relevant ads will improve performance, we’ll drop the lowest-performing ad or ads and expand the remaining ones to fill the entire unit. Showing fewer ads works to your advantage, allowing the better-performing ads to draw more user attention and click-throughs. Google AdSense technology will automatically determine the optimal number of ads to display on any page and will only show fewer ads when doing so will make you more money!’
AdSense Integrated with FeedBurner Site Ads
There's really nothing spookier than hollow, empty ad spaces rattling around your blog and/or web site, putting no cash in your pocket nor any extra hob- in your goblin. Before you banish these underperforming idlers to some distant house upon a lonely hill, we recommend redeeming them with a chance to boost your earning potential. This Halloween, the FeedBurner development team is asking those of us who do the announcing around here to make note of the now-available integration of FeedBurner site ads and AdSense.
This newly integrated capability — designed just for FeedBurner-powered content like yours — puts relevant AdSense content ads to work on your blog and/or website. (Note: AdSense options for feeds not available at this time.) If you choose to activate this service, you can run a 300x250 or 468x60 text or image AdSense ad on your blog. The ad will appear below the first item on your site and archive pages once you have installed the necessary code. Ad content is automatically targeted to complement your site and you will earn revenue each time visitors click on ads. You can even customize the colors (or use a saved color palette from your AdSense account) so the ad unit fits your site's look and feel.
