Advanced Adsense Tips - Getting More Clicks CPC

Regular readers of My-Affiliate-Programs.com will be savy to just how important it is to have a decent click through rate (CTR) with contextual advertising programs like Google Adsense, Chikita and the Yahoo Publishers Network. Often times people are stunned at just how much more money they can make when they start looking “under the hood” of their websites and start thinking about adsense optimisation. Last week I posted several articles about ad placement and how important it is to blend your ads into your sites content. Today I want to post a bit about getting the most relevant ads from the most popular contextual ad program Adsense. Several of the tips posted today will be quite basic while I will also share some adsense advanced resources.

I got the idea for this post several days ago when I started to help out my father in law with one of his main sites (an ethnic recipe site). His site is quite popular and ranks number one in google (out of more than 2.7 million other sites) for his site name which is also the focus niche of the site. He is also doing well on MSN and yahoo ranking in the top 5 for the same phrase for both engines. With so much traffic we needed to make some changes in order to boost his revenue.

The first thing we did was to create a small table right below his header the table contained two column. One column was for for an adsense leaderboard ad (728×90) while the other column was for four small images that were placed in four rows within the column. The next step was the removal of affiliate ads that were not generating any income. Not only were these affiliate ads not bringing in any income but they were also skewing adsense ads. You see my father in law had placed a banner to a wine merchant and had listed about 15 types of wines on a bunch of pages. While wine certainly goes with the theme of recipes it would be smarter to create content pages based on wine rather than just plugging in a banner and a list of 15 types of wine.

So on his “Chicken Recipes” page google was showing only two ads that contained the term “chicken recipes” and was displaying 4 or 5 ads for wines! Ugh, this is exactly what you don’t want to see happen with google adsense. While the page had good basic seo principles on it, with “Chicken Recipes” listed in the title tag, h1 tag and repeated once within the copy text google was picking up on all these wines listed and figured wine ads were the way to go. It is important to note that the copy on the page was not very much, probably only about 200 words.

So site visitors that found this page via a search engine were surely looking for “chicken recipes” but were viewing ads for “wine”. When your sites content and adsense ads match your click through rate will improve, suddenly ads don’t become ads but become resources to other online sites that your visitors are looking for.

As many of you know I also have a culinary site that brings me in enough money to pay the mortgage each month. To give you an example my “chicken recipes” page is currently displaying 4 adsense ads with the words “chicken recipes” … my click through rate is nearly 5 times that of my father in laws site (however were changing that now)!

The moral of the story, surf through your site and check out what types of ads are being displayed and tweak your pages to insure your getting the most relevant ads possible.

Google Also Provides Special Tags To Control Ad Targeting

A while back google introduced what is called “section targeting” which allows webmasters to “mark” parts of their html code that adsense should weigh more heavily or be ignored completely. Their are a number of reasons why you might want to use section targeting (watch for a post later about how and why I implemented this wordpress blog with section targeting).

What is section targeting and how do I implement it?
from google adsense help center

Section targeting allows you to suggest sections of your text and HTML content that you’d like us to emphasise 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. We recommend that only those familiar with HTML attempt to implement section targeting.

To implement section targeting, you’ll need to add a set of special HTML comment tags to your code. These tags will mark the beginning and end of whichever section(s) you’d like to emphasise or de-emphasise for ad targeting.

The HTML tags to emphasise a page section take the following format:

<!– google_ad_section_start –>

<!– google_ad_section_end –>

You can also designate sections you’d like to have ignored by adding a (weight=ignore) to the starting tag:

<!– google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) –>

With these tags added to your HTML code, your final code may look like the following:

<html><head><title>Section targeting</title></head>
<body>
<!– google_ad_section_start –>

This is the text of your web page. Most of your content resides here.

<!– google_ad_section_end –>
</body>
</html>

You can use section targeting to make suggestions about as many sections of a page as you like. However, please be aware that we can’t guarantee results, and that it may take up to 2 weeks before our crawlers take into account any changes you’ve made to your site.

In order to properly implement this feature, you’ll need to include a significant amount of content within the section targeting tags. Including insufficient content may result in less relevant ads or PSAs. In addition, please keep in mind that this feature should only be used to emphasize significant sections of your site’s relevant content. It is against our program policies to manipulate the ad targeting to result in ads that are not relevant to the content of your pages.

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