More Relevant Ads: Ad Section Targetting

March 6th, 2007

This is one neat technique that most people don’t know about Google AdSense. It’s called ad section targetting. What this allows you to do is specify areas that you want emphasized when the AdSense system is looking for relevant ads to display. This is an excellent way to make your ads more relevant to your site’s content.

How it basically works is you specify the section you want to be targeted with special tags like this:

<!-- google_ad_section_start -->
This is my content that I want section targeted!
<!-- google_ad_section_end -->

That’s all there is too it! You can designate as many sections as you want but ensure there is enough content in between the section targets or else Google may not be able to display the relevant ads or ads at all. You may end up even getting PSAs so make sure the areas you target are content rich.

5 responses to my rambling...

Ajith March 7th, 2007 at 9:26 am
Hi John havn’t seen you for a while(a day) hows class…..

The post is real useful .. Most of the people dont know about it…
I ame to know about that a few months earlier from another blog..
Keep going Cheers..
John Hok March 7th, 2007 at 8:20 pm
Yes a bit busy the next couple of weeks but still trying to keep up regularly here.

Great! :) When I learned about it I was quite surprised, it was awhile back. I thought I’d just share it since it can be a powerful technique if you use it right. I’m actually trying it right now on my blog to see if the ads are more targeted towards the specific post.
Natron March 13th, 2007 at 8:01 am
Have you had much success with this? I usually have pretty specific content per page, so I am not sure I will have any sites to test this on.
John Hok March 13th, 2007 at 9:06 am
Personally I’m still testing it out but it doesn’t seem to work too well on the main page. The secondary pages it keeps the ads relevant to the post but that might just be because that is the only area with the real content.
Robert Irizarry March 28th, 2007 at 1:38 pm
Interesting comment, John. I actually find my main page coming up fine but some secondary pages that don’t. It relates to the specificity of my content in part although I’m sure I can do a better job going forward of optimizing for ads.