How to use Adsense tags for more relevant advertisements

Advertising is an big part of many web sites and to make it work, targeted advertisements are essential.

Choosing static advertisements to display is easy. For example, stock imagery, printing services and finally web hosting and all fairly logical choices for a graphic design blog such as mine, where at least one of which will likely appeal to any visitor.

In theory, Google Adsense dynamically generates appropriate ads based on the content of your post. In theory…

Posts on printing should ideally display relevant services, web design posts might show hosting services and logo design posts might show services being offered by fellow designers. Without a little guidance however, Google doesn’t always get it right.

The bulk of my posts are about logo design, branding and corporate identity, followed closely by general graphic design then onto web design, printing, SEO and other related subjects.

Further down you’ll see Adsense ads being display at the end of this post and it would make sense that ads be shown in proportion to the above mentioned content, as things stood however 19 / 20 of my blog posts we’re followed by this:

The only content universal to my posts are my themes sidebars, however there is little regarding web between them and nothing about domain registration. For whatever reason Google decided the only thing suitable for my blog was this one domain registration service, regardless of what the post was actually about.

Obviously this isn’t ideal as the bulk of my advertisements were not likely to be of any interest to readers. By using tags to focus on or exclude content you can help steer your Google ads in a more relevant and profitable direction.

By encapsulating the post content of your website for inclusion, while excluding sidebars, footers and headers etc. more relevant ads should be displayed.

The following code can be used to specify relevant content.

<!– google_ad_section_start –>
This is relevant content that should be examined.
<!– google_ad_section_end –>

While this is used to exclude it.

<!– google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) –>
This is content that should be ignored.
<!– google_ad_section_end –>

After adding this code to the appropriate sections of my blog I immediately began seeing advertisements I previous hadn’t seen in several months without it. The domain registration ad is still floating about, and while there is still an occasional irrelevant one the spread of content is a definite improvement.

Give it a go.

Better ads = more clicks = more income.