Increase Adsense Earnings by Targeting Your Content

May 13th Information and Tutorials \ Monetizing Your Website Google AdSense will often display ads that aren't relevant to your web site's content. Sometimes AdSense will pick up on random words and phrases from around your website that don't really relate to what your content is about. This leaves you with unrelated ads that nobody will click on. Luckily, Google offers a way for you to tell AdSense exacty what content it should focus on, resulting in highly-targeted ads, higher click through rates (CTR) and higher payouts for every click (CPC). 

{google_articles} 

 

This technique is called Section Targeting, or Content Targeting. Simply place the following code around the sections of your website's content that you want AdSense to target:

<!-- google_ad_section_start -->
Site Content
<!-- google_ad_section_end -->

Setting this up on a Joomla website is very simple. You'll need to open up the "index.php" file of your site's template and find where it includes the main component for the current page.

For Joomla 1.0.x:

<?php mosMainBody(); ?>

For Joomla 1.5.x:

<jdoc:include type="component" />

Simply wrap those lines with the Google Section Targeting code:

For Joomla 1.0.x:

<!-- google_ad_section_start -->
<?php mosMainBody(); ?>
<!-- google_ad_section_end -->

For Joomla 1.5.x:

<!-- google_ad_section_start -->
<jdoc:include type="component" />
<!-- google_ad_section_end -->

 

You can also tell Google which specific content that you don't want targeted. Use the following code around links, modules, code inserted by plugins, or anything else that you want Google AdSense to ignore:

<!-- google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) -->
Site Content
<!-- google_ad_section_end -->

{cbauthor}I have a plugin that inserts a badge with the name, info and website of the article's author. The badge will always contain content not related to page's content and I want Google AdSense to ignore it, so I place a nested google_ad_section around the badge with (weight=ignore).

Adding Section Targeting to this website has significantly improved the accuracy of its AdSense ads, but it took a few weeks for Google to get everything sorted out. Section Targeting should be added to to every web site that uses AdSense, but be patient because it could take a couple of weeks for changes to take effect.