Apr 23 2008
How to use section targeting to maximize earnings?
Section targeting when introduced was not a widely known feature. But with many blogs and online forums discussing it, many webmasters are aware of this feature. Section targeting allows you to suggest to google which part of your page it should (or shouldn’t) take into consideration to display relevant ads.
Google uses a complicated arithmetic that includes your site’s ranking, popularity, traffic, keywords in domain etc to decide which ads will get displayed. Section targeting is a not a magical potion that will double your earnings, although some webmasters have reported significant increase in eCPMs. Section targeting is only a small piece that makes Google’s smart pricing policy.
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. - Adsense Help
To use section targeting you need to include a set of HTML comment tags in your code. The content that you want to emphasize will be in between these tags. The format of the tags are:
<!-- google_ad_section_start -->
<!-- google_ad_section_end -->
For example:
<body> Navigation Bar <!– google_ad_section_start –> My article for which I’d like relevant ads goes here. <!– google_ad_section_end –> Footer & Copyright </body>If you want the adsense crawler to ignore a particular section of your page use the following code:
<!-- google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) -->
Some things to note while using section targeting:
- It is against program policies to manipulate section targeting to display ads that are not relevant to your pages.
- Use considerable amount of text in between section targeting tags to get relevant ads.
- Wait for two weeks before you jump to conclusions about section targeting.
- Section targeting are specially useful in forums and galleries which usually display irrelevant ads.
- If your site is about a specific topic and you are getting relevant ads, you don’t need section targeting. See if it does more harm than good.
Section Targeting Plugin for Wordpress
If you are are using Wordpress blogging system Target Adsense is a Wordpress plugin that allows you to define section targeting tags. It allows you wrap all posts with section targeting tags or alternatively only a selected part of your post. I’ve not tested this plugin yet. If you’ve tried it, do give your feedback by leaving a comment.