Chris K Designs

• Tweet

• Tweet

Ever wonder why the ads that Google AdSense decides to show for your blog post or site content doesn’t quite match up with what you were aiming for? Well it’s not surprise that the answer is simple, the ads are selected by a computer. Yeah, no duh right? The problem with computers doing all the work is, they don’t have the ability to distinguish context, importance, or even content as a whole. They can only look at the words you type and compare with a database that it has waiting with hundreds of possible ads. What does this mean for you? I’m glad you asked.

Analogies are like your history professor…

…They can get long winded and boring. Getting relevant ads from any automated ad provider service starts with your writing style. Do you sculpt your posts or pages with heavy analogies? If you do, you might be your own worst enemy. The analogy, while very useful in getting a human to understand your context, is essentially a site crawler’s nightmare. It has no clue that your post is about your actual topic and instead notices a large amount of time spent on the topic that is your analogy. If you are going to try and use analogies to get your point across, do it quickly and concisely.

Google’s Section Targeting

You can also get Google’s AdSense crawlers to take note of or ignore specific content by wrapping it with the following tags:
To use this content:

<!-- google_ad_section_start -->
Your content here
<!-- google_ad_section_end -->

To ignore this content:

<!-- google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) -->
Your content here
<!-- google_ad_section_end -->

Some hints on using this, tell AdSense to ignore your comments (some of those can be quite off topic), related posts (these can carry titles that don’t relate to your content), and possibly your sidebar if you have aggregated content from twitter or other social networks. More can be found about Section Targeting over at the AdSense Help Documentation

Update: I failed to link a plug-in that will help you out with adding these tags for WordPress called Auto Google Ad Section

Make inserting ads easier

Tired of coping and pasting that AdSense JavaScript section into your posts? I was too. Go download the AdSense Manager plug-in for WordPress. After you have it properly configured all you need to add into your post is an identifying bit of text that looks like:

[ad-1]

The plug-in makes an identifying text string in the [ and ], then wherever you post it, it replaces that string with your AdSense code. Remember though, only 3 ad impressions are allowed per page with Google AdSense, so don’t go overboard.

Image Ads vs. Text Ads

This debate could go on forever, there are plenty of people who say that image ads get more clicks and text ads have higher payouts. I don’t know for sure, but what I do know is that so much of that depends on your target audience. Geared at teenagers? They will probably be attracted to image based ads that are moving. Inline text ads that match the design scheme of your blog might work for other groups of visitors. The truth is, you have to find that exact match for your visitors so make sure you use your Google Analytics to keep track of clicks and traffic.

Hopefully those few things will help you integrate AdSense into your WordPress site quicker and with less agony of configuration. I know it made my life much easier.