Without a doubt, the easiest way to monetize your blog is by use of Google Adsense. Not only it takes little effort to setup, you can integrate it easily into your blog.
The thing is Adsense ads don’t make good sense at all, if you know what I mean. Surely you wouldn’t want to see ads on health foods if your blog is about, say make money online, wouldn’t you? But it does happen, doesn’t it? This is due to the fact that the ads are not properly targeted.
As in usual cases, Google Adsense ads are automatically targeted to whole content of your blog including the content of your sidebar, footer and even your readers’ comments. So how do you tell Google to display the most relevant ads to your blog? You need to implement what one would call section targeting.
With section targeting, you have the flexibility to specify which part of your blog you want to emphasize and let Google match the best ads to that targeted section.
How to implement Section Targeting
To implement section targeting, you’ll need to add a pre-defined set of HTML tags to your code. The tags has to be inserted at the beginning and end of whichever section you are targeting.
Say you want Google to focus on your post content and display the most relevant ads, you have to insert the tags on your single.php and look for the php code that display your post content. For instance
Another method of section targeting would be the use of (weight=ignore), a good example of its usage is when you want Google to ignore your sidebar completely. All you need to do is to insert the tags at the beginning and end of your sidebar.php.
Therefore if you are already using Adsense as a way of monetizing your blog, use section targeting to improve the relevancy of Adsense ads and maximize the CTR - Click Thru Rate. You can use section targeting to target as many sections of your blog as you like. So feel free to use multiple sets of tags to improve your Adsense ads result.
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Hello Yan!
Excellent advice – sometimes Google just won’t stop sending ads about something entirely inappropriate and this way you can isolate the text that is causing the problem.
I have a site that has Bol (Short for Bolivia) in the URL and Google nearly sent me Mad posting ads about hotels in Bol in Croatia, until I found this Section Targeting code.
Rhys’s last blog post..Maximize SEO like a ‘Pro’
The irony is no matter how smart Google is, we still need to tell it what to do – sometimes.
Not only section targeting helps to filter out inappropriate and irrelevant ads, more importantly it does improve the CTR.
If only others will follow suit…
nice tips thanks for sharing it
jasmine celion
cool-hotstuff.blogspot.com
On one of my blogs, it worked out unexpectedly well! Somebody left a comment about ‘bet you don’t do this..’ or similar, and all of a sudden I got a load of high paying horse-racing related ads on my celebrity blog – took me a while to work out why my CPC was up to $2 from $0.05!