W-Shadow.com

Over the last few days I’ve been tweaking my AdSense ads and trying to improve their relevance, with good results – last Sunday was the highest-earning day for this site since… well, since ever. I got around $12 for the day, and even though the peak has passed, my CTR & eCPM are still notably better than before (note: there was no large increase in traffic, so it’s really because of the changes I made).

Here are some tips that I figured out from my experimentation.

Use section targeting

Section targeting allows you to emphasize or downplay certain parts of you page for the purpose of AdSense ad selection. This can improve your ad relevance and result in a higher CTR. To emphasize some content wrap it in these tags :

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

To make the AdSense bot ignore some part of your content, use something like this :

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

For this blog I’ve edited the theme to add the “ignore” tags around my sidebar, page footer and most of the header. I also added inclusive tags to some individual posts. The Google AdSense Targeting plugin does some of this automatically, but I prefer to do it manually as it gives me greater control. Note that section targeting can take a while to come into effect.

Break up untargeted words

If you see that AdSense is picking up certain words in your posts and assigning them too much importance (like getting blog-related ads when the post is about widgets and only mentions blogging once), there’s another trick to try.

In addition to section targeting, you can also break up the untargeted words on your page by using the <span> tag. Example : “bl<span>og</span>”

The tags have no effect on how the page looks to a human visitor. On the other hand, the AdSense mediapartners bot will think “bl” and “og” are two separate words (so you might get ads about Ogs 😉 ).
Note that this might be considered a slightly “grayhat” technique by some.

Get advanced AdSense tracking

The statistics available in the AdSense account are very general and not that useful for advanced optimization. For one, per-URL and per-keyword CTR stats would help a lot in seeing which pages are performing well and which need to be improved.

Currently I’m using the AdSense Click Tracker plugin to track AdSense clicks with Google Analytics. This approach works, but it only catches around 40% of the clicks and I can’t seem to get certain data from GA reports (like the aforementioned per-URL CTR). So I’m still looking for a better tracking script.

Do what professionals do (not what they say)!

There are lots of AdSense e-books and video courses out there (some of them are pretty good), but what I’ve found really useful is examining how successful webmasters optimize their pages for AdSense. You can see real examples of how ads are integrated into the content, analyze AdSense block placement and so on, and, best of all, it’s free 😉

Keep in mind that you need to pick the site to analyze carefully. Some highly successful websites are deliberately under-monetized, at least in terms of contextual ads, as they can afford it easily. I’d also suggest you look for websites with target audience similar to yours for better results.