Forum Moderators: martinibuster
If it was about football, one page might need to be about "Jerry Rice". If magicians, "David Blaine". And so on. These pages are all about the person, and the majority of visitors arrive by searching on that person's name in one engine or another.
Anyway I started testing section targeting a few days ago, using the name alone in the targeted section. This is certainly less content than Google recommends including, but since the effect is to emphasize a certain section rather than to target ads on that text alone, it seems like this should be an acceptable implementation. This is Google's exact wording: "In order to properly implement this feature, you'll need to include a significant amount of content within the section targeting tags. Including insufficient content may result in less relevant ads or PSAs."
The results so far (> 10,000 impressions to date) are good: the CTR is WAY higher, the CPC is slightly lower, and overall eCPM is up about 50% on these particular channels. Plus even if there is no exact match, the ads don't appear any less targeted than before.
Comments? Anybody else doing this? I am 100% confident that this is not misleading in any way, but I'm still wary about pushing the envelope.
Now you've praised positive section targeting, I may give that a try on the pages that seem to have fairly hazy ads. Hopefully I'll see a similar improvement in ad quality.
I am using section targeting but not as small a section as you are using. Does anyone know if there are any rules as far as how specifically you can do section targeting?
I know being this specific wouldn't work with some topics but with this one there are plenty of ads available as far as I can tell. I'm guessing this is the case for the topic jomaxx is using section targeting for as well.
netmeg: There were observable differences in performance by the next day.
I'm getting improved targeting, and I can tweak the phrases in the <h> tags to play with the whole equation.
I just re-read the info on section targeting. It looks like there is no rule as to how narrow the targeting can be. It just warns that if it is too narrow you may not get good matches on the ads. So I think it's just a matter of experimenting with what works.
What they did warn is that you can't manipulate the section targeting to get ads that are not the topic of the page.
It sounds like you're targeting words that are very relevant to your content. However, please note that using section targeting on just one or two words is considered to be manipulating regular ad targeting, and is prohibited by our program policies. This is one of the reasons we ask publishers to use whole sentences and paragraphs with section targeting.
Also, highlighting a larger block of text may actually increase the number of advertisers competing to display on your site by expanding the 'context' of your page to a slightly broader pool of ads. This could lead to more revenue for you if it drives the auction higher.
Lastly, just to clarify, we want to make sure your ads are as effective as possible, so our technology detects whether section targeting will improve your results and implements automatically only if you'll earn more revenue.
-ASA
1: Open up viewtopic_body.tpl
(hint: you can find it here: templates > subSilver)
2: Locate this section and add the Google Section Targeting Code:
<tr> <!-- google_ad_section_start -->
<td colspan="2"><span class="postbody">{postrow.MESSAGE}{postrow.SIGNATURE}</span><span class="gensmall">{postrow.EDITED_MESSAGE}</span></td>
</tr><!-- google_ad_section_end -->
The section targeting will wrap around every post. In the forum I implemented this on, the ads snapped into focus much better. It helped alleviate the phenomenom in which ads from other topics were invading unrelated ones.
[edited by: martinibuster at 6:07 am (utc) on June 21, 2006]
so our technology detects whether section targeting will improve your results and implements automatically only if you'll earn more revenue.
AdsenseAdvisor, the problem with this is sometimes I don't expecially want the best paying ads, I want them to specifically fit the article. In the long run I will earn more and the advertisers will get visitors more likely to convert if the ad could be specific to the article.
On my site it's a nice break to see more specific ads now and then. Most of the time it's just widgeting or widgets. The same ads are served up page after page. Some ads with a slightly different slant on pages with a different slant on the topic are most refreshing to me and I suspect to my visitors.
