Forum Moderators: martinibuster
1)Make sure the the ads you want are available. This was my biggest problem! I was trying to get ads on a particular page, but there were NO advertisers for the keywords/subject. Seems pretty obvious, but to check ad inventory just do a G search on a few keywords that you want ads for. If searching for "little blue widgets" does not return any AdSense ads on the right-side of the results page, you may have to widen your search to "blue widgets", or just "Widgets". The more ads you see the more inventory is available.
2) Create your page with the normal content - dont try to stuff it full of keywords to draw in your ads - just create a regular page. Here is the KEY: NAME that page with the keywords you used to find your ads using DASHES (not underscores!) or example, "pretty-blue-widgets.htm" and NOT "pretty_blue_widgets.htm"
3) Publish your page and WAIT. Normally you will have some good ads immediatly, but to fully and properly populate your page with good ads you need to wait for the AdSense G-bot to visit. For me this takes anywhere from 5 minutes to one hour. Dont make any changes to try and fine-tune the ad-targeting for at least an hour.
That's it!
I know that you 'old timers' (or people smarter than me) will probably think these are obvious steps - but it took ME some time to figure these steps out.
if this post has helped your ad-targeting please reply and let me (us) know. I've learned so much from this forum that I want to try and give something back. if i've got something wrong, post and let us know. And if you're incrediBILL, please be nice..
1] Targeted ads were poor, as I have a menu to the left of every page, and the Mediabot was taking random words from the menu. So I used the AdSense HTML targeting code [ <!-- google_ad_section_start --> and <!-- google_ad_section_end --> ] to target the content area of each page. This helped enormously to provide targeted ads.
2] I had one narrow skyscraper, and good CPC, then changed it to two wide skyscrapers, one on top of the other, and the CPC halved. I returned to a single narrow skyscraper and the CPC has gone back to the original and much higher figure.
This is however, just personal experience :-))
Just because there are ads in google search, doesn't mean the advertisers have "content" turned on.
I did the same thing as Easy, I added Section Targeting across my site. It's been a week, and I'm still waiting for the mediabot.
[edited by: Sweet_Cognac at 3:21 pm (utc) on April 27, 2006]
Here is the KEY: NAME that page with the keywords you used to find your ads using DASHES (not underscores!) or example, "pretty-blue-widgets.htm" and NOT "pretty_blue_widgets.htm"
Sorry to burst your ballon on this one however, in my experience, it makes no difference whether they are dashes or underscores.
FWIW ALL my url extensions of more than one word use underscores and nearly all are #1.
It has been debated at long length in the search forum over the years and I don't believe anyone has come up with the definitive answer either way.
One essential point you have completely missed out is the titlebar and metatags containing the same information as one's blue_widgets description.
Without that you can be snookered!
I'm sure i am missing a LOT of points.. This was just some simple tips that work, for newcomers.. If you already know it all, then move along to the next post.
Re: section targeting: i have found that by following the steps i posted, section targeting was not necessary. Also, if no ads are availble, section-targeting aint gunna help..
Your mileage may vary..
If you already know it all, then move along to the next post.
The point of helpful follow-up posts from the more experienced members is to avoid disinformation and possible unnecessary effort.
Don't forget that many of us have been doing this for more than 10 years and this knowledge is priceless yet we give it to all for free:-))
Have you ever seen how much those "search engine seminars" cost? Ouch...
If there's something anyone has tried and proven to be successful and they haven't seen it here, then let us know...I'm always game to try anything:-))
Question for those those who've been experimenting with Google's targeting code.. Have you always seen an improvement in your CTR after implementing google's targeting code?
You may care to read the help page,as it says it may take some weeks for the bots to pick up on the code, and I for one only inserted it a few days back. But so far, so good :-)
[google.com ]
1] Targeted ads were poor, as I have a menu to the left of every page, and the Mediabot was taking random words from the menu. So I used the AdSense HTML targeting code [ <!-- google_ad_section_start --> and <!-- google_ad_section_end --> ] to target the content area of each page. This helped enormously to provide targeted ads.
Okay, now that was worth the price of admission today. I wish I had known about that a long time ago (or is that new?). I completely pulled AdSense off one of my largest sites because I kept getting irrelevant ads because it took words from the menu rather than the actual content of the page.
I'll have to give that a try and see if I can get relevant ads, not to mention money! ;-) Thanks!
I had a small issue with Adlinks parsing the file path and displaying the results in the Adlinks block. The result looked something like this....
Ads by Google
mydomainname
firstsubfoldername
secondsubfoldername
filename
Chatting with the nice folks at Adsense revealed that the bot can sometimes get a bit confused on new pages and punt like this while it figures out what the page is about.
Of course clicking any of the choices led to a "No ads found" type of message.
Unfortunately, descriptive titles, filenames, etc. are no guarantee of perfect targeting. Bots don't have human intelligence, and I've had problems with ads for beer coolers on a Munich Oktoberfest article that mentioned beer and St. Martin hotels on a page about accommodations in the German monastery where Martin Luther took his vows as a priest. On the whole, though, I haven't had too many problems with ad targeting, so maybe your hypothesis about descriptive filenames is correct.
Question for those those who've been experimenting with Google's targeting code.. Have you always seen an improvement in your CTR after implementing google's targeting code?
My best figures on all metrics (ctr, cpm, earnings etc.) happen when I get well targetted ads from real advertisers. I'm sure the same is true for everyone else. Therefore the quality and relevance of ads is paramount.
My experiment with section targeting didn't make things better. The ads I had before implementing it were fine. Well targeted, good advertisers. I'm not sure what I thought section targeting was going to do, but tried it anyway! What I saw was the bot zooming in on various keywords and showing ads for newsgroup readers and all sorts of other irrelevant stuff. Removing section targeting restored proper ads.
I guess my message would be that if your ads are currently well targeted it's unlikely to help - it might even make things worse by changing the ads that show. However, if you are having problems then it has to be worth trying it. I'm sure many people find it works well for them. If it can help get relevant ads, then all of your figures should improve.
My best figures on all metrics (ctr, cpm, earnings etc.) happen when I get well targetted ads from real advertisers.
this line is the essence of our earnings in adsense.
this should be placed in the forum faq.
i am now at a stage that i am getting not well targeted ads from spam sites and i am loosing $140 day of my normal earnings [almost half].
ad targeting code was added to 150K of pages with no improvement over 3 weeks
i have contacted google and got canned answer about the program fluctuations bla bla bla
I've got filenames-that-relate-to-topic.html page files,
I've got content that is relevant
I've got titles on my pages that coincide with my filename and content
I've verified my site with google
... and yet, I get dreadfully poor advert correlations with even more insult added when the Firefox Adsense preview consistently provides appropriate adverts on the same pages... what gives!?
