How to cue up the high paying ads

[Jon12345]

Ok, you have your site with adsense. But you are not getting a great deal of revenue per click through. Could this be because you have low paying ads displayed, caused by the text on your site?

Is there any way to encourage high paying ads to be displayed on your site, rather than low paying ones? If so, how?

[ronin]

Get an AdWords account and start researching keywords?

[Jon12345]

No, I mean this:

You are targetting casinos. You write an article on your site that talks about casinos. But the text on your page cues up an adsense ad that is not at the top of the adwords. Consequently, you end up with something way down the listing at a lower bid price. This results in a lower commission per clickthrough.

So, with this in mind, can you somehow target the higher paying adwords by manipulating content somehow.

[Jenstar]

Perhaps the advertisers you see in the search results have not turned on content advertising. You might think your page is "widgets" but AdSense might think the page is "small blue widgets" for keywords after it is spidered.

And as a side note, casino content is not permitted in AdSense. From the policies:

Site may not include: Gambling or casino-related content

[clearvision]

Hmm, I understood your question to mean, "Is there away to tweek your content so the higher paying click ads in a specific category show up as opposed to the lower paying click ads in the same category?"

That is a good question, maybe it is some algo thing that takes site value and conversion ratio into account and then spits out the appropriate ad?

Okay...I don't know, but would be great to hear what others think!

[Jon12345]

Yes, you put it far better than me. That's what I meant!

Jenstar: was just using an example, but you are right.

[mlemos]

I would not say, tweak your content to target high paying ads, but I see to problem in adding new distinct pages of interest to your audience that focus on aspects related with higher paying themes.

Use channels to see if the ads in the new content pages are performing better or not.

[novice]

"Is there any way to encourage high paying ads to be displayed on your site, rather than low paying ones? If so, how?"

Jon12345,

Many AdWord advertisers are creative at getting low paying clicks. The best way is by choosing non popular search terms that they pay less for.

If your site displays many of these terms then the advertiser succeeds in getting their low paying ads on your site.

[alika]

Except that there is really no way to tell what exact keywords are triggering the ads in your site.

For example, you may think that your page is about "website design" and hence should be attracting high paying ads from Adwords advertisers for the keyword "website design"; only to find that the ads you are triggering is the lower paying keyword of "how to find a website designer to create a site." This is the thing with Adsense -- you just never know for sure.

[FromRocky]

Targeting the high paying/popular ads does not mean you will get the high paying ads but a package of garbage ones.

[alika]

In the early days of Adsense, they had the keyword right beside Ads by Google. People hated it (and justifiably so) because clicking on it would lead the viewers out of the site and put them to Google SERPs for the keywords (and their competitors if they're not in the SERPs).

But what I liked about that feature is that it showed me the exact keywords that the page was triggering. For example, I thought my homepage was about the lucrative two-keyword phrase of our industry, only to find from that feature that the ads being served are from a lower paying 4-word keyword. And this was the time when we were the #1 for our main keyword in G.

Maybe G can introduce back that feature -- without the keywords link back to their SERPs (just a static feature). That can help publishers understand the value of their page. The drawback of course is that it will give publishers more reason to gripe if the page is generating ads of a different/lower paying variant of the desired keyword. Plus, more information means more tools to game the system, right?

[kpaul]

or at least on the adsense preview tool?

-kpaul

[Marcia]

Four words: content development & semantic diversity.

[jilla]

Isn't another factor whether the adwords advertisor is using broad match or not? There may be some high paying advertisors for widget at 2.00 that do broad match so they are paying 2.00 for phrases like "teeny tiny ugly widget". But this also may be effected if there are other advertisors that may be paying .05 for exact phrasing on teeny tiny ugly widget. Would the first guy still be paying 2.00 for this if he doesn't have the energy to do exact phrase bids?

The other question about what phrases are picked up on the adsense publisher's page is interesting. If you do a 2 phrase popular phrase is that picked up on (ie internet marketing)? Or can they determine the page is about "novice person in kansas trying to understand internet marketing" and this could be a .05 phrase?

[trader]

I think the issue is the ads may be well targeted in general, but not well paying targeted ads as they relate to a small sub-category within the broader preferred category.

For example, I have a small site devoted to home mortgage loans, a high paying keyword. However, the ads are mortgage loan calculator ads (likely a low paying keyword, though I never checked it).

Even though calculating mortgage loan payments is not really in the site content, what with 98% of the site about mortgage loans and loan applications (not online ways to calculate monthly payments).

So the issue is why does G send those assumed low paying loan calculator ads rather than mortgage loan ads? Anyone know why or how to solve this problem?

[Atomic]

So the issue is why does G send those assumed low paying loan calculator ads rather than mortgage loan ads? Anyone know why or how to solve this problem?

Try thinking of yourself as a mortgage company trying to think of themselves as a consumer searching the web for loans. Perhaps there's something on your page that is a negative keyword for their campaign that brings people to your page but means that the ad you want to see displayed will not be leaving the low-paying ads. campaigns allow you to specify a region or city so would it help to be less general about home mortgages and turn to being more specific by mentioning getting a home mortgage from businesses in a certain area. If their targeting option is set for a specific city rather than nationwide or global they are far more likely to get a conversion. If you are thinking about a nationwide company why not name them on your page? If you created pages for different metro areas you could specify some companies within them.

I don't know if this would help but when I am creating an adwords campaign I want my clicks to count and I do whatever I can to make sure that the right customer is clicking on the right ad.

[clearvision]

Okay, it seems that ads are changing on our pages depending on text words surrounding the adsense code.

For example: The main gist of an article could be "Credit Card Debt". One paragraph/sentence could discuss "Avoiding college debt by not eating in restraunts". If the adsense code is close enough to this one sentence it could pick up ads like,
"Reduce College Debt"
"Get a Credit Card for College"
"College restraunt guides"
"Avoiding bad restraunts".

So increasing a click value or to get better targeting (at least in our case) could be as simple as placing the code correctly on a page. It also makes me wonder if above the fold ads are worth more than bottom of page ads?

[linear]

So increasing a click value or to get better targeting (at least in our case) could be as simple as placing the code correctly on a page

Correct, in my experience. And via CSS, the position on the rendered page need not be controlled by the position in the page source code.

[panicbutton]

The better page rank you have, the better paying the ads you will get.

[Macbeth]

Hi PanicButton,

Would you mind explaining please what SERPS has to do with higher value payperclick adsense?

Cheers

[panicbutton]

Not SERPS, pagerank.

The better regarded your content, the better ad you will get.

[icedowl]

I don't think it has any direct relationship to PR. However, both PR and the ads you get are both directly related to your content and how well it is written. IMHO it all boils down to the words you use and how well you use them. More and better content allows for better targetting.

Four words: content development & semantic diversity.

Marcia hit the nail on the head!

Added:
As an aside, I've seen ads that were targetted to the "alt" text of an image when the content could not be easily targetted. Example: Gardening supplies ads when the images were of fruit (none of the content mentioned any sort of fruit, plants or other vegetation).