Understanding AdSense better

Discussion of AdSense mechanisms and integration

[AdAdvice]

Hi,

I am a newbie trying to understand how to tweak AdSense integration with our site better. I have two questions

1. Is it possible to supply some publisher page category information to AdSense so it can do better targetting of ads?

2. I noticed that the JavaScript for AdSense sends the number of URLs in user's browser history back to Google. This could be a privacy concern for users of my site. Does anyone know why AdSense code does that?

Thanks.

[Alioc]

Welcome to the forum.

1- Only premium publishers are allowed to do that.

2- Obviously, to analyze visitor patterns and find out invalid click throughs.

Final words: don't alter your code more than you're allowed if you want to stay as an AdSense publisher.

[incrediBILL]

1. Is it possible to supply some publisher page category information to AdSense so it can do better targetting of ads?

Yes and no. You can't directly supply the information to AdSense but you CAN improve the spider food on your page using better titles, H1, H2 tags, alt-text, a few more buzzwords in text, etc. and it will also help your SERPs.

Trust me on this one, took me about a month to get my ads on target when I started with AdSense and they are bullseye on target. Then the SERPs bumped in all search engines, then the traffic came (more than before) and the money increase followed. My SEO work wasn't bad before, it's just AdSense allowed me to better see what Google sees if you catch my drift and I put exactly what Google needed to see in front of it in a more prominent place.

Nothing spammy, just optimization to the teeth.

[Buzliteyear]

AdAdvice,

Influencing whichs ads will appear on a site has become a science here. Actually, it's more of a witchcraft since there is no Google-issued strategy on how to do this.

As indicated above, H1, H2 tags can help as can page title, description, and keywords.

One of the things I use is the AdSense Preview Tool (with a right click it lets you see which ads will appear on any given and indexed page).

But remember, how you set up a page for the search engine will likely determine which ads you get.

[AdAdvice]

Thanks for the insightful answers. What about the second question - privacy concerns - Google sending back the number of URLs in users' browser history? Has anybody (user) raised this concern? Has anybody discussed this topic on these forums before? Or am I being overly cautious? Any thoughts are appreciated.

[Alioc]

I've never seen this mentioned as a concern AA. I don't think your visitors will even realize it. Who feels uncomfortable with it should most probably have disabled javascript. That's not your "problem".