Forum Moderators: martinibuster
This should be very helpfull on pages that cover several topics, like a home page might.
Haven't tried this yet because I just spotted the notice while checking my stats. Sounds interesting though.
[edit note] edited to remove a quote[/edit]
Yeah all I did in my phpbb forums was put in an ignore for my overallheader.tpl file (basically starting from <body> until end of file> and then I also excluded the entire overallfooter.tpl file.
I for one would really appreciate the specifics of this technique since I also use phpBB forums. Thanks in advance!
I for one would really appreciate the specifics of this technique since I also use phpBB forums. Thanks in advance!
You can find these files in /templates/[name of theme you use]/ (in your phpBB directory)
Dowload the files to your computer, edit them as described in the post above and upload again.
When you update phpBB make sure you don't overwrite the edited templates :)
How much is enough? A paragraph's worth? More? Even info sites sometimes have pages that are skimpy on wordage.
--sections marked for emphasis
--sections marked for downplay
--unmarked sections
"Emphasize" means "give more weight to." It doesn't mean to "consider this and only this to the exclusion of everything else."
"Downplay" means "give less weight to." It doesn't mean "ignore entirely."
Sections marked neither for emphasis nor downplay are still considered when selecting ads.
If there is any potential for trouble here, as in giving the mediabot so little to chew on that the system only serves PSAs (or fewer ads per ad unit), it might come with too aggressive use of the downplay tag.
A lot depends on how much weight that Google gives the emphasis and downplay factors. 10% more weight for emphasis, 10% less weight for downplay? 20%? 50%? 100%? I suspect that Google will never divulge the exact weights, as that would make it too easy to game this new system. These percentage weights are "dials" they can twist to do their fine tuning.
This is all my interpretation. I could be wrong.
One other point:
I observe a lot of people in this thread reporting that they made changes, then saw (more or less) immediate results, whether good or bad. Your mileage may vary, but in my case, the Google mediabot has visited just a small fraction of my pages since Google introduced this new section targeting feature. The mediabot has yet to revisit any of the pages that I care about most, and where I have finely tuned the section targeting. This delayed response is why I am moving cautiously here. Don't conclude anything about this new section targeting feature as it applies to you unless and until you are sure Google, through its mediabot, has actually picked up on your changes. (Check the logs.) Then give Google some time to process the changes, and distribute the new data to the various ad servers. (Check the ads.) Only then draw your conclusions.
I observe a lot of people in this thread reporting that they made changes, then saw (more or less) immediate results, whether good or bad. Your mileage may vary, but in my case, the Google mediabot has visited just a small fraction of my pages since Google introduced this new section targeting feature. The mediabot has yet to revisit any of the pages that I care about most, and where I have finely tuned the section targeting. This delayed response is why I am moving cautiously here. Don't conclude anything about this new section targeting feature as it applies to you unless and until you are sure Google, through its mediabot, has actually picked up on your changes. (Check the logs.) Then give Google some time to process the changes, and distribute the new data to the various ad servers. (Check the ads.) Only then draw your conclusions.
I have over 2 million pages, so I know my site was not reprocessed by the mediabot; however, it seemed that there were immediate changes to how AdSense was treating my site.
While I understand how the feature was described, the change was so drastic and immediate, that I didn't want to risk it, so I removed the tags.
While it could be an unrelated coincidence, someone else can be the beta site.
... it seemed that there were immediate changes to how AdSense was treating my site... the change was so drastic and immediate...
I often observe "drastic and immediate" changes to ad targeting, irrespective of this new section targeting feature.
For example, I see five ads in an ad unit (wide skyscraper). I click the refresh button, and often I will see five entirely different ads which may or may not be in the same market niche. I then go to a different system, on a different network (I connect to two commercial networks here at home), and maybe will see a third set of ads, some or all of them different, displayed on the very same web page. (I swear that at times, I appear to see one set of ads displayed in Firefox on Linux systems, and a different set of ads displayed in IE on Windows systems.)
This is something I have never understood. I don't believe that AdWords advertisers are changing their bids at those very instances. It appears that
--the top five ad placements don't always go to the five highest bidders
--bidders in the 6th and lower ranks can win placement
--there is some randomization in the auction process
--different ad servers are serving differing results
--maybe Google is deliberately confusing the issue (to thwart our gaming the system)
Maybe what you saw had nothing to do with any section targeting you had implemented.
I'm beginning to see the mediabot visiting more and more of my section-targeted pages. Section targeting could be a deciding factor, it could be that many improvements I have made recently are beginning to kick in, it could be that AdWords advertisers are adjusting to the system (in my favor) after last week's upheaval, or it could be coincidence, but my CTR and eCPM are up sharply in the last several days.
1] My guess and the impression I got, though Google have not said it explicitly, is that Google will treat unmarket sections in pages that use section targeting tags differently from pages that do not use them. I believe that if a page uses section targeting, then Google will give less wieght to the sections that are not marked than if the paged had not used section targeting at all. That's my impresssion, but again Google did not say this explicitly, yet I get this impression maybe from their saying that using section targeting may result in PSAs if you do not include enough content (and again I guess they did not only mean using the exclusion tags to downplay a lot of the content like others have suggested, but even just using the section targeting tags to select a small part of the page).
2] As I have been involved in programming neural networks and similar types of programming (AI), I do not believe that Google's algorithm is that simple to use a fixed percentage emphasized sections and a fixed one for deemphasized ones. I find that with regards to this (and all other Google algos) they do not use hard coded numbers and fixed rations, weights or percentages. Such equations are simply more complex than that and probably use heuristics that depend on several factors related to the page.
On another note, whether you select to view it as a fixed ration or a more complex function, in both cases I believe that Google will change the way it works and affects ad targeting after some time when people start to use it, and Google collects a good amount of stats about it and learns from it then fine tunes their targeting algos to reflect what they have learnt from such stats. It can be an ongoing process (same as with their page rank algo and search matching aglos).
3] As for the ads changing in the same page upon refreshing, I've had pages that change their ads infrequently and others that may change upon a refresh (though that was more rare). Alternative reasons besides the ones you've already mentioned could be: when google sees that the same IP (the same visitor) has refreshed the page (without clicking) maybe they can change the ads to give the other fresh ones a chance as the first ones had no clicks. Maybe the more you refresh the page, the lower its CTR becomes which triggeres a different type of ads. Probably Google selects ads also based on other factors such as from where the visitor came (was brought by a search engine, from another site (which site), ... etc). There are always alternative reasons. But again, I would like to repeat that I have many pages whos ads remain relatively constant for a considerable period of time (i.e. weeks if not more).
... I do not believe that Google's algorithm is that simple to use a fixed percentage emphasized sections and a fixed one for deemphasized ones. I find that with regards to this (and all other Google algos) they do not use hard coded numbers and fixed rations, weights or percentages. Such equations are simply more complex than that and probably use heuristics that depend on several factors related to the page.
I wouldn't be surprised that the Google section targeting algorithms are much more sophisticated than what I hypothesized. Still, given that we will never know Google's secret formula, our thinking in terms of simple percentage weights is a useful rule of thumb. We need to come to grips with section targeting, however tenuous.
If Google can apply complex heuristics to each and every section-targeted web page they serve ads to, I am more in awe of the computing power and hardware infrastructure they must have to support this than I am in any fancy algorithm they may have devised.
On another note, whether you select to view it as a fixed ration or a more complex function, in both cases I believe that Google will change the way it works and affects ad targeting after some time when people start to use it, and Google collects a good amount of stats about it and learns from it then fine tunes their targeting algos to reflect what they have learnt from such stats. It can be an ongoing process (same as with their page rank algo and search matching aglos).
No doubt about it.
As for the ads changing in the same page upon refreshing, ... alternative reasons besides the ones you've already mentioned could be: when google sees that the same IP (the same visitor) has refreshed the page (without clicking) maybe they can change the ads to give the other fresh ones a chance as the first ones had no clicks. Maybe the more you refresh the page, the lower its CTR becomes which triggeres a different type of ads. Probably Google selects ads also based on other factors such as from where the visitor came (was brought by a search engine, from another site (which site), ... etc)...
If it is as complex as you describe, I am in even greater awe of their computing capacity.
... I would like to repeat that I have many pages whos ads remain relatively constant for a considerable period of time (i.e. weeks if not more).
Same here, which makes it all the more mysterious why some pages change ads frequently (even from moment to moment, from page refresh to page refresh) while others do not.
It's a little disappointing (but, alas, not surprising) that more people aren't engaged in serious discussion of this new section targeting system. IMO, good ad targeting is essential. On my most lucrative site, my high-CPC ads pay 50X to 100X more than my low-CPC ads. The high-CPC ads tend to have much higher CTR, too. In my case, fiddling with ad types, colors, positions, etc. profits me relatively little. I earn the best ROI devoting my time to coaxing the highest CTR, highest CPC ads from the Google ad server. Which is why I am obsessing on section targeting and other on-page ad selection factors at the moment.
As for being in awe of their hardware infrastructure and computing power, you should be. (I wonder how many computers they have ...)
I used the weight=ignore on the navigation area and now the targeting is perfect.
It is nice not to be eating up the budget of advertisers with marginally appropriate clicks (my budget too!)
