The secret to perfectly-targeted ads!

April 27, 2006

By: Tearabite

Source: WebmasterWorld

After busting my rear for weeks to try and get GOOD ads on one of my pages I decided to do some testing and expermentation. I finally came up with how to get perfectly targeted ads. Nothing i did was new, and everything I did is available in this forum, but I dont think anyone has ever put the stops together and posted them (if they have, i hadn’t seen it) - so here it is for any other newcomers struggling with ad-targeting:

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..

I had two issues regarding targeting.

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 [ and ] 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 :-))

I’ve always used descriptive filenames for my pages (luebeck-museums.htm or whatever), not for the sake of AdSense but for my own convenience in maintaining the site. Plus, a filename like luebeck-museums.htm is a lot more user-friendly (and, presumably, SE-friendly) than a00070z000m20?374a.htm.

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.

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.

Posted in Google Adsense