How to use Adsense Section Targeting?

What is Section Targeting?

“Section Targeting” is a feature introduced by Google Adsense for us, Adsense Publishers, to suggest which sections of the pages of our website or blog should be given more weights in deciding which of the ads are best suited or more relevant for the pages.

But of course by simply writing quality articles which are keyword-optimized, you are already helping the Google Adsense in deciding which ads should be displayed in your blog. And actually, it’s one of the ways I suggested in my article, “Make Adsense Ads Relevant“, on how to increase the relevance of the Adsense ads.

Why should you need to make Adsense ads relevant?

Well, having relevant ads on the webpages of your website do not only helps you earn money from Adsense but it also makes your website appealing to the visitors.

It’s never been good to look at your blog which is actually talking about computer but then the Google Adsense is displaying dating ads. And besides, you are not the only one embarrassed with this situation. Google and the advertisers consider this as a big “F” as in “Failure”.

I know that you understand that if the ads displayed on your blog are all relevant, then:

1. you as the Adsense Publisher will earn money from the clicks generated,
2. the visitors will be happy because they have found what they are looking for,
3. the advertisers will earn money from the relevant visitors your blog referred,
4. and Google earns more money from your income and from the spending of the advertisers.

Your Blog and the Google Adsense Ads

However, even if your articles have high quality and are keyword-optimized, but then you still found out that Google Adsense is not delivering the most relevant ads into your blog. This problem is not caused by the lack of Adword Content Advertisers but because of the other content found in every pages of your blog that ruin the suggestions you’ve made through the quality and keyword-optimized articles.

For example: You have a blog of which almost all blogposts are about Valentine’s Day. Some of the pages talks about Valentine Greeting Card, Valentine Wordpress Theme, Valentine DVD, Valentine Books, Valentine Gift and Flower Store in the Philippines, etc.. However, if you’ll browse each of the pages of your blog, you will find no relevant ads displayed by Google Adsense.

Now, you don’t have to do any blackhat method of making the ads relevant because this will only lead you to the expulsion from the Google Adsense program. What you only need to do is to make use of the “Section Targeting“.

Section Targeting

In section targeting, you only need to mark the beginning point of a section and the ending point of the section by using this tags:

So, the content enclosed by these tags are the content that will be given more weights by Google Adsense in choosing the most relevant ads that should be displayed in a certain page.

If implemented in your blog, the HTML code of the page should look like this:

This is the Title

This is where the content of your article found

Usually, the sidebar of your blog contains information which are not actually related to the topic of the page. If Google Adsense will include them with the things it considers in deciding which ads are relevant, then Google Adsense will fail.

So, you need to tell Google Adsense to ignore them by using these tags:

Your content that should be ignored will be here….

You can specify as many section as you can. You have nothing to worry about it because Google allows you to do it.

And of course, make sure to consider these words from Google:

In order to properly implement this feature, you’ll need to include a significant amount of content within the section targeting tags. Including insufficient content may result in less relevant ads or PSAs. In addition, please keep in mind that this feature should only be used to emphasize significant sections of your site’s relevant content. It is against our program policies to manipulate the ad targeting to result in ads that are not relevant to the content of your pages.

And another thing that you should take note:

However, please be aware that we can’t guarantee results, and that it may take up to 2 weeks before our crawlers take into account any changes you’ve made to your site.