Adsense Link Unit relevance

[blueboy9]

Hey all,

I just re-wrote a website for my parents fishing business and I have the following adsense units:

-Horizontal links only banner under the header
-skyscraper text and image ad unit on the right sidebar
-horizontal text and image ad unit in the footer

The text ads are relevant to the site but the images and link unit ads aren't. The image ads are often web hosting related, hotels, or Wordpress ads. The banner link units are always wordpress and seem to be never relevant.

My question is; if I remove any mention of Wordpress in the code will the link units randomize a bit more? And is there any way to get adsense to display ads that you *think* your users will be interested in? Thanks for any help!

blueboy9

[Fraggler]

You can actually specify what parts of the content Adsense uses to determine the subject matter of your website.

Check it out here - https://www.google.com/adsense/suppo...n&answer=23168

[blueboy9]

Interesting thanks for the tip! So if I understand it correctly, in Wordpress if I add those emphasize tags around the posts or page body that I want my ads targeted to Adsense will only serve ads for those?

Or, could I add in some meta keywords for other things I feel my users might like and add emphasize tags around that to get those ads on my site?

[JamesM]

I use both the tagging option and META keywords on my AdSense pages, but then I'm targetting phrases that are directly related to my content. However, I would never put *unrelated* phrases in the META tags as this is generally seen as an attempt to spamdex the search engines, even though the keyword META supposedly isn't used anymore by most SEs.

[blueboy9]

Yes that's a good point, I forgot about the whole keyword stuffing and spamdex thing. So aside from the ads that are relevant, are you basically at Google's mercy for the open ad spaces? I'm tempted to just remove the link unit if the only thing it's going to display is Wordpress Template links... those are hardly relevant to a fishing business!

[Fraggler]

You can filter out competitors who continually show unrelated ads on your site.

You can also select the categories of Ads your account shows. In your Adsense account look for the Ad Review Centre. You will see the percentage of ads shown and revenue generated for about 10 categories. Filter out the ones that are underperforming.

Also remember that less people (advertisers) are using Image ads so there will be less relevant ones for your niche. If they are always off the mark change the unit to Text Ads only. Images ads often get a higher CTR so a higher eCPM regardless of the lesser EPC. Experiment for a week and adjust accordingly.

I am baffled why the link units would be out of whack. Are you targeting a really small niche that lacks advertisers in general?

[blueboy9]

Yes the niche is quite small and there is a lack of advertisers. However the text ad units are always relevant so I just assumed the link unit should be able to find 4 relevant terms as well. Perhaps after a week or two the ads will target better?

[netlexis]

I use section targeting and I see an immediate improvement. I was getting those wordpress ads, too, on a new site. Sometimes, I also think it's a aging process and takes a couple of days.

[blueboy9]

Update: Yesterday I updated the section targetting but didn't see any results. My link units were still displaying Wordpress stuff instead of fishing-related links. Today I decided to change the color of my link titles and once the site updated, the links were fishing relevant.

So, if anyone else has this problem, add in the code to target your site's body and then tweak the appearance of your add to kickstart the switch. I'm not sure which one is to thank but as soon as the color updated, the links became site relevant.

[InternetMarketingIQ]

Originally Posted by Fraggler

You can actually specify what parts of the content Adsense uses to determine the subject matter of your website.

Check it out here - https://www.google.com/adsense/suppo...n&answer=23168

Unfortunately this can take a very long time to see results.. weeks. And even then Google may choose to ignore it.

Not very reliable. And nice of them to make no real way to test it other than wait wait wait... fingers crossed.

Your experience with section targeting and your belief that it is "working" may or may not be based on the section targeting. Again... no real way to test. But as long as you are happy with what is displaying now... that's what matters.