Targeting your Buyers – Google Adsense Tips, Tricks and Latest Gossip Part 3

March 12th, 2007

In part three of this series about some tips and tricks I learnt during my recent visits to the Google Adsense Conference in Brisbane, Australia, I’m going to write about ‘targeting’ your ads to your content.

People get grumpy about the relatively low income they receive from adsense ads on their blogs – essentially, they want to know how to make moneyfrom their blogs, and having heard of the rags to riches stories of bloggers making hundreds of thousands of dollars from advertising online, they want a slice of the action – and why the hell not?

So now I need you to take a deep breath whilst I take you through some of the latest guidelines for helping google to serve ads that are more likely to be of interest to your customers.

Basically, to have a site that makes money you need at least three things:-

1. Website Traffic.
2. Relevant Content.
3. Relevant Ads, and a high click through rate from those ads.

Those are the three key ingredients for making money from Google Adsense, and lacking any 1 of them will be to the detriment of the others.

Assuming you have good traffic (and I’ll be writing tutorials on that in the near future) and compelling content, all that remains is to encourage a high ‘click thru rate’ on your site.

I have to admit, on this site, the content is generally great and informational, but I’ve previously simply relied on the google adsense code to serve ads that are likely to be clicked on. I’ve tried out image ads, I’ve tried out text ads, I’ve tried out different colours and positions for the ads – and I’ve seen minor changes from doing so.

Alot of the time, though, I think I go a bit too by being too solutions oriented – For instance, someone has a problem, I’ll try to solve it for them, they leave happy, I get good feedback from them and probably generate traffic through referrals – that’s all great, and it’s a part of my growth strategy at this early stage of my blog

So, having the content, I hope the ads will be clicked and everything will be fine from there – but I’ve been finding this isn’t the case – on my other comercial sites, I end up with click through ratios (CTR – the percentage of visitors that click on ads) of less than 1%, whereas on my product based sites I get closer to 10%.

I started to think for reasons this may be – perhaps my readers are ‘ad savvy’ and have a form of blindness to the ad content – perhaps I am providing what they need – information, and they have no need to follow my ads to get more of it.

Someone suggested to me that I should leave articles I write ‘hanging’ so that the reader feels compelled to look at the ads to find more information – not a bad idea, but it goes against the ethos of this blog to an extent. I think the real answer is to write my articles in such a way that they want to take the next step, and offer, in the advertisements, companies and individuals that may help them do so.

Enter stage right adsense section targeting– this was released last year, and is an incredibly simple way to ensure that your ads are ‘micro targetted’ to the niche group viewing your pages. So why haven’t we all heard about it? I think alot of website and SEO people have kept this one to their chests a bit, as it’s a fantastic tool that can really help dramatically increase your returns and make the SEO people look worth their weight in gold.

But you don’t need to be a big shot blogger to imlplement this code – all you need to do is place tags around the content you think is most appropriate to your audience.

the tags are <!– google_ad_section_start –> and <!– google_ad_section_end –>

When google adsense bot sees the <!– google_ad_section_start –> tag, it expects that any information appearing between that tag and the end tag should be used by it when it considers what sort of ads to serve.

So, for example, I have taken an abstract from a recent Wired Magazine Article about how Yahoo has missed the boat when it comes to website advertising.

I found a paragraph in their that speaks about Hollywood, TV Shoe, Theaters, TV Sets – all things that aren’t really spoken about much in the rest of the article, but that I think will bring commercial ads about technology – things that some of the geeks reading this blog might be interested in.

The truth is that when Semel worked in Hollywood, he understood more about how movies and TV shows made it to theaters and TV sets than virtually anyone else on the planet. Early in his career, during stints in New York, Cleveland, and Los Angeles, all Semel did was sell movies to theater chain owners. He’d show up at each theater — there were only a handful of national chains then — with a list of the movies Warner was going to release over the next few months, and each owner would bid on the movies he wanted.The truth is that when Semel worked in Hollywood, he understood more about how movies and TV shows made it to theaters and TV sets than virtually anyone else on the planet. Early in his career, during stints in New York, Cleveland, and Los Angeles, all Semel did was sell movies to theater chain owners. He’d show up at each theater — there were only a handful of national chains then — with a list of the movies Warner was going to release over the next few months, and each owner would bid on the movies he wanted.

In the next paragraph, I’ve found interestig information about the infrastructure of Yahoo – keywords like servers, technlogy, redesigning a database, redesigning a user interface – all are rock solid keywords that should hopefully trigger ‘mediabot’ to deliver an interesting combnation of consumer products ads and advertising for high grade database and server technology.

But now, despite Semel’s achievements in Hollywood and early success at Yahoo, Silicon Valley is buzzing with a familiar refrain: Wouldn’t an executive with a little more technology savvy be a better fit? Semel has been Yahoo’s CEO for nearly six years, yet he has never acquired an intuitive sense of the company’s plumbing. He understands how to do deals and partnerships, he gets how to market Yahoo’s brand, and he knows how to tap Yahoo’s giant user base to sell brand advertising to corporations. But the challenges of integrating two giant computer systems or redesigning a database or redoing a user interface? Many who have met with him at Yahoo say he still doesn’t know the right questions to ask about technology. “Terry could never pound the table and say, ‘This is where we need to go, guys,'”one former Yahoo executive says. “On those subjects, he always had to have someone next to him explaining why it was important.” One could have made a convincing argument two years ago that such deep technical knowledge didn’t matter much. But now we have empirical evidence: At Yahoo, the marketers rule, and at Google the engineers rule. And for that, Yahoo is finally paying the price

The Lesson endeth for today – tomorrow we will see the results and expand upon them to make some money 🙂 Don’t be alarmed if it doesn’t look like it’s worked at first – it can take 24 to 48 hours.. patience 🙂

Entry Filed under: Google Adsense Tips,SEO Discussions,SEO Tools