My new blog ( www.osxcode.com ) is now about three weeks old, the googlebot (and many other bots) already came by for a scan and my frontpage adsense links are almost completly off-topic. It's a blog about Mac applications and coders etc. and the Adsense links are: RSS Parser, Mobile RSS Reader, RSS Feed Software, RSS Tool, RSS News Aggregator ...
On my sub-pages the Adsense links are a bit better targeted, but they are still anything else than ideal.
Any ideas why this is the case? Could it be that all the links on the left, that because they are left come before the page content inside the HTML source, could be the source of this problem? Or is it something else?
It would be because there aren't many advertisers targetting the conent on your site. If you google something like OS X Code, you'll notice that there are no google ads. It picks up the first advertising match it can find on your site which is "RSS".
Be patient though. As you add more content, the ads will get better.
The mediapartner-bot visits your site more than once a day (sometimes 12 times) if you update frequently. Try to write in some links with javascript:
<script type="text/javascript">
document.writeln('<' + 'a href="http://example.com/rss.xml">rss</' + 'a>' );
</script>
The AdSense are known for spidering the content of the links you point to. Just take out the ones you don't want for a day or two and see if there's any difference.
Ads are geo-targeted too. I'm seeying pretty relevent ads:
Apple Store
Macs, iBooks, iPods, Software
Alles voor de Apple www.applestore.nl
Yeah, the skyscraper get's now way better ads (Just got my first $0.13). However, the small text ads below the header are still not targeted. Any ideas why the two are so different?
adsense is really an interesting subject. I've put them on my blog, and barelly do 7 usd a month, which is ok with me, because it covers the cost of the site itself.
Now, I'm starting to believe there's a whole science behind this thing. I added adsense for one of my clients, and unbelievably, he made 7 dollar in 2 days.
so I started learning that there are words that pay more (and don't be surprise that those words are related to casinos, viagra and other stuff like that). And, as the price of the ads depends on the subject, sometimes you can get lots of clicks and receive 20 cents for it, while you can also receive 4 clicks and get 3 or more dollars out of it (just to compare).
And google picks ads from the content you put on the page. So, you should have a marketing strategy for certain keywords (not saying you have to start writing it every two lines), so that google understands what your site is about.
Blogs are a little hard, because you tend to post about different topics, so, google will just pick the first thing it finds, which, for some reason, it's always rss, and rss readers.
If you see on my footer, besides my true blog, i have other 3, which i started in order to apply different marketing strategies to each, and see what happens
Blogs are a little easier to handle i guess, because you have all this sites that let you ping them, so you'll bel linked in some other sites. I've seen a lot of increment in the traffic of these blogs. However, the clicks on the ads hasn't improved.
One tip I read a while ago is: if you want visitors to click on your ads, then it has to be interesting for them. Not with colors or big letters, but see...if you are desperatelly looking for a script or a program, you will ignore the ads on a page, and go directly to content. Like, if you choose an audience that can be distracted to your ads, for example, a housewife looking for a cheesecake recipe, then you might improve the number of clicks
Another tip i heard was good, is not to put ads on the index page, but on the content pages.'
Now, I'm starting to believe there's a whole science behind this thing.
I've noticed this, I don't know if it's a "tip" but:
I've been using some of the standart ad units (text and image) for one of my sites and then I've switched to link units and people actually started to click more. I really don't know why.
An other thing I've found is section targeting. The help page at google is not there anymore, so I'm not sure if this actually works, but you can't really lose something so:
What is section targeting and how do I implement it?
Section targeting allows you to suggest sections of your text and HTML content that you'd like us to emphasize or downplay when matching ads to your site's content. By providing us with your suggestions, you can assist us in improving your ad targeting. We recommend that only those familiar with HTML attempt to implement section targeting.
To implement section targeting, you'll need to add a set of special HTML comment tags to your code. These tags will mark the beginning and end of whichever section(s) you'd like to emphasize or de-emphasize for ad targeting.
The HTML tags to emphasize a page section take the following format:
<!-- google_ad_section_start -->
<!-- google_ad_section_end -->
You can also designate sections you'd like to have ignored by adding a (weight=ignore) to the starting tag:
<!-- google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) -->
With these tags added to your HTML code, your final code may look like the following:
This is the text of your web page. Most of your content resides here.
<!-- google_ad_section_end -->
</body>
</html>
You can use section targeting to make suggestions about as many sections of a page as you like. 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.
Please also note that 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.