You would have seen many people complain about how Adsense doesn’t generate much revenue even though they receive a decent amount of traffic on their site. And chances are that you might be one of those too.
The problem here is that though Google does its best to show the ads according to the content on your site, the ads shown still can’t be the most appropriate ones.
Having the ads related as closely as possible to your content will increase the Adsense CPC and CPM rates. These will in turn increase Adsense income for you.
The factors that have an impact on your Adsense income are,
- The size and type of ads shown
- Placement of ads on your site
- Quantity and quality of traffic your site gets
You can help Google in showing the ads that have the ability to work better for you by optimizing your Adsense performance using a new feature called section targeting.
If you don’t have the Adsense approved for your site yet, there are other ways to earn as well.
How To Earn From A Blog Without Google Adsense
Table Of Contents
What is section targeting in Google Adsense
To put it in the simplest words, section targeting is the way you tell Google, “Hey! Focus on the content from this point to that when you are selecting which ads to show on my site.”
Section targeting will help you to serve only the ads that relevant to your content. Because sometimes Google picks up content from areas like the footers and sidebars which aren’t important.
The ad-serving algorithm takes this not-so-productive information and displays ad according to it. Now, as these aren’t relevant, people won’t click on these and you won’t earn a penny.
In such cases, section targeting can help you have more control over which content should be picked up and from where.
How to use section targeting to increase Adsense income
To implement section targeting, you have to put some tags at the beginning and at the end of the content that you want to be considered for serving ads. These tags are recognized by the ad serving algorithm.
There are two tags that are to be used for this purpose,
<!-- google_ad_section_start -->And
<!-- google_ad_section_end -->Your section should start with the first tag and end with the second one. There are different ways to add these tags in your content. Let’s have a look at them one by one.
Add the tags in your blog editor
Most of the blog editors allow you to view and edit the source code for the blog post you’re drafting. If you’re working on a static content page, you can add the tags for section targeting in Adsense right there.
You have to keep a check on the following things,
- These marker tags should not be visible in the post in the visual mode.
- While saving the post, the blog editor doesn’t skip or remove the tags by mistaking them for a comment tag. Re-check after adding the tags.
Using Section Targeting in WordPress
If your site or blog is on WordPress, the previous step can be simplified for you.
It is possible to sometimes forget to check if the tags are in place or have been removed by the editor. Adding them in the source code manually every time can become a mundane task.
With the help of WordPress, you can have these tags inserted into posts dynamically without having to type them in individually in every post.
For this, you have to edit some files of your WordPress theme. For instance, index.php, archive.php, page.php, and single.php.
Search for the PHP method the_content () in these pages. This is usually how the content will be displayed on the pages. Surround this method with the XML comment tags to implement section targeting.
Put the start tag on the top of the_content() and end tag at the bottom of the the_content().
<!-- google_ad_section_start --> <?php the_content (); ?> <!-- google_ad_section_end -->
This is a general example of the PHP method name, depending upon your WordPress theme, the name of the PHP method can differ.
Use plugins to implement section targeting
If you are not comfortable working with HTML codes then you have the option to use plugins to do the job for you in WordPress.
Some of the WordPress plugins that can help Google to emphasize the content of your choice are:
The above tags show you how to emphasize the importance of a section. But you can also use the same section targeting technique to de-emphasize parts of the content.
Verify if the section targeting is now working on your site
In order to check if it is working, you can follow these quick steps:
- Open your site in a browser
- Right-click on the page and look for an option which says something like “View Page Source” in the popup menu
- Click on the option and the HTML source opens up in a new tab or window
- Search this source for the text “google_ad_section“
- See if that the tags do show up in the code
- Check that the main content of the page is actually between the instance of these two tags: google_ad_section_start and google_ad_section_end.
Section targeting when used correctly and judiciously, you might see a slight upward tick on your Adsense CTR and CPC. Don’t expect any huge difference in revenues, it is quite possible that Google was already doing a good enough job and this just helps to make sure that mistakes are made.
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