Improve the quality of Adsense ads.

The title might seem weird to you but let me expose the facts. It does happen that one decides to include Adsense on one’s site. That’s a good idea to base some revenue off one’s site. Trouble is that sometimes you just get some unwanted or completely unrelated Adsense ads on your pages. For example, when testing the Web Design Bureau of Mauritius in the first months, I used to get only a whole lot of furniture ads. When stepping into the detailed view of the site on Google Webmaster Tools, I found out that it was the word “Bureau” that was winning it. Weird to get “pawned” by one’s own site title.

It was necessary to find a parade to this and to improve the Adsense ads. There is a way and a quite simple one as it is. It is given in the Adsense user guide but, hey, like a lot of people, I did not read all online documentation I found as it was just for meddling around. The solution is just to tell the Adsense engine which is the main content of the page and the ads will be modified according to this content. To do this, you need to specify where the content starts and where it ends with these two tags in your code, the first one before your content and the second one after:

<!-- google_ad_section_start -->
<!-- google_ad_section_end -->

Once this is done, you just have to publish your page and the content will be used as a base for publishing your improved Adsense ads. These being closer to your content should be more interesting to the viewers, hence increasing the click rates.

Now for those using WordPress, you can code this directly into your templates or use this great plugin built by Jim Gaudet. It takes 2 minutes to install and it does the job pretty well.