Don’t you just hate it when you publish an article or add a blog item only to find that the accompanying ads don’t seem to match?

Here’s a solution..

Google AdSense is offering what’s called “section targeting”. It’s probably been around for a while, but I only stumbled on it today. Just goes to show it’s worthwhile digging around the AdSense Help Center from time to time to check out new features.

Section targeting allows you to emphasize or de-emphasize specific sections of page content in order to help improve the relevancy of AdSense advertising being shown. It’s a simple process, just a few lines of comment code.

To emphasize a particular section, add this line just prior to the block of content in your source code:

<!-- google_ad_section_start -->

immediately after it, add this:

<!-- google_ad_section_end -->

For content you wish to be ignored, just prior to the section:

<!-- google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) -->

but still close with

<!-- google_ad_section_end -->

Google doesn’t guarantee that it will work every time, and it can take up to two weeks to kick in, but it might be worth a shot if you have particularly troublesome pages.

Word of warning - you need to ensure the content that you flag has a good level of relevancy to the page. For example, if your page was about a Flash tutorial, but you want to show ads for email marketing solutions, then something like this:

<!-- google_ad_section_start -->

gimmee email marketing ads

<!-- google_ad_section_end -->

… would be a no-no. In fact, Google alludes to all sorts of bad things happening if you try this sort of thing - PSA’s, even less relevant ads - there’s also the mention of it being against their TOS; and we all know what that means ;) - so handle with care.

Learn more at AdSense Help Center

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