Greetings Today I came across "Section targeting" feature in adsense (http://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/answer.py?answer=23168&topic=371 ). It was completely new to me. It should allow web sites to have *more* targeted ads by enclosing into tags most relevant content of their pages. Is there anyone having experienced any real improvement? I'm trying it on my site, but I haven't seen any changes into ads being displayed before and after I put the tags. Anyone sharing ideas/experience?
On some types of sites I'd imagine that it can help quite a bit. I've never noticed a great problem with getting targetted ads on most of my sites so I don't know if it works from first hand.
"Sometimes it takes 2 weeks to start to work" . . . How about 2 months? I've tried it with no luck. I think that there is a minimum amount of text that is required. Is it 200 words? Is it 15% of the text on the page. 25%? I have no idea. And I'm tired of screwing with it. I think it is IMPERATIVE to have your keyword(s) in the file name. I think that this is far more important than any "target this, don't target that" kind of BS, which depends upon all kinds of OTHER UNDEFINED factors - where on the page, what percentage, how many words, how many tags, exclusionary rules, incorrectly perceived spamming, etc., etc., etc. .
I find it most useful for excluding irrelevant content from consideration by AdSense (the "ignore" variation), such as links to blog feeds, etc.
I was reading the ProBlogger website today and Darren mentioned that even google themselves can not give him a straight answer on whether section targetting is actually effective or not.... as yet I still havent bothered implementing yet because i have not really heard any success stories
I know for a fact that the "ignore" variant works well. It's a good way to remove stop/poison words from AdSense's consideration without resorting to sneaky cloaking techniques. I had a client who was getting off-target ads due to the presence of a single keyphrase in an article and telling AdSense to ignore that one keyphrase via section targeting fixed things.
Good to know. Maybe the "exclude variant" can have just a little text (haven't tried it) to work, but the "targetting variant" requires a substantial amount of text. Kinda makes sense.
I have enclosed 1Kb of text in the tags but I still haven't noticed any hange in the ads. Of course the text is related to the rest of the page but just a bit different. I don't think it's matter of number of chars. Maybe it's matter of time...
Well, the Mediabot won't come crawling again right away, so you won't see any changes until it does. Try putting the content of the page on a new dummy page and see what happens, the first access to the new page will cause the Mediabot to appear within 5 or 10 minutes.
Surprisingly section targeting works and works really well! Yesterday, after 10 days, my ads are completely targeted on the section of about 1K chars I used on my home page. The section is Wireless Security related and you can see my ads yourself now: http://www.hackerscenter.com If the section you're targeting is near enough to the whole site content and it pays a lot more than any other keyword for your site (my case) I think you can increase your income by 2-3...at least I'm experiencing this and I'm still experimenting new ways of use ! Hope this is of some help