AdSense targeting issues

To get the most out of Adsense you need to understand how Ads are targeted. When you join AdSense you get AdSense HTML ad code which you place on the webpages on which you want to display Google ads. Google then uses its own search and page-ranking technologies and delivers relevant Google ads to those content pages.

How Google AdSense Ads are Targeted
Google claim that this process involves more than simple keyword matching and that their technology understands the context and content of webpages. They include factors like keyword analysis, word frequency, font size, and the overall link structure of the web, to extract semantic meaning with the aim of precisely matching Google ads to each page.

The Google technology is also able to determine the main language of a page but only if the content is in a supported language.

Adsense Geo-targeting
Google is also able to geotarget the ads which it serves. Advertisers who use the Google AdWords system to purchase ads are able to select specific countries and regions where those ads are to be displayed. The AdSense code is a then able to detect where a visitor is from and deliver the appropriate ads.

Does AdSense Ad targeting always work?
In short the answer is no. If you want your ads to be targeted really well then you need to consider writing in a style that will fit with the AdSense targeting algorithms. These tend to work less well where the content is wide ranging and less specific. If you want the targeting to be really tight then it important to try to write so that each page, or post, covers a very specific topic. The narrower and more specific the topic the more likely the Ads are to be targeted properly.

This aspect of the AdSense delivery of Ads can be criticised as forcing Internet authors to write in a pre-determined way in order to meet the needs of AdSense targeting. Of course no one forces you to write in this way and you might be prepared to accept Ads that are somewhat less well targeted for the sake of writing in your own style. After all why should Google determine the way we all use the web!

Nevertheless if your main aim is to maximise your income from ads then you are well advised to take these ad targeting considerations into account.

If you do write in a more wide ranging way or are having other troubles with Ad targeting then there are things you can do to improve matters. I will have a look at these in another post.