How to Display Better Targeted Google AdSense Ads

Here's a relatively unknown but very important feature that Google offers with their AdSense program. It's called "Section Targeting", and it can increase your AdSense revenue if properly implemented. It's all about helping Google to send you more relevant AdSense ads to display on your pages.

Many (if not most) website owners just install the AdSense code and call it good. This will bring the AdSense spider to your pages and let them try to figure out what your pages are about. You can help them by using a documented by not widely used feature of AdSense called "Section Targeting".

Section targeting lets you tell the AdSense spider which sections of your text and other HTML content are really important in the page — important for determining what the page is about. Without section targeting, the spider will scan all of your code, including navigation items, header and footer content, any ads that you might be running on the page, and other information that may be irrelevant to what your page is about.

You can define the sections of your text and HTML content that you'd like the AdSense spider to emphasize — in effect, telling Google what content is critical to the page. Just determine where your topic-critical content is and put this code above it:

<!-- google_ad_section_start -->

and this code below it:

<!-- google_ad_section_end -->

The section targeting feature has been available since October 2005. You can get the whole story (right from the horse's mouth) here.