How to Use Section Targeting in Google Adsense

Google has realized that on websites (especially on blogs) there occurs some information which should not be used for deciding which AdSense contextual ads be displayed on that page. Such information mostly lies in the sidebars and footers. Sometimes, Google’s ad serving algorithm gets confused and take this irrelevant information in account while deciding which ad to show on your blog.

Section Targeting is a mechanism to ensure that the algorithm gets the right content to decide about ad serving. The mechanism is very simple. You just need to put Section Targeting “section start” and “section end” markers in your blog’s code to tell the algorithm about the content that should be considered as context for ad serving.

For this, Google has provided the following HTML tags. These tags are recognized by the Google ad serving algorithm:

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

Read: Out Google AdSense Tips (a must read for AdSense Success aspirants)

You should enclose the content you want to target within these start and end tags. You can do so by placing these markers in your single post code. For example, in case of WordPress, you may consider enclosing the_content() function within these Section Targeting tags:

<!-- google_ad_section_start -->
<div class="entry-content">
<?php the_content(); ?></div>
<!-- google_ad_section_end -->

If you want certain portions of your web page to be totally ignored by the AdSense ad serving algorithm; you can add weight=ignore to the start tag. For example, if you want comments on your page should be ignored –then WordPress code could look like this:

<!-- google_ad_section_start weight=ignore -->
<?php comments_template( '', true ); ?>
<!-- google_ad_section_end -->

Yes, it appears to be a good idea to implement section targeting while using Google AdSense contextual ads. It helps ad serving algorithm to select the best ads to be shown on your webpage. This would help increase your AdSense CPC and CPM rates.

I hope this AdSense tip was useful for you. Properly using AdSense ensures that you earn better income from your online business. Do let me know if you have any questions regarding this. Happy blogging!