It’s amazing how sometimes how even when you know better you can forget the most basic things, and you can be your own worst enemy….
This site has been extremely successful making money with Adsense in the past making around $4-4.5k per month. In November my adsense earnings plummeted by around 50%, which I thought was due to Google changing the clickable area in the ads.
However, last week I realised that what had also happened was that November was also when I started experimenting with my new Eureka theme, and my Adsense Section Targeting was missing. Literally the second I added Adsense Section Targeting by eCPM started to increase and 4 days later it’s up 50%!
Adsense Section Targeting allows you to suggest sections of your text and HTML content that you’d like Google to emphasise or downplay when matching ads to your site’s content. This helps Google match ads to your content, increasing your clickthrough rates and hence your eCPMs. It can also drag your eCPM up further thanks to Smart Pricing.
Adding Section Targeting to your pages is easy. Even if you think you have implemented Adsense Section Targeting correctly, it’s worthwhile going back and double-checking that you’ve added the codes in the best place. On my pages I have added the start tag:
<!– google_ad_section_start –>
just before each post title as this should include important keywords. I’ve then added the end tag code:
<!– google_ad_section_end –>
At the end of the post. You can add these tags as many times as you think is necessary, but it’s not a good idea to add this code to small chunks of text as you may do more damage than good as it might be hard for Google to get the gist of the content you’ve tagged.
I’m glad I decided to go and see if I could do something about my falling adsense earnings! Hopefully now my eCPMs will stay strong again, and all I have to worry about is growing my traffic.
