Adsense Changes Announced

The Google Adsense team have been mighty busy in the past 24 hours with quite a few new features including section targeting, Search Query reports, Custom Reports, More Channels and Google Desktop Sidebar Adsense Status Plugin. Let me explain each below:

Section Targeting

As I mentioned a few weeks back – Google have been testing a system that allows publishers to highlight different keywords/sections of their blog that they want, or don’t want to have an impact upon the type of ads that they want to be served on their site. This feature is section targeting which they describe as follows:

‘Section targeting allows you to suggest sections of your text and HTML content that you’d like us to emphasize or downplay when matching ads to your site’s content. By providing us with your suggestions, you can assist us in improving your ad targeting. We recommend that only those familiar with HTML attempt to implement section targeting.

To implement section targeting, you’ll need to add a set of special HTML comment tags to your code. These tags will mark the beginning and end of whichever section(s) you’d like to emphasize or de-emphasize for ad targeting.

The HTML tags to emphasize a page section take the following format:

<!– google_ad_section_start –>

<!– google_ad_section_end –>

You can also designate sections you’d like to have ignored by adding a (weight=ignore) to the starting tag:

<!– google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) –>’

This will be a feature that has the potential to have significant impact. It could mean the end to blogs getting ‘blog ads’ instead of the topics that they are actually writing about. It could also mean targeting words that have a higher monetary value. They do note on the above page that it can take up to two weeks for their crawlers to pick up these changes. Not a quick fix by any means. They also suggest that you need to include ‘significant content’ in the tags or you’ll end up with irrelevant ads or PSAs (I wonder what ‘significant content’ means in terms of the numbers of words? Probably the best use of these tags is to put them around the content on your individual pages so that Adsense looks less at your sidebars (which can often be a little confusing) and more at the meat of each page.

I doubt they will ignore the parts of your page you don’t put in these tags – otherwise it would be used by spammers to put up high paying ads on low paying content pages.

Search Queries Report

Another very handy feature is the added ability to now find out the top queries that readers look for using your Search box. They write:

‘AdSense for search top queries are the top 25 queries performed on your AdSense for search box within a given date range. Please note that the top queries report does not show unique queries; only queries that receive two or more hits are displayed.’

I’ve often wondered what people search for on my blog and now we can find out. This is a useful tool to have as you consider the types of pages that you might want to add to your blog.

Custom Reports

Adense have added a new feature to their reporting tools – Custom Reports which they describe as follows:

‘Custom reports are advanced reports that you can save for future use. Any advanced report you generate can be saved as a custom report with the same date range and channel settings you’ve chosen. You can quickly access custom reports from your Overview page or the drop-down on your Advanced Reports page.’

So if you have a number of reports that you always run – add them to your custom reports list. You can save up to 10 custom reports.

More Channels

Yesterday I used my last channel and today Adsense have announced you can now have up to 200 of them! Brilliant.

Google Desktop Sidebar Update – with Adsense PlugIn

Today Google also announced an update in their Desktop Sidebar (windows users only) which now allows plugins including one that reports your Adsense status/earnings to you. Pretty useless use for those of us on Macs!