I’ve been putting a lot of thought recently into why some sites get relevant Adsense ads while others don’t. Getting relevant ads on your website is key to having a decent click through rate, because if your ads have nothing to do with your content no one is going to click on anything! If you want to make money online your ads have to be relevant to your content.
There are two obvious causes for irrelevant ads, and a third one that is more theory and abstract than the others.
There Are No Advertisers
If there aren’t any advertisers for your niche, there won’t be any ads. If you follow this URL – http://www.google.com/sponsoredlinks and search your keywords you can see which advertisers are currently running ads for it. There is a major caveat here though, there can be advertisers running ads in your area but not in others. This means that even if you have ads for your G search, there might not be ads on the other side of the country or in other countries. Google’s interest based advertising has caused ads to become more local and sporadic.
It’s pretty easy to figure out if this is your situation since you’ll probably be served PSA’s or generic ads. If you’re seeing ads for muscle building or Evory, this is probably what’s going on. The make money online world doesn’t live and die by Adsense. If this is your situation sell something that fits your keywords. There are tons of other options for monetizing your site, and you can even break it down to the page level. Get rid of Adsense and try something else out.
Your Content Isn’t Optimized
Optimizing your content for relevant ads is a bit of an art. Usually, the post title is enough to get you served relevant ads but not always. If your post title is about red widgets and your content is about shiny blue widgets, you may have a problem getting the ads that you want on your site.
Each post or page that you have should be specific enough that the Google bot has no problems figuring out what it’s about. Everything from your title to content to tags should jive.
If you’re getting ads that are only vaguely relevant to your page, try optimizing. For example, if you’re getting hair removal ads on an acne niche site, optimizing should fix your problem.
Unbalanced Competition Gets Irrelevant Ads
This is a bit abstract so try to follow along. If you have a large site (200+ indexed pages) in a specific and high competition niche, you may not get relevant ads on every single post or page. The ads will be close, but rather than be relevant to the post, they’re relevant to the umbrella topic of the site. The reason, I believe, this happens is due to advertiser competition and G making money.
Let’s use some examples to help this make sense. Take a large site in the credit card niche, the site has 150 pages about credit cards and 50 about managing money. The money managing pages have plenty of relevant advertisers, but the site is only serving credit card offers for ads. If you look at the CPC of the credit card ads and keywords, you’ll know that there are hundreds of advertisers bidding on those and G is making good money on them. With competition this high (and the fact that the ads convert well) it’s in G’s best interest to serve those ads as frequently as possible, even if they aren’t totally relevant to the page.
Now consider a home improvement site with pages about all sorts of tools and supplies. There isn’t a huge amount of competition between all of those keywords, so you’re much more likely to have very specific ads sprinkled with a few that are for the broad topic of home improvement. The balance of advertiser competition is fairly equal among all of these keywords.
I figured this out by having two large sites in the exact same situations above. One gets ads that are specific to the umbrella topic in an insanely competitive niche, and another in a low competition niche that gets page relevant ads. They are both with Wordpress and use the same theme and plugins.
How do you fix this?
You’re probably thinking that I could just use section targeting to get the ads right. Unfortunately, section targeting sucks and rarely works when you’re dealing with similar, but different, keywords. If you’re serious about getting relevant ads on specific posts, you’re best off starting a new site. You can delete the post/page, give it time to deindex, and post it up on a new site.
Aside from that I really don’t have a good way around this. If you have any hot tips that would help, please let me know!
