Does this sound familiar? You just started a new niche site, spent a few hours researching keywords, niches, and content sources trying to get the highest paying keywords on your site to determine the ads displaying on your pages. You’ve completed the project and, after a sufficient amount of time for the ads to become relevant, you check back on your niche site only to discover…’Interest Based Ads’. The bane of every nice site developers existence.
Giving your ads the best chance
Currently I’m using the Better AdSense Targeting for WordPress plugin to help use Google’s Section Targeting for helping ads show relevant content. It dials in the content very quickly and helps out quite a bit.
Why you should be wary of Interest Based Ads
The problem you run into with interest based ads is, you aren’t controlling the keywords used to display these ads. The visitor’s browser or search history is what’s determining this choice. Why is that bad? They may not have been searching for something that has a higher payout. You can tell your AdSense account to avoid Interest Based Ads with the following steps:
First login to your AdSense account and choose the ‘Allow & block ads’ tab.
Allow & Block Ads Tab
Choose the ‘Advanced Settings’ option in the Left Side Menu.
Advanced Settings
Once here you have 2 options that concern you:
- Interest-based Ads Preference
- Third Party Ads Preference
I choose to turn both of these off, which ‘should‘ give you the best chance to have ads more likely to have better contextual relevance to your site.
The settings
I’m not going to say this will make you rich, but I am seeing slightly better ad relevance with these settings being used.
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