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Showing posts with label zzz - check update for new AdSense interface. Show all posts

Thursday, 4 February 2010

AdSense Layouts: using tables, not too many Divs

This article has details about laying out AdSense ads side-by-side with the text in your Blogger postings.

Previously I've explained how to put an AdSense ad-unit "in-line" in your blog post. Using this approach, the advertisement is put in a block of its own, and your content starts again underneath it.

However you can use DIV statements to allow your text to flow around the ad. I've described how do use this approach for putting text and pictures side by side in your blog, and it could easily be used for ad-unit code instead.

That said, in Jan 2010, AdSense's blog gave advice to:

"avoid embedding the ad code in excessive div tags or nested frames".

They didn't say what counts as excessive - but just in case, it may be a good idea to use a separate div for the ad rather than embedding <div> statements.

If you do want to put an ad and your content side-by-side, it may be better to use a table to lay them out. To achieve this, you need to edit the HTML behind the post. To get to this click on the HTML button in the top right of the editor (post Sept-2011 Blogger) or the Edit HTML tab in the top right of the editor (pre-Sept 2011 Blogger).

Use a piece of HTML code like this:

<br />
<table border="0" style="width: 100%;">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>PUT THE POST TEXT IN HERE </td>
<td>PUT THE AD-TEXT IN HERE </td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>

AdSense Troubleshooting: Extra line breaks

This article is about fixing problems with AdSense advertisements that are caused by having extra line-breaks in the ad-code.

Putting AdSense ads into your posts - what can go wrong

Previously I've explained how to set up AdSense for your blog, and how to put AdSense advertisements
right inside a post rather than in the header, footer or sidebar.

However AdSense ad code won't work if it has any extra line breaks added to it. This is why, to put it you need to paste the code into the editor in Edit HTML mode, not Compose mode. And to be certain, I also recommend that you make sure the "use <br /> tags" option (previously called "Ignore new lines") is chosen as well.

If you don't do this, ie if you put the code into the Post Editor while you are in Compose mode, Blogger seems to insert extra <br /> tags (ie new lines) in places. And this causes the ad to not be displayed.

Fixing the problem

If you encounter this problem while putting ad-code into a post in this way, it's best to go in to Edit HTML mode and:

remove the whole piece of Ad code
in a separate window, log into AdSense (www.google.com/adsense), choose the Ad you want from from Adsense Setup / Manage Ads
copy the ad code
swtich back to your blogger window and paste the ad-unit in again

Removing the line-break characters by hand is tedious to do, and I've found it's very hard to get right.

Wednesday, 13 January 2010

Targeting AdSense ads to a subset of page content

There are some websites where contextual targetting is not a good idea, because they attract the wrong sort of advertisements. For AdSense, one work-around is to target your ad-content to a certain sub-section of the overall post..

Contextal Advertising

Google's AdSense is perhaps one of the best known contextual advertising programmes.

It works by looking at the page that and advert is to be shown on, and choosing a suitable ad for that page based on the key words shown on the page.

In many cases, this works well: a page about losing weight will have lots of words that attract ads from a weight loss company, for example.

But there are cases when it doesn't work so well: a blog exposing the "myths" of conventional medicine, and suggesting natural remedies for many problems may well target advertisements from mainstream practitioners and companies.

To avoid this, use section targetting.

Section targeing tells Google what sections to take more (and less) notice of when matching ads to page content.

It can be particularly useful to get some parts of sites ignored. For example, if you have a paragraph like

"my site shows blah, blah, blah, excluding foo1, foo2 and foo3"

and foo1, foo2 and foo3 are things that there are a lot of irrelevant ads for, then using targeting to say "ignore the bit starting with excluding" might be a good idea.

For instructions how to do section targeting that works with AdSense, see: https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=23168

What your readers see

Ideally, the only difference that your readers will see is more relevant advertising.