The way AdSense determines which ads are relevant to your website is based on three main factors…
- Keywords discovered by the exclusive AdSense crawler
- The AdWords Quality Score of each ad that matches your keywords
- visitor demographics
The first thing AdSense does when determining which ads to show is collect all the ads that match your keywords. Then rank those ads based on Quality Score. The Quality Score identifies how much money that ad generates for Google. Finally, it determines whether visitor demographics, such as geographic location or search term history, can raise an ad’s Quality Score.
Determine which ads match your keywords
The AdSense crawler visits each page of your website and looks at the frequency of the keywords on each page, as well as the META Keywords tag and the keywords in the domain name and file name of each page.
The easiest way to improve ad relevance is to make sure your most important keywords are in your page filename. Do not use abbreviations or numbers in the file name. Use whole words and separate them with hyphens. For example, take a look at this article. A good file name would be “how-to-get-more-relevant-ads-in-adsense.htm”. An inappropriate file name would be “adsenseads.htm”.
Writing good headlines and subheadings can also improve relevant ads. Use titles that answer your visitors’ questions. For example, you know that people often Google “How can I improve AdSense relevance?” So, use a title like the one I assigned for this article, “How to Get More Relevant Ads on AdSense.” That will cause AdSense to find ads that also answer the same question.
Use the most important keyword in the desired context. That is, if you take the word “AdSense” for example, there could be “AdSense Secrets Revealed” and “1000 AdSense Templates” and “Improve AdSense Revenue” ads. If you’re writing an article about how to improve AdSense earnings, make sure your article stays squarely in that context. That ensures that AdSense will show those ads.
quality level
Each ad in the AdWords system is assigned a Quality Score. Scoring is largely based on two factors, the bid amount for that ad, and how often that ad is clicked. There are other factors, including the quality of the landing page and how well the ad is written. But ultimately, the Quality Score determines how profitable the ad is for Google.
AdSense will give higher priority to ads that tend to generate more revenue for Google. It’s not just about how high the bid amounts are, but also how often they get clicked on. Ads with lower bids may be clicked more often just because they are better worded and therefore earn more revenue for Google.
As a publisher, you can help AdWords build a click history for each ad by improving the visibility of each AdSense placement. By placing AdSense creatives in the most visible places on your page, you will ultimately help AdSense determine which ads are most likely to be clicked.
Another thing you can do is increase traffic to your pages. Make sure all your internal links are working. Create more internal links. Highlight different pages of content on your home page.
Also, make sure that the AdSense crawler can crawl all of your pages. Please revisit your robots.txt page to ensure that no content pages are being blocked. Be sure to submit an XML sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools.
Sometimes an advertiser will spend so much money on AdWords that AdSense will give their ads a higher priority and promote them across the entire publisher network, despite contextual relevance.
visitor demographics
If you visit your own pages and see some irrelevant ads, it’s often because AdSense is using your personal demographics to increase your Quality Score.
For example, if you’re in Los Angeles, AdSense estimates that ads for restaurants in your city will have a higher Quality Score than contextually relevant ads.
Also, AdSense takes a look at your Google search history. If you’ve been searching Google for “scrapbooking clubs,” AdSense will show ads for scrapbooking clubs on any AdSense website you visit, even when you visit your own.
Tune in your audience
Many times, the reason you see so many irrelevant ads is because your audience has very varied interests. That is usually the result of their content being so varied. When you consider Quality Score to be an important factor in determining which ads show on your website, you can improve ad relevance by changing your audience.
To do this, you need to determine which ads you would like to see on your website. Then find out which audience is most likely to click on those ads. Then, you write content that perfectly appeals to that audience. Make sure all the content you post stays squarely in that focus.
You may also need to redesign the website, use different images, or even change your writing style.