Case Study: How I improved my site

I have a website based around the game Freelancer. It gets mostly repeat visits from players of the game, as well as some admins who run game servers. At the end of 2005 I put AdSense on it, and got a little bit of money from it. However, I was really struggling with irrelevant ads. Here's how I dealt with the problem:

The first major problem was that the keyword "Freelancer" appeared frequently on the site. Google Adsense therefore assumed that the most appropriate ads would be for "freelancing", "outsourcing" and "contracting"; which is far from relevant for my audience. I tried adding random keywords as parameters to the page (e.g. ?play=games+online), but this was a) ugly, b) screwed up cache control, and c) wasn't always effective.

So, I removed as many references to "Freelancer" as possible, especially from headings and titles. However, I can't get rid of every single instance of the word, or no one would know which game the site was about. I came up with the trick of using <span> to break up the word, for example: <span>Free</span>lancer. The word looks the same in the browser, but (maybe) the mediabot will see it as two. Of course, this will ruin any SEO efforts, but I get very little traffic from search engines, so I'm not bothered. Section targeting can also be used here to force the mediabot to ignore certain words.

The second big problem is that my site is mostly driven by dynamic data, i.e. player stats. There isn't any actual content, so I had to add something for the mediabot to read. After using the AdWords Keyword Tool, I got the impression that maybe AdSense take into account the links to other sites. Based on that hunch, I added links at the bottom of the page to other gaming and computer sites (with section targeting of course). I also added some links to articles at the top of each page on similar subjects, which seems to help even if no one is reading them.

These changes I made, coupled with some tweaking and blending of my ad units, has give me a 5 fold increase in earnings last month. It's still not perfect, as my click through rate is still extremely low, but I'll continue to improve it as I read the great advice here at DP.

I hope it is useful to other folk out there. I'd love to hear of any other tips for me and others on getting relevant ads...

Cheers, Cryo.

 

Thanks for the tips.

I have a blog about beauty which google adsense absolutely insisnt on serving ads on 'blogging' and 'photo blogging' to.

I hope your tips help me.

 

Its all about continually testing. Placing ads in spots I would have never thought would do good and then they turn out to be my best performers never ceases to amaze me. So test test test.