3 tips for effectively using Adsense in WordPress

Adsense is one of the easy and effective way to monetize any website. I have been using Adsense ever since I started blogging and it gave me good returns too!

In my last post about Adsense, I had summarized some of my observations from using Adsense to monetize this blog. Long back, I shared a PHP code snippet to insert Adsense based on the post length. Today In this post, I’m sharing few more tips on Adsense, which I think might helpful to you. Here we go:

I assume that you are using WordPress and you know how to edit WordPress theme files. If not, you are using these code snippets at your own risk!

1. Target Adsense content and get better ads

Your blog might have n-number of things – comments, sidebars, ads, etc – apart from the main content. The user comes to your site to read your content, not the n-number of other things. So, it is better to target the main content to show best matching ads, which in turn increase the click through rate. This is called as Adsense Section Targeting. It’s an approved method from Google to improve the advertisement shown on your website.

For Section targeting, all you need to do is, put the following code snippet in your blog/website.

<!-- google_ad_section_start -->
Your main content / blog post.
<!-- google_ad_section_end -->

WordPress users can add the above snippet in their single.php file in appropriate place.

2. Show Adsense only to the search engine traffic

If you want to show the advertisements only to the users who are coming from a search engine (Google or Yahoo!), use this snippet. For wordpress users, in your single.php file place this code in appropriate place.

<?php
$ref = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];
$SE = array('/search?', 'images.google.', 'web.info.com', 'search.', 'del.icio.us/search', 'soso.com', '/search/', '.yahoo.');
foreach ($SE as $source)
{
        if (strpos($ref,$source)!==false)
        {
                echo 'PLACE ADSENSE HERE';
        }
}
?>

3. Add ad only to the older posts

In case you want to show ads only on the posts which are older than, say 10 days. This way you can hide adsense to the regular readers of your blog and still show advertisement to the people who are looking at your old posts. Well, here’s the code snippet for that.

<?php
  global $post;
  $DAYDIFFERENCE = 10;
  $postDate = $post->post_date;
  $currentDate = date('Y-m-d');
  $diff = abs(strtotime($currentDate) - strtotime($postDate));
  $diff = ceil($diff/86400);
  if($diff > $DAYDIFFERENCE ){
    echo 'PLACE YOUR AD HERE';
  }
?>