Google hints and behavioral targeting

If you are using Google AdSense on your site to earn revenue and have looked at different ways to optimize that revenue, then you may have heard about something called "google_hints". This is a feature of Google AdSense that allows a site publisher to provide a few keywords to the AdSense script as hints of what ads to show. It seems that google_hints is an invite-only feature from the AdSense team, but if you are lucky enough to be able to use this feature then you are also lucky enough to be able to use Others Online's audience affinity information to automatically provide those hints.

Once you signup for an Others Online partner account, creating a mashup between Others Online audience affinity data and Google AdSense is as simple as adding a snippet of JavaScript to your pages or templates. Here's what it looks like:

<script src="http://www.othersonline.com/partner/scripts/othersonline.com/alice.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="http://www.othersonline.com/partner/agent/othersonline.com/adwords.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
google_hints = oz_adwords.keywords;
</script>

This would then be followed by your regular AdSense script tags (where you normally specify your publisher key, ad unit color, dimensions, etc.). Note - this example uses a demo partner account, you would of course substitute in your own partner account information.

We don't have good numbers on how well google_hints may improve your CTR or eCPM, but if the content on your site is thin or results in silly or poor ads from Google's page-based algorithms, then using Others Online's people-based algorithms likely will help improve the relevance of the ads shown to your audience. The nice thing about affinity based ads is that showing relevant ads will improve your visitor's user experience as well as improve CTR and eCPM.

Comments

[jeff paul]

Thanks for bringing this to my attention - I’ve reviewed it myself now. A very enjoyable read

[Jeff Paul Forum]

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