Quick Adsense Tip #1: More Relevant Ads with Shorter Permalinks

Quite a number of you have emailed me asking for some Quick Adsense Tips to go inline with the Adwords ones so why not!

I’m in the process of cleaning up my sidebar & putting more “clear defined” categories so this first tip ties in with that just nicely.

I find that with adsense if I use too strings in posts that are too long the Adsense ads can get quite a bit off target. I recently just used this plugin to migrate to shorter permalinks.

Originally I had the structure:

/%category%/%postname%/

However when using multiple categories the urls were becoming quite long & adsense was getting confused.

I’ve now migrated to merely:

/%postname%/

This has greatly increased the targeting of the Adsense ads & increased ctr by over 2% on some blogs.

Another handy feature of using the short permalinks is that I can now rearrange my whole sidebar & categories without making posts go 404 since the category name isn’t in the url anymore.