Google AdSense are being their usual mysterious selves and donât share what the specific requirements are to be approved for their Matched content recommendation units anywhere in their official help documents. However, the exact requirements have been revealed in a comment from an AdSense support representative.
Matched content is an AdSense feature that will show contextually relevant and recommended articles at the bottom of your webpages. The feature is meant to increase how much time your readers spend on your website as theyâll be presented with more [hopefully] interesting content to read when theyâre done with reading one story.
The feature isnât available to every AdSense publisher, however.
Matched content is available for sites with multiple pages and high volumes of traffic.
The Matched content feature is available to select publishers. To be eligible, you must have a site that meets our minimum requirements for traffic volume and number of unique pages.
Typically non-specific communication from AdSense
Reading statements like this can be more than a little frustrating if your website hasnât been approved to use the now matched content recommendation units with your AdSense account. Some good concrete numbers are much more appreciated than vague generalizations with no frame of reference.
Luckily, AdSense staff arenât as silent as AdSenseâs documentation department, or maybe theyâre not as good at keeping secrets. Whatever the case, theyâve let slip the specific requirements (as the only valuable piece of information to come out from a) a Q&A session :
The Matched content feature can be activated for all pubs who meet the following minimum thresholds:
- 1,000 unique pages
- 1,000 daily page visits
- A unique image on most of the pages of their siteâ
This answer can be hard to discover as Google seem to be having technical difficulties with indexing comments on Google+. Or maybe theyâve deemed them of so little value that theyâre not worth indexing? Whatever the case, it took some digging to find this.
The same numbers where later reposted verbatim by a Google AdSense employee as late as on Quora.
Iâd take these number with a grain of salt, however. This blog is eligible for matched content recommendations units with and without ads. But it doesnât have over a thousand articles, only around 300. This blog does have a whole lot of readers visiting every day, though â so the numbers may not be all that accurate nor a strict requirement after all.
I also suspect that your AdSense accountâs historic revenue performance will play a role in whether or not your websites is eligible for Matched content recommendations. Iâd also hazard to guess that Google searchâs secret recipe for what makes for high-quality content could also have an effect on a publisherâs eligibility.
Although AdSense Matched contentâs recommendations arenât all that bad within a service category with a bad track record, Iâve opted to only show them to a small fraction of my readers.
The majority of readers will instead see recommendations from a system I wrote myself. As Iâve been able to tune this system for the content that are on my site, it has proven very effective with higher click-through rates than anything I get with a third-party service like Matched content by AdSense.