AdSense Matched Content [Guide]

Showing related articles below blog posts help in reducing bounce rate and giving more exposure to your other articles. We usually do with by using related post plugins. But few third-party plugins like Outbrain also do this for us. Now, Google Adsense is planning to bring this kind of recommendation tool for Adsense publishers. Adsense calls it “Matched Content”. In this guide, we will discuss what is Adsense matched content and how to check if you are eligible to use this in your blog.

What is AdSense Matched Content?

Adsense matched content is basically a recommendation tool which will recommend the articles of your own blog below the blog posts. It will not show just random articles but it will show contextually relevant and personalized articles. Google is known for its contextually relevant ads, so we can expect its recommendation tool to perform better than any other similar kind of available tools. I am sure now you will surely think of adding this new recommendation tool to your website. But there is also a bad news. It is not available for all Adsense publishers. Google has selected few Adsense publishers based on specific eligibility criteria.

Google has also specified this criteria saying, “To be eligible, you must have a site that meets our minimum requirements for traffic volume and number of unique pages. We’ve put these requirements in place to ensure that Matched content provides a great experience for you and your site visitors. Once your site is approved, you’ll have access to the Matched content feature in your AdSense account.”

So, your website must meet the criteria to be able to use Adsense Matched content.

How to check if your website is approved to use Matched Content?

If you think that your website can meet the eligibility criteria, you can check if your website is approved or not. Follow these steps to know if your website is approved to use matched content.

1. Sign in to your Google AdSense account.
2. Click the gear icon at the top right side of the page and select Settings.
3. In the left sidebar, under “Account”, click Site management.
4. In the “Owned” tab, check the “Matched content” column to see if your website has been approved to use matched content. If the status of your site is Approved, you can use the Matched content units in your blog.

Also Read: How to get Adsense account easily approved

Note: If you own multiple websites, it is possible that few of your websites are approved and few are not. In this case, you can only use matched content on approved websites.

See this snapshot to know how this matched content unit works:

If you are lucky enough, there is the possibility that you get the matched content approved. Good thing about these recommendation articles section is that it is responsive and will work properly on all screen sizes.

At this moment, Google has selected very few developers to test this new recommendation tool. If it works good for publishers, Google will surely consider it opening to all publishers. But we cannot confirm it. This will surely help you in decreasing the bounce rate and improving the user engagement of your blog.

I was not lucky enough to get approval for matched content. Did you get this for your adsense account? If yes, then share your views with us via comments. Tell us how it performs.