What is Google Adsense?
January 14th, 2007 by Scott W
Google AdSense is a PPC (Pay Per Click) service. It allows webmasters to serve whatever content they like (as long as it meets the Adsense guidelines), and will serve up relevant advertisements– or advertisements that relate to the content being served. Its advertisements come from its sister department, Google AdWords, which allows users to create advertisements which can then be placed in relevant areas on both Google searches and web pages featuring Adsense ads.
When a visitor clicks on an ad on the website, the website owner is credited with money from that click-through. The amount the owner is paid varies by two main things:
- How much the AdWords advertiser paid for the visitor click-through
- Whether the click is more likely to end up in the desired outcome for the advertiser’s website (a sale, a registration, etc.)
Using Adsense is extremely simple and requires only that you insert a block of javascript code that is automatically generated into the website code or template. The Google Adsense service will automatically parse the page before it loads and will immediately display ads that relate to the content on that page. In order to determine which ads should be served, Adsense uses a combination of context analysis and keyword matching.
In order to prevent competitor’s ads from showing up on your own website, Google implemented a filtering system that allows its users to prevent specific domains’ ads from showing up on any websites in their account. Ads can also be geo-targeted (based on viewer location) for English, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Japanese or Spanish.
Unless you are displaying only image ads, Adsense provides a large selection of ad formats, colors and sizes to more easily blend into a website’s content. Users can select from a few preformatted banners, tower ads, inline rectangle ads, button ads and more. You may change the color scheme of each ad to fit in better with your website’s layout.
On this website, you will find three examples of what you can do with ads. You can view what is called a Leaderboard ad at the very top of this page, which is 728 pixels wide and 90 pixels high. On the sidebar to your right, you can see a tower ad which comes out to 160 pixels wide and 600 pixels high. At the very bottom, you will see a rectangle styled ad that is 336 pixels wide and 280 pixels high.
Optimizing
Although Adsense ultimately determines which ads will display on any given website, webmasters who really want to earn revenue from the service can use the following techniques to optimize their content for the best relevant ad performance. Until Google’s spider crawls the website in question, Public Service Ads may be displayed. If users click on these ads, the website owner will receive no benefit so it’s best to display either an alternate color (typically the same color as the background) or an alternate ad url (you could display your own ads when their ads don’t display). Thus, there is no reason the ad space shouldn’t get used effectively.
- Keep web page content static (blog posts have permanent links that don’t change)
- Both the text in the body of your pages and the title of each page should contain contextual keywords that indicate a common theme on the web page
- Make sure you select the ‘framed page’ checkbox when generating ad layout code if you are using ads on a framed page
- Make SURE that your robots.txt does not block your webpage from being spidered
Channels
When Adsense introduced channels, it made running reports a much more informative process. When users use channels to track clicks, Google will then be able to track not only hits on a particular website but also individual click statistics for each website or even each ad, if the user so chooses. You can use channels to test differences in ad placement and sizes. This is a great way of increasing revenue.
How much revenue will I earn per click?
Adsense does not disclose how much they pay per click, but as aforementioned, there are two solid ways to determine this: how much the advertiser paid and whether the click is likely to end up in a registration or sale. Unfortunately, you can not control either of these factors, so it is random. Your percentage of the click is also kept private; however, you may use the techniques described on this website and in this post to enhance your ads so that you can maximize how much each ad is worth.
Overall
Google Adwords provides many people with thousands of dollars per month, and could potentially allow you to quit your job but it still takes hard work and dedication. The actual implementation of Adsense is very easy, however, and it isn’t difficult to start getting a few dollars every month by just creating a steady inflow of traffic. I recommend using Adsense over other programs, as I’ve had the most success with it.
