Making Sense of Google AdSense

October 26, 2005

Making Sense of Google AdSense
By Aravind

AdSense is an ad program run by Google which allows Website owners to place advertisements on their sites for a share of the revenue. For every ad clicked on your site, you will be paid a percentage of the per-click price. AdSense ads are like the AdWords ads you see on the right-hand side of Google whenever you type a search query there.

Eligibility for the AdSense Program

Any site that is content-related is eligible for the AdSense program; however, the Google AdSense team has to approve your application. Currently it appears that Google prefers content-rich sites (sites offering information).

Setting up an AdSense program is a free and easy task. Just fill out the online application and within a day or two you should get a reply on whether you are approved or not.

If your site is approved, you’ll be given a login account. The next step is to log in and pick up your HTML code. Copy and paste into pages you want the ads to appear (just one instance per page), and upload your pages to your server. That’s it! You should now be up and running.

Having completed the above two-step process of understanding and setting up the AdSense program, let’s take a closer look at how it all works.

AdSense serves ads that are related to the content of your Web page. Google uses a sophisticated algorithm in order to display the most relevant ads for your page; the algorithm picks up factors like keyword density, word frequency, font size and link popularity. For
best results, try to avoid frequent changes in the content of the page where you’re serving up AdSense ads.

To illustrate, let’s use europeforvisitors.com as an example. Since the site is about travel options to Europe, the ads that are served on the site are generally only related to rail travel in Europe and rail tickets.

If you’re concerned about showing competitor’s ads on your site, this is addressed by simply blocking those particular URLs from showing ads. The AdSense Program’s advanced filter option allows up to 200 sites to be blocked/filtered by you so that they won’t appear on your
site.

Design and Navigation

Google allows you two types of navigation for display of your AdSense ads. You can display horizontally with a space of 468×60, which allows you to display up to 2 ads.

The other option, which is the most popular and also Google’s preferred method, is vertical. This is like a skyscraper ad; it occupies a space of 120×600 and allows you to display up to 4 ads.

You can see an example of this model at (a case-study site used by Google).

Sites that may not be approved:

1. Sites that already serve text ads may not be approved; however, you can explain your case to Google, as the AdSense editorial team decides each case on a site-by-site basis. The europeforvisitors.com site mentioned earlier serves text ads as well as AdSense ads.

2. For sites that don’t have text content, like Flash sites and other all-graphical sites, the AdSense program relies on text content of the site to decide what ads to serve, so it’s not likely that the editorial team will approve sites that have no text content.

3. Sites that require a login are not approved.

4. Sites that serve banner ads *should* get approved; however, if the banner ads are from a third party whose ads might appear in Google AdWords as well as on your site, then you will not be approved. It’s best to remove third-party banners that might be related to your content before you apply for the AdSense program. If you cannot remove third-party banners due to prior commitments, alternatively you may block those sites from appearing in your Google ads and let them know that you will not be showing double ads.

5. Any site with a particular ad appearing twice on the site — once due to Google and once due to being an affiliate — is either not approved, or the AdSense membership is terminated immediately after this happens.

6. News sites and sites that serve search results may not be approved.

Economics and Advantages of AdSense

Google states that they will pay as much as or more than other advertising networks pay site owners for advertisements. AdSense earnings are presently based on cost per thousand impressions (CPM) and clickthrough rates. The final payment is made at the end of each
month once the earnings reach $100.

With this kind of economics, the money each website earns depends on the ads they are serving, the competitiveness of the industry, the visitors to the site, the number of impressions, clickthrough rates and cost-per-click.

The additional advantages of using the AdSense program are as follows:

* No hassle of writing emails, making phone calls and running after advertisers to place ads on your Website.

* No hassle of managing various affiliate URLs, banners and accounts.

* Due to its large pool of ads at Google’s disposal there’s a continuous stream of them available, allowing for sustainability of the program.

* Lastly, because of the credibility and reputation of Google, a small Website’s own credibility could be enhanced when it displays Google AdWords ads through the AdSense program.

I believe the AdSense program is a noble move in helping small content publishers, and also in raising the overall standards of the Internet.

Aravind
g_aravindprasad@hotmail.com

[You can learn more about AdSense at their FAQ page. - Jill]