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Google AdSense

Written by: Lou Sorell

Article Overview: This article tells the story of Google AdSense, what it does and how it works.

Google AdSense

Google AdSense was the first major contextual advertising program. A large part of Google's earnings come from its share of the contextual advertisements served on the millions of WebPages that run the AdSense program. Website owners can sign up for AdSense to enable text, image and even video advertisements on their sites. Revenue is generated on either a per click (the advertiser pays search engines and other Internet publishers for a single click on its advertisement that brings one visitor to its website) or per impression (an online advertisement impression is a single appearance of an advertisement on a web page) basis.

AdSense has become a popular method of placing advertising on websites because the advertisements are not as intrusive as banners, and the content of the advertisements is generally relevant to the website. The main reasons Websites have for using AdSense is to help their sites content alone generate revenue as they typically lack the means for developing advertising sales programs and sales people.

AdSense works providing webmasters with JavaScript code that, when inserted into WebPages, displays relevant advertisements from the Google inventory of advertisers. Because the advertisements are more targeted, they are more likely to be clicked, which generates revenue for the owner of the website, as well the server of the ad itself. For contextual advertisements, Google's servers use a cache,

(a large storage of relevant data), of the page to determine a set of high-value keywords. If keywords have been cached already, advertisements are offered for those keywords based on AdWords bidding system.

For site-targeted advertisements, the advertiser chooses the page(s) to show the ads on, and then pays based on a Cost Per Mile, or CPM (the publisher has to only load the advertising on his website and show it to his visitors in order to get paid commission), or the price advertisers choose to pay for every thousand advertisements displayed. For referrals, Google would add money to the advertiser's account when visitors either download the referred software or subscribe to the referred service, however this system was discontinued in August of 2008.

AdSense has attracted its share of criticism over the years. The main area of concern involves its susceptibility to click fraud. Some search engine optimization firms claim that it is the source of what are called "invalid clicks", i.e. one in which one company clicks on a rival's search engine advertisements to drive up the other company's costs. Google claims that to avoid invalid clicks that they daily remove publishers from their partner network. AdSense publishers can choose from a variety of click-tracking programs available for purchase that display detailed information about the visitors who click on the AdSense advertisements. Publishers can use this to determine whether of not they have been a victim of click fraud.

The payment terms for webmasters have also been criticized. Google will withhold payment until an account reaches US $100, but some micro content may require a long time to amass this amount of AdSense revenue, years in some cases. However, Google will pay all earned revenue greater than US $10 when an AdSense account is closed.

Related Articles
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  Google Adsense and How It Works
  What Do You Want To Know About Google AdSense?
  How Google Indexes Your Site
  Google Adsense - Don't Lose Your Account

Article Tags: advertisement, advertiser, advertisers, advertising sales, appearance, bidding system, contextual advertising, earnings, google, google adsense, internet publishers, nbsp, page basis, relevant advertisements, relevant data, search engines, servers, storage, text image, web page
Referred by: http://jaykubassek.com



Related Forum Posts
Re: From $0.30 to $300 / Day on Google AdSense Part 1 - How To M - Hi Jeff - I`ll likely get into 3rd party advertising later on in the series but what I recommend doing is putting AdSense up as your baseline to test with. Get a sense over a couple of months as to how much you can make from that ad space. Remember that Google takes a percentage of all the money you make through AdSense so it would make sense to charge a higher amount for private ad sales than you`re making through AdSense - the advertisers are paying those rates anyway. Once you know how much your ad space is worth in AdSense, offer up the space to private advertisers with a 30-100% price increase. If you don`t get any takers then you can stick with AdSense... if you do sell the spots then you`re making more than you were with AdSense so it`s worth it. I didn`t have any luck with 3rd party companies who offer to handle the sales for me. Many of them contacted me but when I told them what I made through AdSense and through my own private sales, they said they couldn`t match it. The offer sounds appealing and I was really hoping that a company could take that off my hands but it looks like I`m too well optimized at this point.
AdSense solution - Hi Martin - is it a Public Service Announcement? Every now and then Google throws in PSAs if they can't find an ad to fit your site. You can either choose the default and show Google's PSAs or show your own alternate ad. This is the only image ad I have ever seen when I have had images turned off. Google updates it's data very regularly. I have a plugin on my computer that shows me my AdSense earnings. It logs in to update every 15 minutes and there are always changes. Note that the AdSense time zone is Pacific (California) so you might have to wait some time before you notice a change in days.
Re: How can a social networking site make serious money? - [quote="TannyL":2d06c9rb]Hi Kevin, They sell ad space, use Google AdSense, and some of them like StumbleUpon have an upgrade option, why I don't know, but people upgrade.[/quote:2d06c9rb] Hi Tanny, I'm not very convinced that Google AdSense will generate any serious amounts of revenue for a social networking site. Simply ask yourself when was the last time you were on Facebook, another major networking site or even this forum and whether or not you clicked through an ad? The answer was probably no.
Re: Money never sleeps - Well I guess it goes back to the old cliché of "don't work for money, but learn to have money working for you." However, aside from using your money to invest in things like property, stocks, etc... what are some of the other ways? I feel that the average Google AdSense user can't even make enough each month to buy a new pair of shoes. So in that respect, I wouldn't count on AdSense to help you earn more money while you sleep.
Online sales programs - Can anybody recommend a few good options for making money online besides Google AdSense?


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