What Is Google Adsense?
Looking back over the way internet advertising has developed, you’ll see that is was similar to newspaper and TV.
You’d enter a site, and in some location you’d get to see a banner (often these were quite numerous and very large), which would present and ad for whatever company was paying for adds on your space.
However, this type of advertising has a problem. It really wasn’t exploiting the fact that the adds weren’t in some newspaper, but were instead presented over the Internet.
If you are someone that browses the web often, this type of thing is something that you have noticed before. You’re at an online website shopping for a woman’s watch for your wife, but then you get a banner ad for a car.
While you might, at some later point want to buy a car, right now you’re looking for a watch and it would have surely been nice if the banner were advertising a watch, because then you would have probably clicked it.
Thinking the same thing, the people at Google came up with a great idea. This is knows as Google AdSense, and it’s known as a targeted advertising program
What you do (as a web designer / website owner) is, instead of jumping through hoops to get some banner on your site that your visitors won’t even care about, is you just allocate some region of the screen.
You then sign up for the Google AdSense program, you insert a small snippet of code in your webpage and Google ensures that in the location you specify, a banner will appear, presenting adds relevant to the contents of your site.
Google can do this easily because they are a search engine company. It looks for the key words in your page, searches a database of websites to find the ones related to whatever is on your page and presto: a targeted ad.
You (the webmaster) get a fee for each visitor that clicks on an adsense banner on your site. Now that’s bound to happen more often then with a traditional banner because people are actually interested in what’s in that banner (otherwise, they wouldn’t be on your page would they?).
But, this also does wonders for the people who want to advertise. And it’s because of the same reason. The greatest thing about Google AdSense is that all the content in a banner is relevant.
This is why everyone remains happy, since relevancy fuels the programs success. The advertiser has a relevantly placed advert, the publisher earns money from their content and Google take their cut.
In terms of looks and functionality, the Google Adsense program has set high standards for itself. You can’t have more than two such banners on your website and Google only inserts text in these banners.
Adsense advertising is not as presumptuous as normal advertising, and that can be more welcoming. But this also means you should position the banner better because it’s possible that visitors might miss it altogether.
So in the end, Google AdSense is an advertising program that is unique because the ads are relevant to the content on the site. Anyone that wants to advertise pays Google for it. Adsense is how you place ads on sites and Google will pay you.
All transactions are run through Google, and the advertisers and publishers get access to statistics which help them to understand and moderate the effectiveness of their campaign.
From site visitors to advertisers, this process is effective and simple, which is why Google is known for being innovative.
