UNDERSTANDING GOOGLE ADSENSE ADSENSE BASICS GOOGLE ADSENSE FOR DUMMIES

 

GOOGLE ADSENSE FOR DUMMIES PART 1. ADSENSE BASICS CHAPTER 1. UNDERSTANDING GOOGLE ADSENSE

 

Introduced in June 2003, AdSense offers anyone with any type of Internet real estate the ability to generate at least a small income from their efforts. Understanding AdSense AdSense is an advertising program that anyone who publishes a Web site can use to generate income for their Web site. But there’s one small condition — Google must approve your site before ads are shown on your site. A longer explanation is that AdSense is an ad-placement program that utilizes Google’s proprietary search capabilities to determine the best placement for ads that are purchased through the Google AdWords program. AdSense is contextual advertising, or ads that appear in the context of surrounding content. What this means for you is that AdSense ads are related to the content of the pages on which those ads appear. It sounds complicated, I know. And really it can be very complicated, but the bottom line is that with AdSense, you can place ads on your Web site that are targeted to the content of your site. So, if your site is about Chinese Crested dogs, ads for Web-based human resources applications don’t show on your site. AdWords: The flip side of AdSense AdSense is one-half of an advertising duo that Google has cooked up. The other half is Google AdWords, a pay-per-click keyword advertising program. (How smart is that? Having both advertisers and publishers as your customers!)  In a pay-per-click advertising program, advertisers place ads based on keywords that are related to their content. (Keywords, in this context, means key terms or words that are commonly associated with a given subject, topic, service, or product.) In pay-per-click advertising, advertisers create short, text-based ads that are very closely related to chosen keywords, and then allow those ads to be shown on other people’s Web sites that feature (in some way or another) the chosen keyword. The advertiser agrees to pay up to a certain dollar amount — called a bid — each time a Web site visitor clicks on the ad. Thus, the term pay-per-click. The bid amount an advertiser placed on a keyword is usually determined by two factors: the budget and the popularity of the keyword. The advertisers themselves set the daily budget for each advertisement — one built around how much they are willing to pay if someone clicks the ad. The bidding process itself sets how much a keyword is worth — clearly, more popular keywords are going to cost advertisers more. The bidding process works much like any other auction process, with one minor change. Advertisers bid for placement of their ads by keyword, but more than one advertiser can win. The way it works is that the advertiser that has the highest bid has their ads shown in the most desirable places (both on Google and other Web sites). Bidders with lower bids will still have their ads shown, but in somewhat less desirable places. The “less desirable” places can still perform very well, and in fact are sometimes more coveted because they cost less, which means advertisers can afford to have their ads shown more often. In return for placing those ads on your site, you’re paid a small amount each time one of your site visitors clicks an ad, and in some cases, even when site visitors just see the ads. Money Makes AdSense Go ’Round Okay, so AdSense is (in essence) an advertising program. But why would you want to use it? Well, for the money, of course. AdSense is an easy way to generate income from your Web site, even if you’re not selling anything on the site. Some publishers use AdSense as a means of making their Web site more valuable to site visitors. Anyone who displays an AdSense ad is considered a publisher, whereas anyone who purchases the ads that are displayed through AdSense is an advertiser. When placed properly, AdSense ads can add value to your Web site by pointing users to other resources related to the topic of your site. This means they’ll probably surf away from your site at some point. But if your site is well built (which is essential if you intend to grow traffic over time), it’s likely that users will come back to your site again in the future. The value here is that users not only get what they’re looking for, but you get return traffic; and because you’re using AdSense to help those users find the information they need, you’re also making a little extra money in the process. Deciding Whether AdSense Is Right for You Even though there are a lot of benefits to using AdSense, it’s not for everyone. One good example of this is if you have an e-commerce Web site that features products on every page. Many e-commerce site owners aren’t willing to include advertisements on their pages because the ads can cause site visitors to surf away before they complete a purchase. What it all really comes down to is to know how badly you would be hurt if a site visitor surfed away from your site. If the damage would be like cutting off your left hand, you probably don’t want to include AdSense on your site. If, on the other hand (the right hand because it’s not been cut off yet), the possibility of a site visitor surfing away wouldn’t cost you any money, AdSense is probably worth considering. To be clear, a certain percentage of site visitors click an ad on a site and then don’t come back, either that day or at all. But that percentage is likely to be very small. If you won’t lose money if they don’t come back, why not try to make a little money? Jenn Savedge, the owner of the blog The Green Parent doesn’t use AdSense. She says, “I want to have complete control over the products that are advertised on my site. I don’t want it to appear as though I am endorsing products when I am not.” And that’s a valid reason to decide against using AdSense. A good rule of thumb is generally that all content-only sites can afford to have AdSense ads displayed on some, if not all, pages on the site. Sites that sell stuff? Well, that’s a little trickier, but if you have pages that don’t contain links to purchase products (like product review pages, or articles that extol the value of a particular product or group of products), you can probably feel pretty secure about including AdSense ads on those pages. Common AdSense Questions ·         How much money can I make with AdSense? There’s just no easy answer to this question. Well, okay, there’s an easy answer — it depends. But that easy answer isn’t really useful. The problem is that several measurements impact your daily revenue from AdSense ads, such as Unique visits: A visitor is considered unique when she visits your Web site the first time during a given period of time. Depending on the metric — the measurement used to track visitors on your Web site — that’s used, a visitor might be considered unique the first time he visits your site in a 24-hour period, the first time in a week, or the first time in an hour. For AdSense, the unique visits measurement is used to help determine the click-thru rate for ads. Click-thru rate (CTR) is the number of people who click an ad and are taken to the Web page designated for the advertisement. This page is usually a larger, more colorful ad, the opening page of a Web site, or a page that displays more information about the product or service featured in the ad. Average click-through-rate (CTR): The CTR is the actual number of visitors who click through an ad on your Web site. This is important because you’re paid when users click your AdSense ads. Average cost-per-click (CPC): The CPC is the amount that advertisers pay each time someone clicks one of their ads. This number varies widely and is dependent upon the cost of the keyword to which an ad is related. For you, as an AdSense publisher, the CPC is the basis for how much you’re paid. Using these three measurements — measurements which are highly variable — you can estimate how much you could make based on some hypothetical numbers. For example, assume that your Web site gets 1,000 unique visits per day and that the average value of the ads that are displayed on your site each day is $.25 per click (that’s the CPC). Finally, assume that about 2 percent of your 1,000 visitors click through the ads on your site each day. Now, you have numbers that you can work with. With those hypothetical numbers in place, you can use this equation to estimate how much you might make from your AdSense ads on a given day: (unique visits x average CTR)average CPC = potential revenue so (1,000 x .02)$.25 = $5.00 ·         How much does AdSense cost? Easy question, easier answer. AdSense doesn’t cost you a thing. Well, it doesn’t cost you a thing unless you consider the time that it takes to implement the ads on your Web site. But even this step isn’t overly time-consuming, so even labor costs should be minimal. ·         What kind of ads will show on my Web site Okay. All jokes aside, the ads that show on your site are determined by the content of your site. Google uses a search algorithm to determine what ads are best suited for your site — an algorithm that’s quite similar to the one Google uses when you run a search query from the Google search pages or through a Web site-based search box. ·         Can I control ad content? Fortunately, Google’s made it possible to exclude some companies from showing their ads on your site. It’s not too difficult to do; simply ad your competitors’ URLs (Uniform Resource Locator, the Web address) to your ad filters, and the competition is then blocked from advertising on your site. ·         Can I use AdSense on more than one Web site? Sure you can, and here are a couple ways to do it. First, you can use the same AdSense code on all your sites, and the metrics — the tracking measurements, like number of clicks and payment for clicks — are all collected in the same report with no way to differentiate the Web site. The other way you can track multiple sites (or even different pages within the same site) is to use Google channels. Channels simply allow you to track different sites or pages on a site by using code that’s written to indicate each separate channel you set up. ·         Can I have more than one AdSense account? Google doesn’t think that’s such a great idea. You’re limited to a single AdSense account per payee. You can differentiate between ads on your various Web sites with the channels that I mention earlier in the preceding section, but having two accounts is a no-no. Google’s very sensitive about the ways in which publishers use AdSense capabilities. Reading through the AdSense program policies before you even being to set AdSense up for your Web site is a very good idea. Google won’t think twice about banning policy violators from using AdSense.