About Adsense

AdSense is Google's syndication program for its AdWords
advertisements so first up, you need to understand AdWords
to make sense of AdSense.

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AdWords
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AdWords are small text-only ads that sometimes appear on the
right hand side of Google's search results page when you do
a search.

They are extraordinarily powerful - MUCH more so than you'd
think at first sight - for 5 reasons.

1. They are 100% targeted: the advertiser chooses which
keywords have to be entered before their ad is shown.

This means that you can make your ad appear ONLY in front
of people ACTIVELY LOOKING for information about a topic.

You sell binoculars? Then you can set up your AdWords ads
so that they show up ONLY when someone enters "Binoculars"
into Google's search box.

You can also restrict your ad coverage to specific countries.


2. You only pay for click thrus. If no one clicks on your ad
you don't pay anything but...


3. Google penalises ads that don't work well because it wants
only ads that are RELEVANT to the viewer to be seen. Poorly
performing ads get disabled automatically. This protects
Google's brand from being sullied by irrelevant ads.


4. Google lets advertisers rotate different ads for the same
keywords and AUTOMATICALLY shows the most effective ad more
often. Thus there is an in-built survival of the fittest
process going on where fitness is judged by real consumers
voting in real time.

If they click, your ad stays. If they don't, it doesn't.

Evolution can be extremely brutal - and fast!


5. Google gives advertisers incredibly detailed near real-time
response data so you can monitor and adjust your ad without
wasting much money.


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AdSense
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So where does AdSense come in this?

Well, Google has taken their excellent AdWords program and
extended it to non-Google web sites and branded it AdSense.

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Key distinction
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However, AdSense differs from AdWords in that Google, instead
of looking at the search terms entered into its search box
to determine what ads to show, looks at what keywords would
be relevant to the web site the ads are to go on.

Example:

If you have a site rich in content about binoculars, AdSense
technology determines that it would be an appropriate site to
post AdWord ads about binoculars on. (Google uses its existing
page ranking technology to assess a site's content.)

There's a good example of AdSense in action here on a web page
about web hosting.

http://www.1stprofitprograms.com/Web_Hosting.html?1

This AdSense technology is called "content-targeting".

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How you make money with AdSense
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The process is simple.

You sign up for AdSense and if your site is accepted,
(we'll cover this process later in the course) Google
gives you some code to paste into your web pages. It's
JavaScript stuff that you can simply add into the HTML
of your page.

When someone views your page this JavaScript fetches ads from
Google. If they then CLICK on your ad, Google charges the
advertiser a click thru fee and shares it with you.

This is entirely AUTOMATIC so if you have a content rich site
with lots of traffic that is not currently making you any money,
AdSense is something you should seriously consider.

Now maximising this process is much harder and it raises what
I call the content dilemma which we'll explore later too:

Is your site designed to earn AdSense revenue or
is its main objective something else?


So that's the background to AdSense.

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Tomorrow we'll look at ways to maximise the amount of money
that Google sends you.

There are two pretty complex processes going on behind the
scenes that we will examine, paying particular attention to
those things that are within your control. Not everything is!