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Google AdSense Review/Overview
Page: 1/2
(2455 total words in this text)
(10369 Reads) 
Google AdSense Review/Overview:
Author: rampy AT randomdrivel.com
Adapted from the infamous South Park "under pants gnomes" episode
Step 1: Build a website and put affiliate ads on it
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Big Profits!!!
Is Google AdSense program the coveted step 2? (read on)
Some background: I've tried quite a few affiliate programs on various sites (
Random Drivel |
UberCade: Mame cabinet | Build Your Own PVR site ). I have tried/used (and in some instance continue to use)
Amazon's Associates program, X-Arcade affiliate program, some Lycos program from
way back, and a few others I can't recall. The trouble with most affiliate
programs are:
1.
The percentage you get for the referral is really low (one exception linking
directly to an amazon book gives a decent percentage but a book is usually a lower ticket item)
2.
High payout thresholds ( you have to reach certain minimum amounts to get a check
mailed to you, and at this rate you'll never get there )
3.
You only get a referral if someone buys something at that site (either now or in
the near future). If you send tons of traffic to a site but nobody buys anything
you don't get one red cent.
4.
During the dotcom bubble certain places never paid out
regardless of whether you hit the minimum threshold or not (i.e. scams or the company went out of business). I'm still waiting for an All Advantage check =)
If I was lucky (on my semi-modest traffic site) I'd get enough in Amazon commissions (in
the form of a gift certificate coupon code which lowers the payout threshold to 10 dollars) to buy myself a paperback once every other quarter. Granted,
I didn't put a ton of referral links or a billion banner ads blinking "buy crap"… I just put up a few links to books/DVD's that I liked and thought my audience would like (or hoped
if they were going to be buying something else from Amazon anyway, that they would
consider throwing me a bone by clicking through my link when making their purchase). I didn't want to spend all day
being a huckster, nor make big bucks off the internet… Just trying to get some
sort of small perk or maybe offset the cost hosting my sites for all the time and energy I put into them.
Hopefully you are getting the picture here. I've been pretty disappointed in
the past with affiliate marketing.
Before I go into detail about my experience with the Google Adsense program and my experience with it, you
should have at least a passing understanding how the other side of Google
advertising works ( Google AdWords ). Google AdWords allow an advertiser to
bid (as in an auction) on placement of text-only ads placed in a specially marked
area adjacent to Google's search engine results. An advertiser can sign up for
the services, create the ad text/url, choose which search engine result key word(s)
the ad should appear under, how much they are willing to pay per clickthrough, and finally the total amount they are willing to allocate for a given
day. Here's where the ad placement order auction comes in. The higher an
advertiser bids the higher their ad will be placed (for the most part, read on).
The higher a text ad is displayed in a page the more likely it will be seen and
hopefully clicked on (people in the "western" world read a page left to
right and top to bottom; hence the desire for the top most placement. This is especially true on a search result page where a person may never look past the first few lines if they find what they are looking for).
The only caveat to this is Google measures how well an ad is performing clickthrough percentage-wise to guage how relevant it is to the key words it's being associated with. Google's
algorithm will reward an ad with the coveted higher placement if it's highly
relevant even over a slightly less relevant advertisement that paid MORE per clickthrough.
Hopefully you got all that. Google AdSense lets you display Google Text Ads on
your site and pays you a cut of the AdWords advertiser's clickthrough bid
price. From the AdSense front page, "AdSense delivers text-based Google AdWords ads
that are relevant to what your readers see on your pages - and Google pays you"
Well I've heard that last line before =)
The sign up process was pretty painless. You do have to provide certain
information for tax purposes (Google giveth IRS taketh away) and there is some
sort of review process where presumably a person or bot verifies that your site
meets their content criteria (i.e. no porn, hate speech, etc see
their policy page for official details). One small note: You'll
need to already be in Google's index; brand new sites are generally not
accepted. One additional sidebar: sometimes Google can be picky - see Scott's
experience here and here over at the The Ultimate Insult with adsense )
Once you get your confirmation email and log into their self service system you
can copy the HTML/JavaScript code snippet and paste it into your site. That's all you need to have Google display text ads on your page. You can choose which style/size text ad to display as well as customize the text ads to fit in with your sites color scheme. I had no problem customizing the colors of my ad (the 160 pixels wide x 600 pixels high "tower" ad you probably see on your right ) to my site's color scheme. It fits right in. You can create all sorts of custom color schemes and save them in your Google Adsense account (you hear that Amazon! It remembers my custom color schemes ?!?!) There are a variety of ad display styles available from single squares, to traditional banner style, to high tower "strip" ones. Overall I found AdSense to be very
flexible when it comes to modifying/customizing the appearance of the ads.
Google AdSense ad's are targeted by the text that is on the page you are
displaying the ads on. If you run a site dedicated to say, dog grooming, and
you put up a page with a recipe to your famous buffalo wings, the the buffalo wing page will have
google ads about hot sauces, mail order buffalo wings, recipe books, etc. Meanwhile
your other pages with content about dog grooming will have links relevant to dogs or dog grooming such as stores selling grooming brushes, pet medications, or lassie DVD
widescreen extended Peter Jackson edition.
You can get a decent idea of what type of ads google "might" place on your
site/page by using this free tool: Google Adsense web tool
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