Internet Marketing: Getting the Best from Google AdSense
AdSense is an ad-serving or ad-delivery program run by Google. Website owners can sign up to this program (and subject to a review and acceptance by Google) they enroll in this program to enable text, image and, more recently, video advertisements to be displayed on their sites. Ads are delivered via a snipped of JavaScript code and are administered by Google and generate revenue on either a per-click or per-thousand-impressions basis.
In this program Google utilizes its search technology to serve ads based on website content, the user's geographical location, and other factors. AdSense has become a popular method of placing advertising on a website because the ads are less intrusive than most banners, and the content of the ads is often relevant to the website. Moreover the background and look of the ads can be changed so they blend better with a website's content.
The two buttons above will allow you to link to and join either or both the AdSense and AdWords programs. The text of this article will tell you why you should join both programs and will also give you tips as to how to minimize your costs. Read on and be informed...
What is AdSense?
The AdSense program is the flip side of Google's flagship AdWords advertising product; the main source of the company's revenue. AdSense delivers advertisements to websites; the same advertisements that are paid for in Googles AdWords programs. Each time a visitor visits a page with an AdSense tag, a piece of JavaScript writes an iframe tag, whose src attribute includes the URL of the page. Google's servers use a cache of the page for the URL or the keywords in the URL itself to determine a set of high-value keywords. (Some of the details are described in the AdSense patent.) If keywords have been cached already, ads are served for those keywords based on the AdWords bidding system. And in general the payout for a click on an AdSense advertisement is in proportion to the cost of the original AdWrods campaign. Google generally refers to this as 'AdSense for Content'.
The image, above, shows the logo on Google's AdSense sign in page and gives an example of a typical ad layout as served by Google to a publisher's web page.
AdSense currently uses JavaScript code to incorporate the advertisements into a participating site. If it is included on a site which has not yet been crawled by the Mediabot, it will temporarily display advertisements for charitable causes known as public service announcements (PSAs). (Note that the Mediabot is a separate crawler from the Googlebot that maintains Google's search index.) An example of AdSense code is given below (this is the selfsame code that drives AdSense code on this website:
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As you can see, this code defines the size, layout and graphical style of the ad banner as well as specifying the unique identifier of the publisher in the "google_ad_client" tag.
AdSense for Feeds
In addition to their AdSense program for publishers Google also offers AdSense for feeds which was unveiled in May 2005. This is a version of AdSense that runs on RSS and Atom feeds that have more than 100 active subscribers. According to the Official Google Blog, "advertisers have their ads placed in the most appropriate feed articles; publishers are paid for their original content; readers see relevant advertising — and in the long run, there are more quality feeds to choose from".
AdSense for Feeds works by inserting images into the feed and when the image is read and displayed by the RSS reader/browser Google writes the ad content into the image that it returns. As with standard AdSense advertisements the content of the advertisement is chosen based on the content of the feed surrounding the image. When the user clicks the image, he or she is redirected to the advertiser's site in the same way as regular AdSense ads.
AdSense for Search
This is a companion system to regular AdSense for Content where a publisher can place Google search boxes (such as the one at the base of this page) on their pages. When a user searches the web or the site with the search box and then clicks on an ad associated with the search results the publisher is paid. But the AdSense program does not pay publishers for mere searches or clicks on standard search results.
Referrals
This is a further companion program to Google's AdSense. Here ads are placed on web pages for Google products such as AdSenes, AdWords, Firefox plus the Google Toolbar and the Google Pack of software. Ads are varied and two examples are the AdWords adn AdSense buttons at the top of this page. Here publishers are paid if anoyone signs-up for any of the Google programs being advertised.
Abuse of AdSense
Like all potentially lucrative systems AdSense is not immune from abuse. Indeed, website publishers are incentivized to gain as many clicks on AdSense advertisements as possible. There is also the price disparity on AdSense values. This makes it far more lucrative to draw visitors to website targeted at certain keywords such as 'mesothelioma' or 'attorney' that it is for any other keyword. This has led some webmasters to create sites tailored to lure searchers from Google and other engines onto their AdSense site to make money from clicks. These "zombie" sites often contain nothing but a large amount of interconnected, automated content (e.g.: A directory with content from the Open Directory Project, or scraper sites relying on RSS feeds for content). Sites also use un-original content like content scraped from other sites or derived from Wikipedia to give their AdSense targeted sites the appearance of having original content.
This has led to many webmasters specifically targeting AdSense's top paying keywords (if you want to find what these are see my Adsense Top-paying Keywords page. This can be a legitimate money-making strategy as long as you have original content to match these keywords but often these are used as the basis for 'scraper' or wikipedia-copy sites.
Problems and Worries
Google's AdSense program has recently been criticized for a phenomenon known as 'Click Fraud'. This is where one company clicks on a rival's search engine ads to drive up the rival company's costs.
Google's ads also use non-xhtml compliant methods to display the advert contents. As a result they break the xhtml strict validation on any pages that contain them. This is a problem for publishers who wish to adhere to w3c standarts throughout their website. This is due to the use of the document.write method, which is deprecated in favour of DOM manipulation in xhtml, and the use of the iframe element, which is deprecated because it ties markup to presentation. This can be worked around by keeping the AdSense code in a separate html4 file served as text/html and including this in the application/xml+xhtml file using the object element. But this is an elabourate work-around for a problem essentially caused by Google.