Understanding Google Adsense Is It Right For Your Business
October 8, 2009 by Ron
Filed under Contextual Marketing
Google AdSense was the first major contextual advertising program.
A large part of Google’s earnings come from its share of the contextual advertisements served on the millions of Web Pages that run the AdSense program. Website owners can sign up for AdSense to enable, text, image, and even video advertisements on their sites.
How Does Google Adsense Work?…
Revenue is generated on either a per click (the advertiser pays search engines and other Internet publishers for a single click on its advertisement that brings one visitor to its website) or per impression (an online advertisement impression is a single appearance of an advertisement on a web page) basis.
Google AdSense has become a popular method of placing advertising on websites because the advertisements are not as intrusive as banners, and the content of the advertisements is generally relevant to the website.
The main reasons websites have for using AdSense to help may their sites content alone generate revenue. Small Websites have especially found AdSense useful for increasing ad revenue as they typically lack the means for developing advertising sales programs and sales people.
How Do I Add Google Adsense To My Website?
Google AdSense works by providing the approved webmasters with JavaScript code that, when inserted into web pages, displays relevant advertisements from the Google inventory of advertisers. Because the advertisements are more targeted, they are more likely to be clicked, which generates revenue for the owner of the website, as well the server of the ad itself.
For contextual advertisements, Google’s servers use a cache (a large storage of relevant data) of the page to determine a set of high-value keywords. If keywords have been cached already, advertisements are offered for those keywords based on AdWords bidding system.
For site-targeted advertisements, the advertiser chooses the page(s) to show the ads on, and then pays based on a Cost Per Mille, or CPM (the publisher has to only load the advertising on his website and show it to his visitors in order to get paid commission), or the price advertisers choose to pay for every thousand advertisements displayed.
For referrals, Google would add money to the advertiser’s account when visitors either download the referred software or subscribe to the referred service, however this system was discontinued in August of 2008.
Is Google Adsense The Right Choice For You?
AdSense has attracted its share of criticism over the years. The main area of concern involves it’s susceptibility to click fraud. Some search engine optimization firms claim that it is the source of what are called “invalid clicks”, i.e. one in which one company clicks on a rival’s search engine advertisements to drive up the other company’s costs.
Fraudulent Google Adsense Clicks Can Get You Removed
Google™ claims that to avoid invalid clicks that they remove publishers daily from their partner network. Google AdSense publishers can choose from a variety of click-tracking programs available for purchase that display detailed information about the visitors who click on the AdSense advertisements. Publishers can use these types of programs to discover whether they falling victim to click fraud.
When it comes to webmasters who are using Google Adsense it has been criticized by many. Google will withhold payment until an account reaches US $100, but many who have only a small amount of traffic drawn to their content it may possibly require years in some instances to amass this amount of AdSense revenue to see a payout.
If you close your account, Google will pay all earned revenue greater than US $10.
To be truly successful with Adsense you will need to build a content site that is very targeted towards your sites theme and then ensure that you have the ability to build many back links to your site to generate the massive amounts of traffic you need to see a decent size payout on the Google Adsense.
As an example of this I have a site that receives more than 3000 visitors a day and has made as much as $70 dollars a day on Adsense advertising.
If I were selling an e-book for example, lets say the e-book is worth $20 dollars and using the average statistics of when a purchase will occur which is around 1 in every 200 visitors if I divide that into my 3000 visitors then I am making 15 sales a day at $20 for a total of $300 a day.
What would you rather be marketing? Your Own Product or Service or getting cents in the dollar.
Google Adsense is good if you do not have a product or service to sell or are just interested in funding your online hobby but if you are looking at using Google Adsense as a way of creating a business then you will be very disappointed.
Adsense is the best paying contextual advertising out there but there are also some other good paying ad programs like Infolinks and Adbrite.
Thanks for your insight on affiliate marketing. I have a few tips of my own to offer. First, realize this is not an overnight business. It might take a few months after you start for the real income to start flowing in, especially when using whitehat methods such as SEO to bring in traffic. Second, resist the urge to promote every single cool looking offer or brand new product you find. It is better to focus on one product or service at a time, researching and finding everything you can about thet product or service, and throwing everything you can at the promotion of that product. Once promotion of a particular product or service is bringing in steady income for you, then you can consider promoting another product. Third, it is very important that you research and create a business plan before you start, and then always stick with that plan while you work. Affiliate marketing takes work, but if done correctly, everyone can make some money.
For now google adsense is the most popular paying contextual advertising but these days with it’s bunch of policies, applying for google adsense account is a bit tight. I would also like to thank you Madelyn for sharing with us other paying advertisers such as adbrite and infolinks, because right now, a lot of people only know adsense. I hope that with your information, they will give these two advertisers a try.
I have been using AdSense on most of my niche blogs and they’re definitely one of the easiest way to make money for me so far
Good point you have there. What if you combine both? What if you are selling something on your site, and as well as advertising something else? Do you think that will work?
Hi Brandenberry
That all depends on the product or service you offer. Maybe if you had a high end product you were selling that not everyone can afford, then you have another product you can advertise as an alternative to the one you are selling and maybe receive a commission for your efforts.