What Is Google AdSense?

AdSense
Google's AdSense program lets you sell advertising space for other people's ads on your website--and not just any ads that Google chooses, but ads that are relevant to your site's content pages. The service is free, and you earn money every time someone clicks on an ad.

In this article:

AdSense is a great program, though Google has given it a confusing name. If they'd called it AdSpace, you'd know right away what it's about: selling advertising space on your website. Despite the nomenclature issue, AdSense (www.google.com/adsense) has become popular with bloggers and other people who run noncommercial sites. You sign up, carve out some space on your pages for the ads (Figure 1), paste a few lines of code from Google into the HTML for your site, and let Google fill in your pages with color-coordinated ads. When somebody clicks one of the ads, Google pays you a fee (the amount varies, and the company doesn't disclose its payments).
Note: AdSense can be tricky for e-commerce sites because you can't fully control which ads appear on your site, and you wouldn't want to run ads for your competitors' merchandise right next to your own displays. You can, however, filter out some ads.
Though you can't decide which ads appear on your site, Google does a very nice job of assessing your pages and supplying ads that might interest your visitors. For example, if you run a site about the history of window treatments, Google is likely to dish up ads for vintage blinds and specialty curtain rods. That kind of relevance is important, because Google doesn't pay you when somebody sees an ad on your site; it pays you when somebody clicks an ad. So you want Google to fill your space with blurbs likely to interest your readers.
The $64,000 question is, of course, how much can you make? The exact answer is: it depends. If your site gets tons of visitors, and you focus on a narrow topic, there's a good chance Google will serve up ads that appeal to a lot of people hitting your site. For example, if you run a popular site devoted to mobile gadgetry, you might make enough to buy a new device every few months. If your site gets sporadic traffic, or more important, if it's not clearly about something, it may be hard for Google to supply highly relevant ads, and you might make enough to cover a box of paper clips every so often.

Figure 1. Top: On a Google results page, ads from the AdWords program are called sponsored links. They appear above and to the right of the regular results.

Bottom: On other web pages, ads come from the AdSense program and get the label, "Ads by Google."

Google AdSense Team Comes out with Glossary of AdSense Terms

If you're not sure what all that Google AdSense jargon means, you're not alone. Fortunately, the Google team has your back. A Google AdSense Glossary has been posted to Google and covers everything from account type to ad display terms to reports to technical terms.

For example:

Cost-per-click (CPC) The CPC is the amount an advertiser pays each time a user clicks on his/her ad. Google AdWords has a CPC pricing system.

If you've heard about PSAs and don't know what they are, go to this definition. What about Effective CPM? That's there too.

And like other "help" documents on Google's site, you can provide feedback to Google to inform them about whether the information given is helpful or not so that they can continue to release a product that addresses everyone's satisfaction.

Google AdSense Failing Non-US Customers

Increasing gripes by web sites, blogs and publishers, yet in practice still few real alternative choices remain in practice. Yet the market is open to moving to different models, and in particular ones that do not depend upon the US Dollar The Google advertising program for web sites has in the past been the favorite for easy publication of advertisements on web sites and blogs without their own established advertising programs. This is due to the easy configuration whereby javascript HTML code can be entered into web pages, and the Google advertisements are served according to the content on the page, so as to attempt to provide advertisements that are relevant to the readers of those pages. Plus points compared to other U.S. based advertisers have been the level of income from these advertisements which is shared between Google and the publishers, and being a large company with thousands of employees, publishers could be sure there would be no cheating. Statistics are also provided to assist in monitoring effectiveness. However, there are several factors that have during the past year made Google a less attractive proposition for serving advertisements on non-U.S. sites as well as those that have a more advanced technology or professionalism. One declining factor that is perhaps the most serious one for publishers outside the United States, is that the U.S. dollar is in free fall, and will never recover its value. This means that even if publishers work harder in publishing good content, the income from Google advertising goes down each month, due to the ever weaker dollar. If a European company will come along and provide the same service as Google AdSense, and charge in Euros, it would sweep up all non-U.S. websites in one go, without any doubt. Another factor, is that Google AdSense sometimes fails miserably to match advertising to the pages: this appears to be highly fluctuating, with some days doing well and at other parts of the month providing very poor advertisements. This is more a problem to web sites that are not providing content that are more sought after by advertisers, and is likely due to a shortage of advertising to be served for some sectors at some parts of the month. A further factor is that Google AdSense cares less about small to mid-sized publishers as they used to. Outstanding issues requiring a fix by Google due to bugs in their system, going for months without being addressed, appear not to be uncommon, unlike a much faster and pro-active customer service response a year ago. Such problems are important to publishers who do not want to see white spaces where Google Ads have failed to "collapse" as they should, or other bugs that prevent fast page loading when Google AdSense servers are slow. The effect on their visitors can be important, as well as on their income. To Google however, these appear not to be priority issues. Further proofs of Google now relying on a now well-known and established brand name and product of AdSense are that they are as of now ending their referrals program whereby anyone is rewarded by a payment after bringing them a new customer who reaches a certain level of income. Naturally this is a business decision which is sensible to Google, as referrals are no longer important nor likely the result of a web site as much as their now well known brand name. It is however a further indication that Google is content with the way things are going, and is concentrating more on the larger customers than the smaller ones. It is not uncommon for companies to start off on the backs of millions of small consumers, namely the smaller and mid-sized web sites that were the foundation for the growth of Google AdSense and AdWords, as well as individual bloggers and advertisers, only to then move into the more lucrative market of larger corporations. It is far easier to make money from higher value payments over fewer customers and therefore not face the 'customer service' nightmare that goes with proving communications to millions of clients. However, this coming year will tell whether Google AdSense's increasing unpopularity among small and medium sized publishers will cause any problems or concerns, and what other options will in practice present themselves to such publishers. Mathaba News Network is already considering phasing out Google advertising in favour of in-house managed advertising and use of the OpenAds platform to serve those ads, and even to other models of income generation more favorable to a non-U.S.-based publisher.

Google Modifies Adsense Referral Program, Again

As a response to Adsense publishers outrage over the previously announced change in the Adsense referral program, Google is modifying the program policy yet again. Whereas a week ago, Adsense publishers?? earnings would depend on their location, it would depend on the location of the users referred by the publishers.

As stated in the recent Inside Adsense post:

The changes to referrals promoting AdSense will now depend on where your users are located, regardless of your location as a publisher. You??ll earn $100 for every user you refer to AdSense who is located in North America, Latin America or Japan when they generate $100 in AdSense revenue within 180 days and they remove all payment holds. You??ll no longer be paid for users you refer who are located elsewhere. These changes will go into effect the last week of January.

So, it means that even if you are not located in the said regions, you can still continue to earn from Adsense referral unit for as long as you target users from those regions. You would need to make sure that the targetting settings on your Adsense account is targatted towards users from the said regions.

All is not lost then for those publishers who earn a lot in referring Adsense from their blogs/sites. This in a way erases the discrimination towards publishers who are not located in the three regions. What is not clear still is why give earnings only for referred users coming from North America, Latin America and Japan.

At any rate, in addition to this announcement, Google Adsense also took the opportunity to announce yet again some changes on its referral program. This time for Google Pack and Firefox. From $2 for every referral of Google Pack Google is reducing it down to $1 a referral. The same rate would apply for referred users coming from China. And Google??s reason, its all part of a continous evaluation process of the referral program to make them effective and sustainable.