What is Google Adsense?

Do you know what Google Adsense is ?

Sometimes we cannot take things for granted, for example, one of my friends for several years spoke to me and I just realised that all this time, he though Adwords was Adsense. Shocking! Well shocking to me anyway.
That’s why I would like to create a section here. A beginner’s guide to Google Adsense. Everything a beginner need to know on Google Adsense.

When you are searching with Google you will see some results on the right hand side of the search results. These are called Google Adwords. They’re advertisements which people pay for. Everytime you click on the adwords, the advertiser is charged a certain amount. This is because the adverts are paid for on a as click basis. For example, if 3 people clicked on your advert 3 times, then you will be charged 3 times. This is what is called “Pay per click” or PPC.

Google Adwords are used for marketers who cannot get high on the search engines naturally. Therefore why bother fiddling about with the website where you can pay for the rankings. Of course, the more you pay per click, the higher your ad will appear up the search engine page

On top of the Beginner’s Guide To Google Adsense, maybe I should write one for Adwords as well

Adsense are ads which look similar to Adwords but they can be customised with several options such as the background colour, border colour, colour of the fonts, colour of the hyper link and also the size of the box.

Adsense can be put on a website and it will display the appropriate Adwords which is related to the content. This works very much like the Google search page results. Therefore one of the most important message for the Beginner’s Guide To Google Adsense is build a website which contains valuable information. Adsense will pick up on the keywords of the content and will display the appropriate ads.




AdSense is an ad serving program run by Google. Website owners can enroll in this program to enable text, image and, more recently, video advertisements on their sites. These ads are administered by Google and generate revenue on either a per-click or per-thousand-impressions basis. Google is also currently beta-testing a cost-per-action based service.

Google utilizes its search technology to serve ads based on website content, the user's geographical location, and other factors. Those wanting to advertise with Google's targeted ad system may sign up through AdWords. 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.

Currently, the AdSense 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.)

Many sites use AdSense to monetize their content and some webmasters work hard to maximize their own AdSense income. They do this in three ways:

They use a wide range of traffic generating techniques including but not limited to online advertising.
They build valuable content on their sites which attracts AdSense ads which pay out the most when they get clicked.

They use copy on their websites that encourage clicks on ads. Note that Google prohibits people from using phrases like "Click on my AdSense ads" to increase click rates. Phrases accepted are "Sponsored Links" and "Advertisements".

The source of all AdSense income is the AdWords program which in turn has a complex pricing model based on a Vickrey second price auction, in that it commands an advertiser to submit a sealed bid (not observable by competitors). Additionally, for any given click received, advertisers only pay one bid increment above the second-highest bid.



History

The underlying technology behind AdSense was derived originally from WordNet and Simpli, a company started by the founder of Wordnet — George A. Miller — and a number of professors and graduate students from Brown University, including James A. Anderson, Jeff Stibel and Steve Reiss. A variation of this technology utilizing Wordnet was developed by Oingo, a small search engine company based in Santa Monica founded in 1998] Oingo focused on semantic searches rather than brute force string searches.[3] Oingo changed its name to Applied Semantics, which was then bought by Google for $102 million in April 2003, to replace a similar system being developed in house.


AdSense for feeds

In May 2005, Google unveiled AdSense for feeds, 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, more quality feeds to choose from".

AdSense for feeds works by inserting images into a feed. When the image is displayed by the reader/browser, Google writes the ad content into the image that it returns. The ad content 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

A companion to the regular AdSense program, AdSense for search lets website owners place Google search boxes on their pages. When a user searches the web or the site with the search box, Google shares any ad revenue it makes from those searches with the site owner. However, only if the ads on the page are clicked, the publisher is paid. Adsense does not pay publishers for mere searches.


How AdSense works

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.


Abuse

Some webmasters 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). Possibly the most popular form of such "AdSense farms" are splogs ("spam blogs"), which are centered around known high-paying keywords. Many of these sites use content from other web sites, such as Wikipedia, to attract visitors. These and related approaches are considered to be search engine spam and can be reported to Google.

There have also been reports of Trojans engineered to produce fake Google ads that are formatted to look like legitimate ones. The Trojan Horse apparently downloads itself onto an unsuspecting computer through a web page and then replaces the original ads with its own set of malicious ads.


Criticism

Due to concerns about click fraud, Google AdSense has been criticized by some Search engine optimization firms as a large source of what Google calls "invalid clicks" in which one company clicks on a rival's search engine ads to drive up its costs. Some publishers have been blocked by Google, complaining that little justification or transparency was provided.

To help prevent click fraud, publishers can choose from a number of click tracking programs. These programs will display detailed information about the visitors who click on the AdSense advertisements. Publishers can use that data to determine if they've been a victim of click fraud or not. There are a number of such commercial scripts available for purchase. An open source alternative is AdLogger.

Google has also come under fire for allowing AdWords advertisers to abuse trademarks. In 2004, Google started allowing advertisers to bid on any search terms, including the trademarks of their competitors.

The payment terms for AdSense customers have also been criticized. Google withholds payment until an account reaches US$100 , but many small content providers require a long time - years in many cases - to build up this much AdSense revenue. These pending payments are recorded on Google's balance sheet as "accrued revenue share". At the close of its 2006 fiscal year, the sum of all these small debts amounted to a little over US $370 million - cash that Google is able to invest but which effectively belongs to its customers.