Google's Adsense program allows webmasters of any level to earn revenue from their websites. This is done by placing a piece of javascript code (currently the only option) on your web page that will show advertisements of various editable sizes and should your users click on those adverts you will be paid a portion of the revenue. The ways to maximise site revenue seems to have given way to an "Adsense Fever" and general thinking has switched from "Build Site then Get Advertisers" to "Get Adsense Account then Build Site".
Firstly a quick preview on the ins and outs of a Google Adsense Account. What is Adsense? It is management centre for webmasters who want to display text and image adverts on their website that are automatically geared to showing advertisers relevant to the content of that site or individual page.
Adsense advertising takes two forms: banners and search. Each banner comes in various regular sizes that you would expect and can display either text adverts, images or videos and can be colour customised to better integrate into your own design, font choice is fixed though. Adsense for search takes two variations in itself, you can place a search box on a page that either redirects to the Google country specific search engine of your choice or it can redirect to a bespoke results page on your own site showing Googles results. These results pages will have advertisers on them also. Each type of integration use a piece of script (currently javascript, no php yet) that you place in the location you want to show the ads/results. You make money whenever a user clicks on one of these adverts. These earnings are dictated by how much the advertiser has paid to be listed in the banner or searches and by what percent of the revenue you are allocated (this percentage is not openly discussed by big G). Each click is monitored through tracking systems that attempt to eliminate fraudulent clicks and the results can be seen in the reports section of accounts. See the terms of service (TOS) for more details on fraud. This tracker will let you see your click through rates (CTR) which is the percentage of people who have viewed your ads and clicked on one of them. You will also see how much you have earned per day and can create separate "channels" which allow you to track the performance of individual websites or even pages. But
what is adsense to the website user? Well, here:
With that in mind I'd like to bring up the less popular theory of building a decent site that gets lots of traffic and lots of clicking over a spam site that gets less traffic (because of a crowded market) with slightly higher paid clicking. Any successful affiliate, discussion forum and even the
Google Adsense website will tell you this. †† Any person looking to make a quick buck by selling you ebooks and out of date keyword lists will tell you differently. Do I add sense to the situation? (Oh come on, surely you've heard worse puns?)
Adsense Alternatives? There are two main reasons that you will be looking for an alternative to
Adsense. Either you have been kicked off of the program, or all you get is public service ads and/or really low earnings from each clicker. Well, although popular, adsenses strength lies in it's relevance matching capabilities. If your site deals with several products or subject then chances are your ads will never really match the page's content and therefore hardly anyone will clickthrough and therefore you won't
make money with any form of contextual advertising. This is particularly common with blogs and forums. Sometimes having just 2-3 good image banner ads through affiliate networks such as Tradedoubler or AffiliateWindow can results in far higher earnings that you ever could get with the ad matching programming. Plus, good selection of advertisers can add visual value to your page, a cluster of text ads can generally detract from such. We have sites with just contextual ads, some with just affiliates banners and some with both. The tip is to change them each month and check the results until you find what works. What's popular isn't always what's best.