AdSense

Google AdSense

What is AdSense?

AdSense is Google's free program that allows web publishers/owners to place relevant ads on their websites and earn money. It allows web publishers/owners to earn money whenever someone clicks on the Google ads displayed on their pages.

Personally, I find AdSense quite easy to deploy but less easy to understand. That is because it is quite easy to get your HTML code for AdSense, plonk it onto your web page(s), and shortly after you will see the ads appear on your page(s).

Just deploying AdSense ads to your site does not mean that they are "optimized" - i.e. earning you the best revenue they can. Revenue stream from ads are significantly affected by the choice in format, size, color as well as their positioning on the pages. And then there is the "challenge" of producing relevant reports to view and track performance of the ads that are running on your site. And this falls significantly into the realm of "channels".

In other words, to really have a good chance of optimizing your revenue stream via the placement of Google ads on your site, there is a quite a few things you need to know. I presume a lot of web publishers using AdSense are like me: impatient and eager to get something on your site with minimal amount of time "wasted" on reading, then letting the ads run with only occasional cursory checks on how they are doing. We all seem to lead such busy lives and we have 10,000 other things to do - so who has time to read through the tons of (helpful) material that Google provides to help us achieve our goals.

While not claiming to be a Google AdSense expert, I have noticed that once in a while, when I make the concerted effort of reading up and following some of Google's suggestions, my revenue from Google AdSense has been known to jump by 300% or more. However, the difficulty is that there is so much still to read and learn and know. And each time I put aside time to do some reading and research, I get sidetracked by the multitute of useful links. And then after hours of reading around and around the same or similar pages, I feel all lost, there is still no clear picture in my head and I give up; leave my ads "unoptimized", and go back to just whistling in the dark for more clicks and revenue.

Hence the purpose of writing this series of Google AdSense articles is to try and provide you (and me) with some coherent, logical, sequential way of doing things so that you don't go through this protracted, tedious, and ineffective ways of doing things.

My Structure of Google Articles

It is very confusing if you are trying to simultaneously juggle setting up an optimized AdSense, trying to learn all the information you need to know, as well as minimizing the time you need to set aside to do all these. Google's steps, help, and tips are all interlinked and while the information is generally very good, it does mean that you are constantly jumping from one hyperlinked information page to another, just trying to find and absorb what you can use now so you can complete your task.

So I am going to structure the sequence of these articles as if you are a newbie:

1. step-by-step, walk you through the steps from seting up an AdSense (example) to getting the code for your pages. (Note: the steps will be highlight in a yellow box for easy reading.)
2. I will simultaneously provide the information (that you will most need now) to setup AdSense
3. A list of references for further reading will be provided at the end of each page. (You can read this at some later date. It will not be necessary for you to read them all now. Similarly, you do not need to jump to all the hyperlinks provided inline on the pages. They are provided for you as extra information and you can come back to read them later.)
4. At the end of the series, there will be a Summary of the steps (in one place) as a quick refresher.

Joining AdSense and How much does AdSense cost?

Google's AdSense is free to join.

AdSense Setup Overview

Okay, lets say you have applied and set up an AdSense account and you are now eager to place some Google targeted ads on your web pages. What do you do now?

Getting to AdSense Setup Page - setting up the AdSense 'shell'

To get the AdSense HTML code to put on your pages, you need to set up an AdSense "shell" configuration - what colour you want the ads to be, what size, how many ads, and where you want to place these ads. You don't actually specify the ads themselves. Rather, you are setting up the "shell" so that Google can drive ads into those allocated "shells" that are relevant to the contents of your pages.

AdSense Sub-Categories

Google offers AdSense in a number of sub-categories - to suit the needs of your site as to where you want to place the ads, whether the Google ads are to appear on standard web pages or mobile sites, etc.

At the time of writing, Google is offering 5 sub-categories of AdSense (click image on right to view fully). It is possible to use more than one of these sub-categories. The current sub-categories are:

• AdSense for Content
• AdSense for Search
• AdSense for Feeds
• AdSense for Domains
• AdSense for Mobile Content

At the moment, as I am only employing AdSense for Content and AdSense for Search, I will only be writing on these two sub-categories for now. And I will be writing with specific reference to Drupal sites as that is what I currently use the most.

Let's go to the next step: AdSense for Content.

References

• Google's What is AdSense page
• Google's AdSense Programme Policies - including information on types and number of AdSense ads you can have on each page.