Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Adsense: What It Is And How It Works

By Darrel Hawes

Adsense is a service owned and operated by Google. Adsense lets website owners earn advertising dollars by showing ads on their websites. Google supplies the text, image and video ads that show on websites in the Adsense network. Which advertisements appear is determined by the keywords and content that exists on the website.

For many website owners, the Google Adsense program is a big part of their advertising arsenal. Adsense's popularity can traced to at least three factors. Ads in the Adsense program normally do not disrupt the flow of reading as do similar ads which people are used to interacting with online. Not to mention relevance; due to Google's system for matching ads to the the specific content on websites, the ads can be expected to closely match the theme of the page on which the ad is found.

Website owners generate advertising revenue when a visitor to their site clicks on an ad on their webpage. The amount earned depends on the ad. The revenue might be just a few cents or a dollar per click, or even more. Adsense ads originate from the Adwords network of advertisers.

Website owners might be tempted to click on ads on their own sites, as clicks earn them money. As one may expect, Google has methods for detecting actions like this, which is referred to as "click fraud." When a webpage is displaying signs of click fraud, a website owner might be banned from the Adsense for life.

Websites encourage clickthroughs by three strategies:

The use of several varieties of traffic generating techniques to get more visitors to their websites.

The use of excellent content on their websites, with the goal of displaying higher-revenue generating advertisements.

Effective sales copy which moves visitors to click on ads. Common phrases include "Sponsored Links" and "Advertisements". As you might expect, Google's Adsense terms do not allow such statements as "Click on these links". - 15478

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