What is Google Adsense?
If you look at the Internet a few years ago, you will see that advertising was done in a very similar way to other types of media like television, or in fact, more like what you see in a newspaper. You would enter a site, and at a certain point you would see a banner (often quite large and very large), which would present and advertise for any company that would pay for additions to your space.
But there was a problem with this kind of advertising. It was not really a question of exploiting the fact that the additions were not in a newspaper, but rather were presented on the Internet. You have probably noticed a lot of things like this on the pages you have been browsing. You look for a watch in an online store, but you get a banner that advertises a car.
Although you might, at a later time want to buy a car, right now you are looking for a watch and it would surely have been nice if the banner advertised a watch, because you would probably have clicked on it. This is also what Google people thought, so they had a great idea. It’s known as Google AdSense, and it’s known as a targeted advertising program.
What you do (as a web designer/ website owner) is, instead of jumping through hoops to get a banner on your site that your visitors won’t even care about, is that you just allocate a certain area of the screen. You then sign up for the Google AdSense program, insert a small snippet of code into your webpage, and Google ensures that in the location you specify, a banner will appear, featuring relevant additions to your site’s content.
It is very easy for Google to do this because Google is a search engine company. It searches for keywords in your page, searches a database of websites to find those related to what is on your page and hop: a targeted ad. You (the webmaster) receive a fee for each visitor who clicks on an adsense banner on your site. Now, this is bound to happen more often than with a traditional banner because people are really interested in what’s in that banner (otherwise, they wouldn’t be on your page right?).
But it also does wonders for people who want to advertise. And that’s the same reason. The best thing about Google AdSense is that all the content in a banner is relevant. This relevance is the key to the success of the programs, and also the reason why everyone stays happy. The advertiser placed a relevant ad, the publisher earns money from their content and Google takes their share.
Of course, as always, Google has set high standards for its AdSense program, in terms of appearance and functionality. You can’t have more than two banners on your website and Google only inserts text into those banners. An additional advantage is that AdSense advertising is much less annoying than regular advertising. But it also means that you should better position the banner, because it is possible that visitors may miss it completely.
So, ultimately, Google AdSense is an advertising program that is unique because the ads are relevant to the content on the site. Anyone who wants to advertise pays Google for it. Anyone who wants to place ads on their site does so via AdSense, being paid by Google in the process. All transactions are done by Google, and advertisers and publishers have access to statistics that help them understand and moderate the effectiveness of their campaign.
The whole process is elegant, simple and efficient from anyone in the chain, from site visitors to advertisers, and this is one of the reasons why Google is known for its innovation and new thinking.