What is Google Adsense?

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What is Google AdSense? If you looked at the internet a few years ago, you'd see advertising very similar to other media, like television, or, in fact, more like what you see in newspapers.

You'd visit a website, and in some places you'd see banners (often quite numerous and very large), which would be advertising for whatever company paid to add them to your space. But there was one problem with this type of advertising. It didn't really exploit the fact that the ads weren't in newspapers, but were instead served across the internet.

You've probably seen plenty of things like this over the years. You're browsing an online store, looking for a watch, but you get a banner advertising a car.

While you might, at some point later, want to buy a car, now you're looking for a watch, and it would definitely be nice if the banner advertised a watch, because you'd probably click on it.

Well, that's exactly what the folks at Google were thinking, so they came up with a killer idea. This is 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 some banners on your site that your visitors won't even notice, you simply allocate some screen space.

You then sign up for the Google AdSense program, insert a small piece of code into your web page, and Google ensures that the banners will appear in the locations you specify, adding relevance to the content of your site.

This is very easy for Google to do because Google is a search engine company. It looks for keywords on your page, searches its database of sites to find ones related to whatever is on your page, and presto: targeted ads.

You (the webmaster) get paid for every visitor who clicks on an AdSense banner on your site. Now, this will definitely happen more often than with regular banners because people are genuinely interested in what's on the banner (otherwise, they wouldn't be on your page, would they?).

But it also works wonders for those who want to advertise. And for the same reason. The greatest thing about Google AdSense is that all the content in the banners is relevant.

This relevance is key to the program's success, and it's also the reason everyone stays happy. Advertisers get relevant ads placed, publishers make money from their content, and Google takes its cut.

Of course, as usual, Google has set some high standards for the AdSense program, in terms of appearance and functionality. You can't have more than two such banners on your website, and Google only inserts text into those banners.

So, an added benefit is that AdSense ads are much less obtrusive than regular ads. But this also means you have to position your banners better, as visitors might miss them altogether.

So, ultimately, Google AdSense is a unique advertising program 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 through AdSense, getting paid by Google in the process.

All transactions are run through Google, and advertisers and publishers get access to statistics that help them understand and moderate the effectiveness of their campaigns.

The entire process is elegant, simple, and effective for everyone in the value chain, from site visitors to advertisers, and it's one of the reasons Google is known for its innovation and fresh thinking.