Getting Started With Google Adsense

It should come to no surprise to most of you that amongst the number one monetizing forms one can use is Google Adsense – a strong advertisement method that automatically targets the content of your site and displays ad links accordingly. Super fast and pretty good, if you have a large website to play around with!

Of course the good ol’ giant has some flaws (although we will not discuss those in this article) but for the most Adsense will do a lot for your webpage. And nowadays the concept of having small text ads on your site is pretty much accepted and no one should be to upset about it.

How does Adsense work?

Well, first off you get to sign up with your site and the merry gang at Google will then get back to you if your site has been accepted or not. One tip here is to apply only with finished web pages or pages that has some decent content on them at least, it’s always boring to get rejected just because you were to trigger-happy!

When you are finally onboard, first of congratulations! Now it’s time to see what this program can do for you! As we wrote about earlier Adsense supplies advertisement to your visitors based on the content of your page, this means that if your page is about used cars, most likely the ads will display advertisement for.. used cars. Most of the time this will not be a problem since most pages are about one subject but in some cases it can be a bit messy (if you run a news page or link page you will have less control over shown ads). Why is this a problem you say? Well basically because visitors tend to click on ads that are closely related to the issue/content they are looking for. If your visitors are on your site reading about computer games, they’re more likely to be attracted to ads about computer games – now if you are running a site with changing content but still in some niche, you might get visitors that usually come to your site to read about computer games, but on this occasion you’ve pasted a news article about.. say cars, and then Adsense might show ads about cars. Not so likely that visitors will click on them, meaning less income for you.

This is no biggie however, there are numerous ways around this (defining what content Adsense should target is one) but I just wanted to give you a briefing how Adsense works and displays ads. Next step is choosing what type of ads you’d like to display on your page. My recommendation here would be to go with as much integration you possible can. Although, and this is a pretty BIG one, don’t ever try to fool your visitors (or Adsense either) just to get clicks! First off, your visitors will hate you for ever and eternal damnation might wait for you, but more important still, Adsense might throw you out and ban you.. not that funny since it’s no stroll in the park to get back in again.

(If you’re uncertain about your integration, just send Adsense an email just to make sure)

Different types of Adsense ads?

Currently there are three different ad formats available on Adsense:

Adsense for Content – displays ads (in text or banners, or both) on your page depending on your content/seo/links/and a lot more stuff, just to define what the hell your page is really about

Adsense for Search – A very smart little search bar integration letting your visitors search google and your site – while you get paid per search.

Adsense recommendations – Get your visitors to start using some of Googles own products and earn some cash along the way. You got Adsense, Adwords, Firefox with Google toolbar and Picasa to choose from.

Adsense for content

On this article I will mostly talk about Adsense for Content though, since that is, atleast in my opinion the system that works best.

So now you got your Adsense account up and running, time to choose your style! As I said above I would recommend Adsense for content since this is by far the easiest way of getting targeted ads on your site that your visitors might actually click on! First you get to choose if you want to have text ads or banners (images), or a mixture of both.

My recommendation here would be to go with text ads, small discreet stuff that works very well integrated on your pages. I would go for the banner images, not just yet at least but I will get back to using banners later on.

Try to pick a size that works for you, and be very mindful about the colors you can choose from, I would definitely recommend that you try to use the same, or similar colors on the ads that you have on your own links and a href stuff. Also try to give the ads some space and if you can, give them a good position, maybe somewhere in your text block?

Next up is definitely Text Links, these are small works of wonder and works very well if places right. I will get back to these small wonders later on this page but for now the direction you should be aiming for is trying to integrate them, and if you can even try to give them the space like you would for a normal navigation menu! (but as I said before, don’t try to be a smart ass and hide the links or make them too tricky, sure you might earn some nickels on it but the chances that Google won’t like your stunt makes it NOT worth it.)