What is Adsense ?

Question What is Adsense? Should I use this service? How many visitors are needed to afford the program?

The Adsense program is an easy way to make money out of a website or a weblog… You have just to put a small JavaScript code in your pages, and wait for the revenues…

What are Adsense and Adword?

Adsense is an advertising program for any Web site, even a small personal weblog. The type of ads varies: contextual ads, search field, and sponsoring.

Ads make revenus on either a per-click or per-thousand-impressions basis.
Adword is the complementary program for advertisers. They have to choose how much they want to spend for each click on the advertisement which appears on websites. They can choose the keywords and in some case the website to display the ads. If your website is choosen by advertisers, there are chance you gain high revenues for each click.

Conditions

There is not special condition to be admitted to the Adsense program, but not to have been previously banished! Of course, Google can refuse to publish on your website if it lacks content or traffic.
It is better to wait until you reach 1000 unique visitors per day before to subscribe, otherwise your incomes will be rather low and the chance to be banished rather high.

Programs

Advertisement may have the form of a graphical banner, or a set of textual announces. This is choosen by the user unless it chooses for text or image.

Contextual advertisements

A contextual advertisement matches the content of the page. It is based on the keywords found in the page but also in the keywords in the links to the page.
Page are crawled by a special robot named Mediabot, that is different from Googlebot, the search engine crawler.
The revenues varies between 1 cent and 3 dollars or more according to the pertinence of the ads and the balance between offers and demands.
The more the ads ares related to the content of the page, the more revenues increase…

Referrals

The rules of referrals are different from that of contextual ads. The amount earned is fixed at start and it is only made when an action is performed, not at the click. The action may be a download, a subscribing to a service, or the purchase of a product depending the furnisher. The user could promote the products in referral, not that of contextual ads.

Search

When the user place the Adsense search field in its pages, announces are inserted into the results of searches and the user makes money when visitors click on these ads.

Adsense for feeds

Images holding ads are inserted into RSS or Atom feeds according and the announces are choosen according to its content. The feeds must have at least 100 subscribers to be elected.

Videos

The videos are advertisements themselves. This is an alternative to images.

Mobiles

The ads are displayed on mobile phones.

The rules of the program

The first rule is this one: never click on the ads on your own website and never ask your friends to click on the ads.
The second is: never make incentive to click, never say your visitor to click to the ads, never put pretty image near the ads to convince visitors the ads is dedicated to the image.

These clicks are invalid, they are not paid and your account may be closed.

Note that if you want to test the ads on your site, Google provide you a set of tools to test your advertisements without risk that your account is closed for invalid clicks.
Google know when you clicked accidentally, do not send a message to present excuses, only Google will judge if it is accidental or intentional.

Look at things to avoid with Adsense for a more extensive set of rules and on the Google site for the term of use.

Increasing revenues

You can increase incomes in several ways:

1) Increase clicks on the ads. The number of clicks may increase by a better placement of ads. Top of the text (not of the page) and left of the page are the best placements. If the content is short, the ad should be placed after the text. If it is long, put it at top or in the middle. See also Placement in a classic page.

2) Create new pages. Very often, creating new pages increases incomes. Pages about news often make good incomes, but it is necessary to be indexed quickly, and since robots of search engines adapt theirs visits to the activity of the site, you have to create continuously new pages!

3) Keywords. The relationship between supply in keyword and demand determines the value of advertisements. Put ads on pages where keywords have high demand and related to business, not on other pages. Remove ads where they are not related to the content of the page.

But avoid MFA

Google has recently changed its policy about MFA. MFA are websites Made For Adsense. The content is intentionally very poor, the pages are full of advertisements. Since visitor don’t found any valuable content, they go to the ads to get it. Until the account is disabled!

Success stories

Google on its website displays a list of success stories with Adsense.
Here are some example of incomes that are made with only Adsense and these amounts are confirmed by Google. These are not big website with hundred of persons to work on it but only personal site with just one or two webmasters.

DigitalPoint.com is a website publishing articles for webmasters. Its income is $10.000 a month. You know Digg.com, maybe you have published an article on it, its income is $250.000 a month.
And PlentyOfFish.com, a free dating service makes $300000 a month. Why to have paid service?

Payment

The user may be paid by check, virement on in other forms. The rules of payment have changed recently. When incomes reaches 10$, a procedure is stated to perform some checking about the identity of the user, or the validity of his bank account. A code is sent at his address and a small amount to his account.
The user is paid only when his overall earning reach $ 100 at end of a month, and the next month.

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