Google Adsense: What Is Google Adsense, Anyway?

Google Adsense is a contextual advertising program that allows advertisers and publishers to work together for a win-win outcome for all parties concerned. Through publishers or webmasters who rent space on their websites, advertisers can get "contextual" or highly relevant advertising out to web surfers who visit sites that interest them. Google will place various forms of advertising on sites, and depending upon the number of ad impressions or click throughs, an advertiser will pay a certain amount to show their advertising messages.

The Google technology is cutting-edge and was, until a few years ago, impossible to attain. However, utilizing complex Google algorithms, the spiders who are robotic readers visit various websites and calculate the number of words versus the number of times a certain keyword or phrase is present. This tells the spider and Google which types of advertising to deliver. The relevancy of the advertising is directly related to a visitor clicking on the advertiser's message.

Google maintains the network and has final say over what and how many times an ad will run. The web publisher decides how many and where the advertising will appear on their website. The advertiser pays a certain amount per click or 1000 impressions and the ad is delivered a certain number of times based on daily budget. Adsense publishers and advertisers can use a plethora of different delivery mediums including: link ads, content ads, picture ads, RSS feed ads, mobile ads and, in its beginning stages, advertising via YouTube.

In addition to the type of advertising available, the advertising can also be delivered in a wide variety of sizes from the smaller 125x125 on up to the larger 336x280 ads. The shapes range from banner, to vertical skyscraper advertising, ads for getting advertisers to use the service, a search feature that also pays and straight referral bonuses.

Recently Google has allowed users to publish advertising in a whole new way. As mentioned previously, YouTube advertising is taking Google Adsense by storm. Video is the next big medium, so it's no wonder
that advertisers are following suits. Many web publishers are placing video Adsense on their websites and blogs to help grab the attention of surfers and add interest, motion and color to their website. In addition, these ads also garner the webmaster more income.

Adsense publishing is an up and down income with many variables going in to whether the webmaster has a good month or a bad one. While some websites have a large amount of traffic, others are smaller niche markets with very specific advertising being delivered. In some cases, the smaller, niche intensive websites earn more money than the larger, broad-spectrum business models, because the advertising in smaller niches has advertisers paying 10x the amount of money that others are paying.

A case in point is the "Mesothelioma" niche. There are tons of websites up with advertising and content related to the asbestos cancer, Mesothelioma. This is because one click on an ad for a lawyer who specializes in Mesothelioma cases would give the webmaster $4-$5.00 per click while others were paying 10 cents per click. While that is no longer the case, Mesothelioma does still get a pretty hefty cost per click.

Adsense provides many tools for their web publishers and advertisers to use in order to maximize their earning potential. Google also provides a full training school for serious business concerns looking to become certified in Google Adwords promotion. While this program is for the big guns, the little guns are just as welcome to work through the program and it is completely free with both video and text printouts.

To gauge how the Adsense earning are going, and to figure out trends and track which sites are doing better than others monetarily, many web publishers will not only use their Adsense publisher's ID, but also add a Google Adsense channel to each of the ads that they generate. In this way, they can keep up with which sites are doing well and which are not and make adjustments accordingly.

Webmasters who are looking to earn more revenue from Google Adsense are now, more than ever, able to get web visitors who are targeted and ready to visit, read and possibly click through to products and services that are niche specific and delivered by the Adsense network.