Web Design

Google adsense is the ‘publisher’ side of the google adwords advertising system that has seen google become THE most successful internet company EVER. Most people know what google do, but very few people actually understand how google makes its money, and what pay per click is all about.

The answer is very simple. When you do a search on google, you will find the search results are usually broken into three distinctive areas :

• The first couple of search results appear in a shaded colour (sponsored links)
• The remaining search results are regular google listings (‘natural results’)
• On the right hand side there is usually another row of search results (sponsored links)

Those two blocks of sponsored links are what make google the richest and most profitable internet company on the earth. Sponsored Links are ‘paid listings’. They are there because the owner of the website wants to get visitors to their website, and they are prepared to pay for this.

So for example, suppose I sell house insurance and I have a website all about house insurance. I want to get traffic to my website, and I am particularly interested in people who happen to be searching using the keyword ‘house insurance’. I set-up an account with google and specify how I want my ad to look and how much I am prepared to pay for each visitor (pay per click). Once the account is up and running, anytime someone searches for ‘house insurance’, my ad will appear either in the top results, or down the right hand side (providing that I have selected to pay enough money).

Google Adwords is based on an open market system with the company prepared to pay the most money being pushed higher up the lists. If you are going for a very competitive area but are not prepared to pay very much, then there is a chance that your adverts will never show up.

Google charges the advertiser each and everytime someone clicks on one of these sponsored adverts, and that is how they make most of their money.

Google Adsense – widening the market

So now that you understand how Google works, its time to take a look at how you can get in on this action! Google pretty soon realized that whilst the majority of people start their search on the search engine page, they quickly go on to look at other web pages such as informational web pages (such as this one for example!) These pages are not owned by google, but google would still like to have the opportunity to display adverts that may be of interest to the readers.

So Google setup the system called ‘Google Adsense’ which basically allows website publishers to provide a platform on which google can display its adverts. The publisher inserts a piece of code where they want their advert to appear, google then visits the page and figures out what the page is all about, and from that, they are able to select which adverts in their inventory would be suitable for them to display. And each time one of these adverts get clicked on, google charges the advertiser and passes on a percentage of the cost to the publisher.

So if you have a passion for a particular topic and you have some basic web skills, you could create a website (or even a blog) all about your chosen subject, then sign up to google adsense and start displaying the ads. A word of warning – under no circumstances should you ever click on your own adverts – by doing this you are effectively stealing money from googles customers – and believe me, google does not look favourably on people who try to steal money from its customers!