Adsense Basics

[GT Web]

Webmasters have been using Google's Adsense program for several years now and its success is one of the main reasons Google is now worth approximately $150 billion. Adsense allows website publishers to place ads on their website for a portion of the advertising revenue. It's quite easy to get an Adsense account and placing the banner ads on your pages is also straightforward. One of the biggest problems faced by Adsense users is unrealistic expectations. Unless your website gets thousands of hits per day or is of a topic with specifically high paying ads, making more than a few dollars per day is difficult. Of course, there are plenty of success stories. While there are literally thousands of webmasters who make a few dollars per day using Adsense (which is a nice little bonus for people running websites as hobbies), there are also publishers who make hundreds or even thousands of dollars per day and work with Adsense as their full time job.

When a visitor clicks on one of your Adsense advertisements, you will get paid a percentage of whatever they have paid for that click (Google also takes a cut). Revenue per click varies anywhere from $0.01 to $5, depending on the genre of the website and the location of the visitor. Clicks from the US, Canada, Britain and Australia bring in the most revenue, while clicks from Chinese or Indian visitors often bring in only a couple pennies each. Websites about health, web hosting and insurance will generate much greater revenue per click than sites about games, music and celebrities. Apart from a website's traffic, click through rate (CTR) is a crucial figure. This represents the percentage of visitors (or page views) which result in a click on an ad. While the revenue per click figure is often difficult to change (since modifying the topic of your website is difficult and usually not a good idea), increasing your traffic and CTR figures is the most straightforward way of increasing revenue.

Adsense is a well respected program and payments are always made on time. Google is very vigilant about preventing click fraud, so don't even think about clicking on your own ads. You might make a couple dollars doing it, but Google will soon discover your scheme and delete your account. You will never be paid for the fraudulent clicks and you'll be hurting honest webmasters who rely on Adsense to make an honest living. By creating web pages with quality, unique content and adding well placed, good looking Adsense ads, you can create a viable revenue stream that generates revenue while you sleep. I'll get into more specifics about Adsense in upcoming articles, but for now, check out how other webmasters integrate ads into their websites. Consider which ad placements make you want to click on the ads and which placements can be improved upon.