What is Adsense?

Google Adsense is a program people sign up for.  They get a Google Adsense publisher id number, are known as an Adsense publisher, and they display ads on the pages of their websites or blogs. When people click an ad to go visit the site that the ad links to, the Adsense publisher earns a commission.

What do Adsense ads look like?

You know when you use Google to search for information about something? On the page of search results that come up, you will sometimes see results at the very top of the page, and sometimes on the right too.  These are Adwords ads that are displaying on Google. 

If you have an Adsense account you are allowed to display these Adwords ads on the pages of your sites or blogs. Customization of the ads is possible, where you can change the colour of the text, the colour of the title text, the colour of the description text, the colour of the URL link text, as well as the background colour and border if you want one.  You can even have images displayed instead of text.

Adsense publishers are allowed to display three Adsense blocks on each page of their site, as well as three link units.  Depending on their preference, some Adsense publishers display all 6, or just one or two.  It's up to them.

Google monitors Adsense accounts closely, records your IP address, and knows if you click your own Adsense ads, so do not do it! You risk getting banned from having an Adsense account.

Google Adsense is free to join.

There are quite a few rules to go through when trying to make sure you do not do anything wrong to risk getting banned from using Google Adsense, but it's a popular way of making money online, and can be well worth the effort of becoming familiar with the Adsense policies, conditions and rules.

Within your Adsense account you can add the URLs (the link to the page, seen and found in the browser bar right at the top of your computer screen) of the pages you have your Adsense ads on, and you can log in from time to time (or a few times a day if you like!) to monitor which pages of your sites are getting impressions and clicks.  You can see how much money you are earning and which of your pages are doing well, and which are not doing so well.

You are allowed to publicly share with others how much you are earning but you are not allowed to disclose your click through rate.  Click through rate is for example 10% if for every 10 times a page with an ad on receives an impression (is seen) the ad is clicked once.

Go through Adsense rules carefully to learn what you can and can not tell others about it.

In South Africa you have to earn R1 000 before Google posts a cheque to the physical address you gave when you signed up.

It took me a year (while not knowing much about Adsense at all) to earn my first R1 000. cheque.  Since then it has been every three months and I am due to receive my fifth Google Adsense cheque soon.  I am almost almost managing to get the three months between cheques down to being only two months between them, and, obviously my aim is to not only try to get a Google Adsense cheque every month, but to try let that monthly cheque be considerably more than R1 000. per month.

Some people really struggle to earn much with Adsense, while others are thriving, especially in the U.S. However, there are actually some South Africans who manage to earn over R10 000. per month with Adsense.

Using Adsense is not simply a matter of putting the ads on your site and expecting the money to roll in.

The text in the Adsense ads automatically generally relates to the text content you have on the pages of your site or blog. Some research and learning is needed to be able to put words in your titles and text that people are searching for quite often.  If your topic does not have too much competition (there are not too many other sites that have similar information) you may manage to get the link and description to your page appearing on the first page of Google results - the natural search results ten results per page - for free, without using Adwords to get an ad linking to your site displayed there in the results.

Also, depending on which keywords you've chosen to target when you write your article on your site or blog, how much you earn when somebody clicks an ad on your page could be different amounts.  Sometimes you may get next to nothing, and sometimes a reasonable amount.  It helps to do research into which kinds of words might generate higher paying ads on your pages, and how much competiton those words have.

If you have an Adwords ad appearing on Google search results and somebody clicks it to visit your site, you pay for that click, whereas you do not pay if your link and description result on Google search results is a natural search result and somebody clicks the link to visit your site.  Well, you might not pay in money, but it can cost quite a bit of time doing research and working on trying to get a Google page one natural search result.

Of course, having a natural search result on page one of Google search results is not the only way to get free traffic (visitors) to your site.

© copyright Teresa Schultz 2011