Although there are a number of contextual advertising schemes out there Google AdSense remains our favourite, primarily due to the ease of setup and implementation.
But first, what is contextual advertising? As the term suggests, this is advertising, or ad placement, based on the content of the site that the ads will appear on.
For example, at cynergise.com we write articles on Internet marketing so most of the ads that appear on our site are related to Internet marketing. However, there is more to it than that; Last week Sol wrote an article about how blog owners can strengthen relationships with their readers using certain blog-comment plugins for WordPress. Some of the ads that displayed for this article had to do with relationship-building and how to find the perfect life-partner! Not quite what we had in mind! However this was quickly remedied by adding filters to our AdSense account blocking out those advertisers.
To get a better idea of what contextual advertising is, take a look at the Google AdSense ads in the middle and right-hand columns of this site – you may need to scroll down the page a little to see them – you’ll probably see ads on AdSense, Google AdWords and other Pay-Per-Click schemes. Look at some of our other articles and the ad will change to reflect the content. If your site is about sports, it’s likely the ads displayed will be related to sports in some form or another.
So, how do you get started with Google AdSense? As with all things Big-G, it’s free to sign up and after a brief evaluation period of your primary web-site your account will be activated. There are, of course, terms and conditions that your web site has to follow and as long as you play by the rules your web site will be serving up relevant ads to your web-site visitors in no time.
After you’ve signed up and your account activated, you’ll be able to sign into your account, set-up how you’d like Google to pay you (although this can be deferred to a later date) and start setting up your ad campaigns. Everything is very well documented and it’ll only take a few minutes using the wizard to set up the colour and dimensions of the ads so they fit in with your web site. The AdSense wizard then presents you with a block of code which you insert into your web page at the location you’d like the ads to appear.
And that’s it – once the relevant ads begin to appear your web site visitors will hopefully be clicking through to other related and relevant sites.
So how do you, the web site owner, generate revenue? Google AdSense is a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising scheme which means that you as the publisher of the ads gets paid every time an ad on your site is clicked on. The revenue generated varies from click to click as advertisers ‘bid’ on certain keywords and a sliding scale is used depending on the maximum bid per keyword.
I’ll be writing more about this and on how to implement Google AdSense code in your web pages in new articles in the near future.
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