Google Adsense is probably one of the most wonderful inventions that Google came up with. For the Internet marketer trying to make a few extra bucks online, this little marvel allows him to do so without having to spend a great deal of money. While you’re not going to get rich with a Google Adsense campaign, if you put enough sites together, you can make a decent monthly income. But first, you need to know just what this Adsense thing is about.
To understand Adsense, you first have to understand the basics of Adwords.
Google Adwords is a system by which a marketer can promote his products by way of what is called a pay per click (ppc) system. The marketer’s ad is placed on the search engine pages and he only pays for the ad if somebody clicks on it. The payment can be anywhere from a few cents to a few dollars, depending on the competition for they keywords to that ad. So what does this have to do with Adsense?
In addition to showing these ppc ads on Google’s search engines, Google offers marketers the opportunity to also have these ads shown on what they call content sites. These are web pages hosted by various people all over the Internet. Whenever these ads are displayed and somebody clicks on one of them, the person running the ad is also charged for the click, just like with the search engines. However, there is one difference, and that’s where Adsense comes in.
On these content pages, since they are owned by various people and not the search engines, Google gives the owners of these content pages a chance to earn some money from these Adwords ads. If they place a certain code on their web page that identifies them to Google as an Adsense customer, each time a visitor clicks on one of the ads, the owner of the page gets paid a percentage of the fee paid to Google. Don’t try to figure out what this percentage is because Google isn’t talking. But if somebody clicks on an ad that costs the advertiser $1, you’ll probably get about 20 cents from that click. Google keeps most of the profit.
Getting an Adsense account is really very easy. You simply go to a special URL to and fill in your personal information. The one downside to this, at least for some people, is that in order to get paid by Google they have to provide some kind of personal info that they may not be comfortable with providing. For example. There is one option where you can choose to get paid via Google making a direct deposit into your bank account. If you’re uneasy with giving Google that information you might want to just have them send you a check.
In the next installment of Making Sense of Adsense, we’ll get into the actual sign up process and how to get started with Google Adsense. Like I said, you won’t get rich doing this, but for very little work, relatively speaking, you can make a few extra bucks each month.