Loading ...If you looked at the Internet a few years back, you’d see that advertising was done in a way that was very similar to what you see in a newspaper. You’d view a page and you’d see an ad for a company which was paying for ad space on that website. But there was a problem with this kind of advertising. It wasn’t taking full advantage of the possibilities of the Internet.
You’ve probably noticed a lot of things like this over the pages you’ve browsed. You’re looking at an online shop for a watch, but you get a banner that advertises a car.
While you might at some later point want to buy a car, right now you’re looking for a watch. It would have been nice if the banner had been advertising a watch, because then you would have probably clicked it.
That’s also what the folks at Google thought of, so they came up with a killer idea. It’s called Google AdSense, and it’s known as a targeted advertising program.
What you do (as a web designer / website owner) is, instead of jumping through hoops to get some banner on your site that your visitors won’t even care about, you just allocate some region of the page for advertising.
You then sign up for the Google AdSense program, insert a small snippet of code in your webpage and Google ensures that in the location you specify, a banner will appear presenting adds relevant to the content of your page.
It’s very easy for Google to do this because Google is a search engine company. It looks for keywords in your page, searches a database of websites to find the ones related to whatever is on your page and presto: a targeted ad.
You, the webmaster, get a fee for each visitor that clicks on an AdSense banner on your site. That’s bound to happen more often than with a traditional banner because people are actually interested in what’s in that banner, otherwise, they wouldn’t be on your page would they?
This also does wonders for the people who want to advertise for the same reason. No longer are they wasting money advertising their product or service on a page that isn’t even relevant.
This relevancy is the key to the program’s success, and it’s also the reason everyone remains happy. The advertiser has a relevantly placed advert, the publisher earns money from their content and Google takes their cut.
Of course, as always, Google has set some high standards for its AdSense program, in terms of looks and functionality. One of these is that they limit the number of ads shown per page. The benefit of this is that AdSense advertising is a lot less obtrusive then regular advertising, but this also means you should position the banner optimally to ensure that visitors see it.
So in the end, Google AdSense is an advertising program that is unique because the ads are relevant to the content on the site. Anyone that wants to advertise pays Google for it. Anyone who wants to place ads on their site does this through AdSense, getting paid by Google in the process.
All transactions are run through Google, and the advertisers and publishers get access to statistics which help them to understand and moderate the effectiveness of their campaign.
The whole process is elegant, simple and effective from anyone in the chain, from site visitors to advertisers, and it’s one of the reasons Google is known for their innovation and creativity.
