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AdSense & Content-targeting

Google AdSense

So where does AdSense come in this?

Well, Google has taken the excellent AdWords program and extended it to third party sites and called it AdSense. That's all.

An AdWords ad on your site is an AdSense ad.

Key distinction

However, AdSense differs from AdWords in that Google, instead of looking at the search terms entered into its search box to determine what ads to show, looks instead at what keywords you have on your site.

Example:

If you have a page on your site all about banks, AdSense technology determines that it would be an appropriate place to post AdWords ads about banks.

This technology is called "content-targeting".

I have posted a page on this website about dollar accounts and banks because Google pays you by check / cheque. If you don’t live in the USA, cashing these dollar checks / cheques can be quite expensive and it can also be quite a tricky business opening a dollar account.

If you look at the banks page, you'll often see ads for dollar accounts posted there.

The important thing to note is that the process of assessing what your web page is about is automatic.

Google uses its content-targeting technology to do this and generally it does it very well although there are exceptions.

For an example of a page where content-targeting doesn’t seem to work well, see http://www.infomatifanalisa.blogspot.com

When I last checked, this showed ads for DNA testing whereas it should ideally have ads about viral marketing things on it: content-targeting technology has picked up on the wrong meaning of viral in this instance.

However, note that headline on the page includes the word "laboratory" - this could certainly be confusing Google.

How you make money with AdSense

We’ve been over the basic money-making process. Maximizing your income is much harder and it raises what I call the content dilemma which we'll explore later too:

• Is your site designed to earn AdSense revenue or is its main objective something else?

So that's the background to AdSense.

Tomorrow we’ll look at ways to maximize the amount of money that Google sends you.

There are two pretty complex processes going on behind the scenes that we will examine, paying particular attention to those things that are within your control. Not everything is!

Best wishes until then,

William Charlwood


PS One of the ways to boost your AdSense income is to develop creative ways of getting people to come to your site again and again.

I cover this in detail in my ebook The Definitive Guide to Google AdSense.

posted by Ahmad Faiz Besah @ 3:27 AM