AdSense is an advertising program that anyone who publishes a Web site can use to generate income for their Web site. But there’s one small condition — Google must approve your site before ads are shown on your site.
A longer explanation is that AdSense is an ad-placement program that utilizes Google’s proprietary search capabilities to determine the best placement for ads that are purchased through the Google AdWords program.
AdSense is contextual advertising, or ads that appear in the context of surrounding content. What this means for you is that AdSense ads are related to the content of the pages on which those ads appear.
It sounds complicated, I know. And really it can be very complicated, but the bottom line is that with AdSense, you can place ads on your Web site that are targeted to the content of your site. So, if your site is about Chinese Crested dogs, ads for Web-based human resources applications don’t show on your site.
In return for placing those ads on your site, you’re paid a small amount each time one of your site visitors clicks an ad, and in some cases, even when site visitors just see the ads.
Okay, so AdSense is (in essence) an advertising program. But why would you want to use it? Well, for the money, of course. AdSense is an easy way to generate income from your Web site, even if you’re not selling anything on the site.
And while creating income is the most likely reason that publishers use AdSense, it’s not the only one. Some publishers use AdSense as a means of making their Web site more valuable to site visitors.
Anyone who displays an AdSense ad is considered a publisher, whereas anyone who purchases the ads that are displayed through AdSense is an
advertiser.
Now, this is where a lot of debate usually begins. Experts (who are usually people who know a lot just about a given subject) tend to disagree about the value of any type of advertising on your Web site. Some experts say that any advertisement that takes people away from your Web site is a bad thing. Others say that ads are okay, in the right places.
When placed properly, AdSense ads can add value to your Web site by pointing users to other resources related to the topic of your site. This means they’ll probably surf away from your site at some point. But if your site is well built (which is essential if you intend to grow traffic over time), it’s likely that users will come back to your site again in the future.
The value here is that users not only get what they’re looking for, but you get return traffic; and because you’re using AdSense to help those users find the information they need, you’re also making a little extra money in the process.
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