In the year 2003, Google launched an advertising program called Google AdSense. It is aimed at the advertisers looking to promote their products. This model operates on a pay-per-click or pay-per-impression basis. Google AdSense provides opportunities for website owners to monetize content-rich platforms like a blog, website, or YouTube and showcase the product to the target audience by utilizing the online traffic and facilitating revenue generation simultaneously. If you are a website owner or write blogs, Google AdSense helps you earn money online or create monetization for their brand. Google AdSense is the ad hosting program that lets Google publish ads on your website. You can make money when someone clicks on the ads placed.
In this blog, I intend to discuss Google AdSense, how it works, how to configure an account in Google AdSense, how to set up for payment, Custom Search Engine, Ad Units, and other related aspects.
What is Google AdSense?
Google AdSense is an advertising network administered and operated by Google to place ads that work on a pay-per-click (PPC) algorithm. It is a free tool that enables website owners to make money by displaying Google advertisements on their websites. Google plays the role of a mediator between advertisers and publishers.
Google advertising tool connects – the website owner – with the advertisers to display ad content. All you need to do is to drop a piece of AdSense code into your website to make space for the ad and it immediately starts working. When someone clicks on the ads placed on any website then Google will pay the publishers. Chances to receive clicks on the ads will increase if your website has more traffic.
Google collects money from the advertisers, it keeps a 32% share of the amount for facilitating the platform to run the ads and other processes, and the remaining 68% is paid to the publisher.
How Google AdSense works?
First of all, register yourself for Google AdSense. Before that Google verifies whether the website meets the criteria to run the ads. Once the registration is complete which is free, Google will start displaying ads based on your website niche as well as the subject that website owners are interested in. Advertisers start bidding to show ads in those spaces.
Ads are screened to ensure they are high quality and relevant to your content or audience, even when viewed on smartphones and tablets. The highest paying ads will appear and the website owner will get revenue of about 68% of the total ad amount.
Criteria for AdSense Approval
Google ensures or verifies that the website pages are ready for AdSense. For a website to succeed with AdSense, it should have unique content that is relevant to the visitors and provides a great user experience. Before you go to sign up for AdSense, you should review your pages to ensure they are in good shape.
You should also ensure that website has unique and interesting content. Valuable and original content is paramount to building a strong and loyal user base. When users enjoy your content, they share the experience with others, and this, in turn, helps you to grow your site.
The website has clear, easy-to-use navigation as well as an easy-to-use menu bar. These are the key part of providing a good experience to the user. When building your navigation bar, do follow these 3 main criteria:
- Alignment – are all the elements lined up correctly?
- Readability – is the text easy to read?
- Functionality – do drop-down lists work correctly?
Pros and Cons of Google AdSense
While there are numerous benefits of using Google AdSense, there are some drawbacks also.
Pros
- security between advertiser and publisher
- variety of targeted ad formats
- types and placement
- ease of payment (Google pays monthly by direct deposit if the amount is over $100)
- ability to run ads on mobile devices and RSS feeds.
- Save time with automated ads
Cons
- Google can terminate an AdSense publisher’s account at any moment, and it’s not very forgiving if rules are broken.
- A website needs ample traffic to make money, and once an ad is clicked on, the visitor is redirected and leaves the publisher’s page.
Ad units on Google AdSense
An Ad Units are containers that represent the ad format settings of a collection of Placements. Ad Units consolidate ad format information into a single object for easier Placement management. Ad units send ad requests to AdMob and then display the ads they receive to fill the request. After that, you need to create an ad unit, where you assign an ad format and ad type(s).
Display Ads: Display ads are ads with images that are responsive by default, which means they automatically adapt their size to fit your page layout and your users’ devices. They can be customized to show fixed ad sizes. They’re also compatible with AMP pages.
In-feed Ads: These are native ads that have an adaptive flow inside a feed. This is best suitable for blogs or an article, directories, product reviews, etc.
In-Article Ads: Another type of native ad that fits in between the paragraphs of a page. This is best suitable for publishers and reviewers because ads appear in the middle of the content. This gives the user an enhanced reading experience.
Matched Content: These are recommendations that promote your content to visitors. Matched content is good for increasing page views, revenue, and time spent on the site.
Link Ads: Links ads show a list of topics that are relevant to the content of your page. These are responsive, which means they adapt their size to the layout of the page. They can be customized to stay fixed on-page.
Ad formats on Google AdSense
Banner: A most basic format for the ad that appears at the top and bottom of the device screen.
Interstitial: Full-page ads appear at natural breaks and transitions. It supports video content as well.
Rewarded: Ads reward users for watching short videos and interacting with playable ads and surveys. Good for monetizing free-to-play users. It also supports video content as well.
Native: Customizable ad format that matches the look and feel of your app. Ads appear in line with app content. It also supports video content as well.
Ad types on Google AdSense
When you select the ad types for an ad unit, you are selecting the kinds of ads you want to allow it to display to the users. When the ad unit requests an ad, it can only receive an ad that matches one of its assigned ad types.
- Text, image & rich media: This could be text-only, images, or rich media such as interactive ads. Animated images are not supported for native ads.
- Video: Ads with video and audio content. Video ads that appear in banner ad units always start muted. Users can unmute the ad if desired using the mute button provided by Google.
- Interactive: Ads with an interactive element, such as a playable ad or a survey.
The ad types available in an ad unit depend on the ad format you selected when creating it.
Get started with Google AdSense
At Digital Market Academy, you can learn AdSense in 5 simple steps. It is very easy to use this facility. You need just 5 things to get started with Google AdSense.
1. Create Google AdSense Account
To create a Google AdSense account. Visit the Google AdSense site and click on Get Started link. The following information has to be furnished into Google: website URL, email address and you have to specify whether you want customized help optimizing your ads or not.
In the URL field,
- Enter the URL of the website that you want to show ads on
- In the email address field, enter a Gmail address if you have one.
- If not, just click to sign up to create a new account.
- Select your country or territory.
- Review and accept the AdSense terms and conditions.
- Last you click on the create account button.
2. Setup Payment option
Before we start running ads on the website, make sure Google has all the information it needs to make your payment. To achieve this
- Go to the Payments tab on the left side of the page.
- Then you will land on your Payments dashboard.
- Once you start generating revenue from the ads, all the payment details can be viewed on the payment page (screenshot below).
Now, you have to:
- Update the “How you get paid” information
- Payment option added to the platform to get payment
- Fill in the details of the payments under the Settings tab so that Google can verify your payment information
- Must meet payment threshold in your country
- Verify tax information and address and location
- Know when does AdSense pay
You may also want to briefly review your Account settings (again, go to the left-side navigation to access this). The information should be up-to-date if you have an existing Google account. If it’s not, make the necessary edits.
3. Connect the website to AdSense
To synchronize the website with AdSense, drop a piece of AdSense code into the website to make space for the ad. Then, from our Google AdSense dashboard, go to Sites, Click on the Add Site link and enter your domain name. Custom code will be provided along with instructions to embed it on your website on the next screen.
After the code is copied into the website, go back to the Google AdSense screen, and click on the Get Review button. It will take a minimum of two weeks for Google to verify your website. Still, we can do a head start in setting up the ads.
4. Choose Ad Placement
At this point, you’ve told Google that you want it to place ads on your site. But how will you decide where to display those ads?
There are two options for determining where the ads will show up: you can either let Google choose for you, or you can select the placements yourself.
Option A: Google automation
Google’s automated tool is the quickest way to create ad placements. To start, we have to go to the Google AdSense dashboard and then to >> the Ads section.
Under the “By site”, click on the pencil icon, to see what auto ads might look like, Google will render your website on the next screen. When it finishes rendering, you can see your website. You can toggle between the mobile and desktop view by clicking the corresponding icons above.
You can switch on the “Auto ads” toggle on the right, to preview the look when Google automatically places ads on your site. Under “Ad load” you have the option to adjust the number of ads to be displayed.
If you don’t want ads to be shown on every page of the website, you can include them under “Page exclusions”. From “Global settings” you can also automate mobile ad optimization.
If you intend to use the Google auto ads, just toggle the automation on and Google will automatically place the ads for you.
Option B: Custom ad placements
You may prefer to go for the manual ad placements. Reasons to choose the manual over the automated option could be any of these:
- You want control over the placement of ads so that the user experience doesn’t get disrupted.
- Place ads only on the high-traffic areas of your site. Pages that are informational but not generating revenue, like blog posts, etc.
When we choose manual ad placement then we have to go page by page through our website and decide: which type of ad should appear on it, where we will place the ads, and what size of the ad will fit best for that page.
5. Create and run ads on your website
Once the account is created with AdSense and the website is approved by Google, we need to set up the ads. We need to configure the ads on our website by going to the Overview section (which you will find on the left-hand side of the dashboard under the main heading, Ads) and choosing the type of Ads you want to set up.
After we select the type of ads to be displayed on our website, click on Create and get the code. Google will automatically create the code for an ad unit and we have to copy and paste this code onto your website.
In Word Press, you can paste the code into the widgets section. Once the code is pasted, Google can take up to an hour to start showing ads on your website (screenshot below).
Custom Search Engine
To create a new custom search bar for your site, follow these steps:
1. Sign in to your AdSense account
2. Choose Ads for search and then choose Custom Search Engines.
3. Click on +New Custom Search Engine
4. Give your search engine a name and save it to get the code.
5. Copy and paste this code into the HTML of the pages you want to show your custom search engine.
Now click on the “New Custom search engines” button. On the next page, we need to fill out the form. For the “What to search” field, select the second option “Only sites I select”, and enter your website URL in the field.
Next, hit the “Save and get code” button. A pop-up window will open. You have to copy the code from both the “Search box code” and “Search result code” boxes.
Adding Search Box to Widget
You can add AdSense search to the Word Press sidebar by adding the code to a widget.
Editing AdSense Custom search engine
To edit Google AdSense Custom Search Engine
● Go to https://cse.google.com/cse/all
● Click on its “custom search engine” option to edit it.
● Click on the “Look and Feel” option from the sidebar.
How to analyze your AdSense account
AdSense can be analysed through performance reports and filters and metrics can be used to understand how, where, and when the revenue has been generated.
1. To Analyse the AdSense Account.
2. Log in to your AdSense Account.
3. Then click on Performance reports.
Select the Report type to break down the data. Let’s say you want to see how the ad units are performing. You can click on Ad units and you can also add filters to the report type. You can add multiple filters. After that, you should select a metric that you want to check.
- Clicks — includes the metrics that relate to the CPC bid type, e.g., clicks, click-through rate, etc.
- Views — includes the metrics that relate to the CPM bid type, e.g., impressions, page RPM, impressions RPM, etc.
- Active Views — includes the metrics that relate to the Active View CPM bid type, e.g., impressions, Active View viewable, etc. See viewability and Active View to learn more about Active View.
- Engagements include the metrics that relate to the cost-per-engagement (CPE) bid type, e.g., impressions, page RPM, impressions RPM, etc.
- Videos — include the metrics that relate to the video ad type, e.g., TrueView views, TrueView VTR, etc.
- Matched content — includes the metrics that relate to Matched content units, e.g., total impressions, recommendations, etc.
- Sessions — includes the metrics that relate to AdSense session reporting, e.g., sessions, sessions measurable, session RPM, etc.
Hence they are either based on a specific ad or bid type. Here we are looking at clicks. By adjusting a date range you can check the change in the pattern you can check the trends in the revenue stream.
AdSense best practices
Never click on your ads: Since AdSense is based on clicks and other engagement, clicking an advertisement on your website is considered fraudulent. You mustn’t let any family members in your household click on those ads either.
Google won’t be able to tell the difference between you and your spouse. If they see clicks coming from your house to ads on your website, they can remove you from the AdSense program.
Run different ad units: Everyone has different preferences. Different website visitors might be attracted to different styles and types of ads displayed on your website.
Find the best placement: It’s also a good idea to look at some of the most popular and successful websites in your industry. Look at their ad placements. If you notice a common trend across the websites, you can try to repeat it.
Final Thought
Google AdSense is the best place to advertise your product and earn money online. Digital Market Academy enables you to better understand and execute this option on your website. Learn Google Adsense and more about monetizing at Digital Market Academy, Bangalore.
