Google Adsense

Google's Adsense program is a very simple method of monetising websites. The principle is that website owners who publish content can provide adverts targeted towards their content, and each time a visitor clicks on one of these adverts, the website owner gets a commission paid to them.

We've used Adsense on a number of websites (including this one), and have found it extremely easy to include targeted adverts with very little effort. Basically, as long as the content has been good enough, Google's contextual ad filter do the rest. So, for example, as we are talking about the Adsense program in this article, the adverts displayed by Adsense on this page should be about Adsense. If we were to talk about web hosting, the ads would be about web hosting, and so forth.

The value of a click can vary massively from just a few cents (all clicks are measured in US Dollars) up to tens of Dollars, and will depend really upon what your content is about. Pharmaceuticals tend to pay highly for example, whereas small niche topics will tend to pay much lower amounts (there are always exceptions however).

The beauty of Adsense is that it automatically provides relative, targeted ads which are even localized. So wherever your website visitors are from, the ads will be targeted towards those visitors. This in turn means more clicks on ads, and so more money for the website owner, you.

Another brilliant aspect of Adsense is that no matter what your website's traffic levels, as long as you can provide some content for the internet (that doesn't infringe on any of the program's terms and conditions), you will more than likely be accepted into the Adsense program. Many other advertising programs require minimum traffic levels before being accepted, and finding individual advertisers can be extremely difficult if your traffic levels are low.

Adsense allows a large amount of tracking to be setup so that you can see which ads are being clicked on, and by using the statistics from this tracking, website owners can quite easily try out different ad positioning, and thereby optimize ad placement.

Setting up an Adsense account is a very simple process if you already have a website up and running, and takes just a couple of days whilst your website is assessed for its content (just to check it doesn't infringe on Google's Terms and Conditions).

Once you've been accepted into the program, you can go ahead and add some ads to your website. There are many varieties available so you should be able to integrate the adverts in some way. Just make sure you read the Terms and Conditions well, and DON'T break them for any reason whatsoever!

As well as the many different sizes and colour variations available for the adverts, Adsense provides different types of adverts including referrals (getting others to sign up for Adsense), and more recently, the mobile and video adverts.

Adsense provides much written support to help with advert integration into your website, and even provide features such as 'heat maps' to show which areas of websites or blogs tend to work better for adverts.

All in, we have always been very impressed with Adsense, mainly due to its simplicity and easy of use, and although it's not going to make you rich beyond your wildest dreams, there are many success stories out there where people have made money from Adsense (you can read about some on the Adsense website).

We would recommend the Adsense program to any content publishing website owner looking to supplement their income a little or maybe just to pay for hosting costs.

As a very big word of warning however - NEVER CLICK ON YOUR OWN ADS, as this will result in an immediate ban from the Adsense program.