Let’s get started with Google Adsense

It's probably one of the hottest topics out there, and with good reason. Where else can you get paid over and over again for doing something once?

Of course I'm talking about Googles Adsense program, for website publishers who don't mind placing a small bit of code into their sites to show ads in return for a share of the profits.

It's relatively easy to get started with Google Adsense, as all you need to have is a website or blog on which to show the Adsense ads, and a Google Adsense Publishers Account. To get an Adsense account you need to go to www.Google.com/adsense and apply for an account, as long as your website complies with their terms, you will be accepted and be able to log in to create your Adsense ads. If you don't have a website, you can setup a blog for fr.ee at http://www.blogger.com put up some content, and submit this. Blogger is also owned by Google, and some people claim this gives you a better chance of acceptance, whether it does or not you decide for yourself.

For the next part, once you are logged in you need to choose what type of ads to display, link units are just one line links to sites related to your sites keywords, ad units are the blocks of code you see everywhere with a short description, a link and a url for each site advertised. Once you have chosen which ad type to display, you can then choose the size and format of the Adsense box. This is where you must make a decision to ensure it fits in with your site, where you are going to place it.

Be aware that irregular sized and shaped adsense boxes work better than the regular ad sizes, 468x60 is immediately picked up as an ad due to banners being this size for so long online and has a low clickrate, while the 336x280 and 300x250 adsense blocks work much better. There is also some arguments as to whether you should blend the ad into your site by using the color palette Adsense gives you to edit the ads colours to make the colours the same as your site, or to make them stand out by making them a different colour, this will depend on your site, and you can test to see what works best.

After you have setup the format, colour scheme and type of ad, you will get the code to add to your site. Before you go ahead and paste it in, it's a good idea to setup channel tracking. Setup different channels named so that you will know what it is about, and this will enable you to track which ads are working, on which sites by changing them around, and tagging them with different channel ID's. This is one of the most overlooked parts of Adsense, the ability to track your ads through channels affords you the ability to test and tune to get the ideal colours, and placement for your adsense blocks.

Adsense does a good job of finding ads related to your site, and you have no input into what will be shown. Sometimes it gets confused, so you may have to tweak your sites copy to make the keywords more prominent so Adsense can do a better job of targeting your visitors with the ads displayed. Obviously the better the ads target your visitors, the more relevant they will be and the better the clickthrough rate.

As we already said, Adsense is a great way to make some income, and some people are even making a good living from it, it's residual income, fairly easy to setup and low maintenance. If nothing else it will help pay the hosting fees for your website, so why not get started with Google Adsense today?

Let’s get started with Google Adsense

1. First, signup at Google Adsense. you can do so by clicking on the button below. you’ll need your mailing address and website ready… just fill up standard forms, nothing fancy.
2. Go to Adsense setup and setup your ads outlook – the border color, background color, as well as the text colors. assign  channels to your ads if you wish to monitor your ad performance individually.
3. Copy the adsense code (piece of java scipt)Â at the bottom of setup page and paste it to your webpage.
4. Load it to your server and preview it.
5. At first, you might be seeing no ads or Google community ads (donations/WWF/ blah blah blah…), this is because Google bot has yet to crawl your site content and has insufficient info about your site so they will just serve community ads that will not earn you any money. once your site is crawled (normall within minutes) and they realise what’s your site about, they will put on related ads.

One step further than Adsense starter

Now that you already have an Adsense account and had the adsense code posted on your website, its time for you to start tracking on your ads performance. but before you can ever read the report from Google Adsense, you gotta understand what those figures mean to you.

Basically there are only five figures to look after in Google Adsense: Page Impressions, Clicks, Page CTR, Page eCPM, and Earnings. if these names sounds like greeks to you, you better learn them fast. these numbers mean nothing if you do not understand the maths and meaning behind them. A simple definition for these figures would be:

• Page Impressions 

means the number of times your ads are showed to your visitors.

• Clicks

means the number of clicks your site visitors made on your ads

• Page CTR or CTR

is a percentage number. to be easy, CTR = Clicks/Impression x 100%

• Page CPM

means cost per 1000 impressions. speaking in maths, it means. Earnings/Impressions x 1000.

• Earnings

means the profit you made in your selected currency.

Understanding the numbers

Earnings vs Clicks*

We all knew clearly what are the purpose for us in putting up Adsense ads: To make money, the more the better. in other meaning, this means that we want to lift up the ‘Earnings’ in Adsense stats as much as possible, right. theoritically, we knew that we can earn more in Adsense by drawing more clicks on our ads. Hereby, we assume clicks increase = earning increase.

CTR vs Earnings*

Say that our website traffics are constant, everyday one of our webpage have 200 visitors and this gives 200 impressions to that particular page ads. if clicks increase, and the impressions are constant, we knew CTR will increase… hereby, we can assume CTR increase = earning increase.

Impressions vs Earnings*

What if our CTR is constant where we can have 5% of our visitors click on our ads constantly? As Clicks = Impressions x CTR, we knew that clicks increase when our impression increase (provided CTR is constant) and clicks increase will lead increment in earnings (the earlier assumption).

Joining the dots and usage of the figures

The picture is simple. seeing that earnings are corresponded positively CTR, Clicks, and Impressions, we can knew clearly that to grow our Google Adsense revenue, we need to grow either one of the number of clicks, or impressions. meaning, we can either bring more traffics to our website (increase impressions) or to have more visitors click on the ads (increase clicks). these stats would be very effective for benchmarking your improvments as well as to justify your biz strategy.

Say that if you are wondering which background color (say, blue or white) is better for your Adsense revenue, you can test them at your website. the ads performance can be tracked easily with the stats said above. does the blue background draws more clicks and yield higher CTR, or the white one? this, of course will then lead you to be wiser when making the decision.

Hidden numbers

Sad to say, Google stats do not reveal the full picture an adsenser would like to see. at least not for me. as a CPC ads program, the revenue generated from adsense relies fully on the value of each clicks. but how much it worths for one single click – we do not know.

The million-dollar-question in making good Adsense money is always “what’s the most expensive keyphrase”. if you ever want to earn good money from Adsense, you need to have expensive keyterms in your website to trigger the related ads to show up. as we mentioned earlier, google ads will find related ads to showed in your website. so if your website is like talking about some useless craps (malaysia broadband streamyx for example)…you probably wont get much of ads show coz there is NO RELATED ads in google inventory! no merchant is paying for streamyx related ads thus there wont be ads for these website. or, there are ads ..for example if you are going after softwares or ebooks on taking care of your dogs ..there are related merchants who want to buy the adspace on your website…there will be ads shown on the adsense bar but HELL, these merchats are paying so little to google …so in turn, you wont get much from google as well. for example the dog trainer is paying $0.50/click (i consider thats a lot for a private dog trainer) for google ads, neglect the smart pricing consideration and google will split half with u on the ad revenue, you will get $0.25/click. each day you are so damn lucky and you get 100 clicks per day ..so your per day click will be $0.25 x 100 = $25/day ..which in turns, $750/month, $9000/year. yeah yeah, its some money, but nothing impressive.

Now, consider you make a website to target some high paying keywords… imagine you can make $3/click……so that’s 6 times more than the click dollars generated by working out on the dog trainer ads…. 6 x $9000 = $54,000/year. now that’s what i call good money.

However, as i said earlier, Google NEVER reveal the price per click behind the scene. as we webmasters are relative small in the eye of Google, this is hidden in their secret valley and we have no chance peeping in. further more, as days go by, Google is implementing ’smart-pricing’ into their pricing system where the value of each click is calculated *smartly* via Google smart pricing algorithm.

To counter this situation, the best you can do to estimate the keyword price is view it from Overture Max bid function. at the time of writing, these are some of the high paying keyphrase…

mesothelioma treatment cost $21.00/click

selling structured settlements cost $20.00/click

arizona divorce attorneys $14.30/click

mesothelioma* cost $11.59/click

house loans $9.79/click

mesothelioma treatment options cost $9.19/click

auto insurance quotes florida cost $8.07/click

cash for structured settlements cost $8.00/click

mortgage $5.99/click

florida mortgage $5.09/click

vioxx lawyer $5.00/click

vioxx attorney $4.60/click

vioxx $2.10/click

So…i guess that’s all for the basics for starters. as your journey starts, i’m sure that you will meet up with loads of misleading info and myths in Google adsense, thus i believe the following sections will get you ready: Defining the myths in Google Adsense, and Google Adsense Tips and Tricks.

*Note: smart pricing and other variables are neglected in our example for the ease of explanation. google pricing algo in adsense is, of course, a lot more complicated that .