What is Google adsense?

A few years back, advertising on the Internet was pretty much similar to other types of media like newspapers or television. In fact when you would have entered a site, you would get to see a large banner advertising for the company that was paying for it.

But the problem with these banner advertising was they were targeted towards general internet surfers. You've probably noticed a lot of things like this over the pages you've browsed. You're looking at an on-line shop, looking for a watch but you get a banner that advertises a car.

Although you might, at some later point may buy a car, but right now you're looking for a watch and it would have been so nice if the banner were advertising a watch, because then you would have probably checked it out.

Well folks that what Google thought of, and they came up with an excellent idea called Google AdSense - also known as targeted advertising program. What you do (as a web designer / website owner) is, instead of getting some banner on your site that your visitors won't even care about, is you just allocate some region of the page.

After signing up for Google AdSense program, you just insert a small code in your webpage and Google ensures that in the location you specify, a banner will appear, presenting adds relevant to the contents of your site.

It's very easy for Google to do this because Google is a search engine company. It looks for the key words in your page, searches a database of websites to find the ones related to whatever is on your page and presto: a targeted ad.

You, being the webmaster get a fee for each visitor that clicks on an adsense banner on your site. Now that's bound to happen more often then with a traditional banner because the banner shows ads that are similar to the content of your page.

But, this also helps the people who want to advertise. And it is because of the same reason. The greatest thing about Google AdSense is that what is displayed in a banner is relevant.

Showing relevant ads is the key to the programs success, and also the reason why everyone remains happy. The advertiser has a relevantly placed advert, the publisher earns money from their content and Google take their cut.

The benefit is that AdSense advertising is a lot less obtrusive then regular advertising. But this also means you should position the banner better because it's possible that visitors might miss it.

So in the end, Google AdSense is an advertising program that is very unique because the ads are relevant to the content on the site. Anyone that wants to advertise pays Google for it and get lesser targeted customers. Anyone who wants to place ads on their site does this through AdSense, getting paid by Google in the process.

All transactions are run through Google, and the advertisers and publishers get access to statistics which help them to understand and observe the effectiveness of their campaign.

The whole process is elegant, simple and very effective from anyone in the chain, from site visitors to advertisers, and it's one of the reasons Google are known for their innovation and new thinking.