Google AdSense : What is it?

• An ad serving program
• Provides contextual advertising
• Is an automated system

Google AdSense : Why use it?

• No need to seek out advertisers
• Provides "easy" revenue to small websites
• Less intrusive banners
• Ad relevancy

Google AdSense : Are there drawbacks?

• Payouts only every 100$!
• Not possible to decide which ads appear
• Users develop "ad-blindness"

Google AdSense : Where do I sign up?

• Subscribe with adSense program
• Insert javascript code into the page
• ...Google does the rest

• Good to know

  • The page will be crawled by Google's mediabot at regular but unpredictable intervals
  • Paid per click or "thousand impressions"
  • Keeps track of what is clicked

Google AdSense : How does it work?

• Serves ads based on:
  • Site's content
  • Site's structure
  • Geographical location of user
• Works in conjuction with Google's AdWords
  • For advertising through Google's program
  • Advertisers pay for keywords
  • Complex pricing model based on a Vickrey second price auction
  • Advertisers provide the banner for the ad
  • Stored in Google's advertiser database

Google AdSense : How does it work? (continued)

• When mediabot crawls the site
  • It finds keywords from the pages
  • Stores a cache of the page along with the keywords
  • For fast contextual ad delivery
• When ad is clicked
  • Passed to click washer
  • Click count and verification of IP address
  • Payout

Structure

Check out the AdSense patent, which describes in more detail how the system is defined.

Frauds and abuse

• Pages with only Google ads
• "Zombie" sites, relying on automated content, and using high-paying keywords
• Fraudulent clicks (undisclosed)

Expanding AdSense

• AdSense for feeds
  • For rss or atom feeds
  • Inserts images into the feed
  • In beta
  • No more users accepted
• AdSense for search
• AdSense for mobile content

Other major advertising programs

• Yahoo! Publisher Network
• Microsoft adCenter