by Irene Lizarraga

Created on: July 16, 2009

Google Adsense is a an advertising program for website owners who want to publish ads on their sites in exchange for a share of Google's advertising revenue. The ads displayed come from the Google Adwords program for advertisers. It's a pay per click program, so the website owner gets money every time a visitor clicks on one of the ads (as opposed to pay per impression programs that generate revenue every time an ad is displayed).

It's very simple to enroll in the Adsense program, you only need a website that complies with Google policies and be older than 18 years old and residing in a country where Google is allowed to make payments to. They don't request a minimum number of impressions or clicks per month, and the ads shown on your website will be chosen to match the content on your site. You can even filter the possible ads to be displayed if you don't want specific advertisers to display on your site (competitors, or simply sites you don't want to endorse by displaying ads for them on your site). Once you have been accepted in the program you will be able to create ad units, following a step by step wizard, configure the colours, track their individual performance to tweak them for better results and generally have a quite good control of what is displayed on your site at a fraction of the effort involved in selling ad space in your site directly to advertisers.

So, what are the weak points? First of all, unless you have a lot of very successful sites and high traffic chances are you won't be able to give up your day job thanks to google ads. And if you do, you'll probably have better paying advertisers knocking on your door already. You need to accumulate 10$ to be able to request payment, but your earnings will get carried on for the next month if you didn't make so much on a certain period. You only get paid when people actually click on your ads, and the amount you will be paid depends on how much Google Adwords managed to auction that ad keyword for, so unless your website content istargeted for high paying keywords you won't be getting more than a few dollars per month. Also Google can and will discount clicks that they consider fraudulent and might even close your account or freeze it if they think you're clicking on your own ads or encouraging other people to click on them without any interest on the target website.

So keeping in mind both the strong and weak points, is Google Adsense worth it? Generally it is. It's a low effort revenue channel, and as long as you keep producing good content for the ads to betargeted it will rent you some money. The ads can be made fairly unobtrusive and since they are targeted by content, they are relevant to your visitor's interest and can be considered more of a resource than an annoyance, provided there's actually content and not just ads everywhere. The implementation is extremely easy (They give you the code, you just need to put it wherever you want your ads to display on your website) and generally is as hassle free as it gets. So it can be a very nice way to get started on getting some advertising revenue from your website and as a good alternative when you don't have specific campaigns or ad slots sold to advertisers.

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