Google AdSense : Java Glossary

Google’s affiliate scheme to pay you for putting ads on your website where you get paid per click. The ads at the top and bottom of each page on this website are managed by Google AdSense.

Click throughs on those ads generates the revenues that pay the ISP (Internet Service Provider) bills for mindprod.com. They also fund Google to the tune of $16 billion a year. This is what pays the bills for the free Google search engines.

Advantages

• Most of the time Google selects ads for your space that are relevant to the content. They usually interesting to your readers.
• Google AdSense is one of the few affiliate programs worth the effort. Unlike most other advertising and affiliate schemes, you actually make substantial income, and with minimal effort.
• There are three basic schemes for getting paid for advertising.
  1. Percentage of sale.
  2. Per click through.
  3. Per impression. You get paid just to show the ad, even if the reader totally ignores it.
  AdSense pays on click through. You get paid for curious readers whether they buy or not.
• You can put up to three banners per page and if the banners are big enough, sometimes multiple ads will fit in a banner. They are popular because they are very easy to set up. You just put a standard piece of HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) on your page that tells Google the size of ad you want and they take it from there.
• You don’t have to sell advertising space. Google does that for you.
• You don’t have to bill advertisers. Google does that for you.
• You don’t have modify HTML to insert new ads.
• You don’t have to select which products to advertise or where to optimally place the ads.
• You can use the same web page real estate for hundreds of different advertisers.
• Using the same canned HTML, you can display different ads on every page.
• Google automatically figures out which ads generate the most revenue in which spots and rotates them for you.
• There is almost no work to setting it up, just register and insert a block of JavaScript wherever you want an ad to appear. Then stand back and wait for the monthly cheques.
• You can block ads from objectionable companies.

Disadvantages

• Companies you don’t endorse advertise on your site. The ads imply your approval when it is not there. They are usually not bad enough to bother blocking, or present long enough to bother blocking.

How It Works

Google pays you for placing most ads on a CPC (Cost Per Click) basis. When advertisers target your particular website or webpage, they pay on a CPM (Cost Per thousand/Mille impressions) basis. You, as the displayer of the ad, will get something in the order of $.10 USD to  $1.50 USD per click based on your natural ranking, an advertising desirability measure.

The rate you get per click is a the result of an automatic auction between advertisers for the right to advertise to your site or your keywords. You get an undisclosed percentage of what the advertiser pays.

You must, of course, register as an affiliate first or they won’t know where to mail the cheque.

I keep the ads off the high traffic pages since they can slow down loading and, if Google is unreachable, can freeze the loading entirely. I have written Google repeatedly about the problem. There is also a problem using the website offsite when the ad content is not available. Google JavaScript needs to suppress the ad if when you are off-line or if the ad does not appear within a few seconds. It should not hold up the entire page. For now, you have to turn off JavaScript for off-line viewing of my web pages.

Ads can only appear on pages that Google spiders, so they must be open to robots.txt and appear in your optional sitemap. Google needs to examine their content to select relevant ads.

Tweaks

There are a few tweaks with JavaScript you can do to o speed up AdSense:

• Load show_ads.js from your own website rather than Google’s http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js.
• Suppress the ads in Opera since they make Opera hang.
• Suppress the ads when the page is loaded locally from hard disk since they slow down local access so much.

To see how it works, look at the code to invoke the ads at the top and bottom of each page and the JavaScript in http://mindprod.com/embellishment/javascripttools.js. Basically I load the Google scripts dynamically only when I discover I am not in Opera and not viewing a document loaded from hard disk. I use the same trick for Google AdSense and Google Translate.