Making Money With Google Adsense

Google's Adsense program is an advertising system that allows web site owners to earn revenue by publishing ads on their sites.

The adsense program is unique in its ability to select and display ads which are relevant to the content of your site. For example, if your site is about bicycles, the adsense code will automatically select and display ads related to bicycles such as bicycle supply stores.

What is truly amazing, is Adsense's ability to not only understand what your page is about but also provide ads relevant some really obscure topics.

The relevance of the ads displayed by adsense are key to the programs success. Unlike banner ads and earlier text advertising programs, Adsense ads are very relevant to the page that the internet user is looking at. This means that the user is more likely to click on the ad.

For example, if the web surfer was looking for information about bicycles on the site and the adsense advertisement showed a link to another site which deals with the same topic, the chances are that the user will be interested in the ad and more likely to click on it than, for example, if the ad had nothing to do with bicycles but instead dealt with mushrooms.

Getting the visitors to your site to click on adsense advertisements is key to earning money. Whenever a visitor clicks on an ad, you get a fee.

The amount of money that you get whenever someone clicks on Adsens evaries depending on the Advertiser Competition for that search term.

So for example, if the ad dealt with movies ( a very popular search term) it means that the advertisers paid more to display their ad and so when someone clicks on the ad, you make more money. On the other hand if your site is about an obscure topic that advertisers care little about, there will be less competition among advertisers for ad space and so when someone clicks on an ad, you will not earn as much.

In addition to contextual ads as described above, adsense also offers other ways of making money including adsense for search and now, adsense referrals.

Adsense for search allows you to put a Google search box on your site which the web visitor can use to search either your site or the internet. When he or she enters a search term the results include both regular Google results and paid advertising. If that person then clicks on the paid advertising you get paid.

Various factors influence the percentage of people who will click on the adsense ads. These factors include the position of the ad, the color of the ad, etc. It is best to experiment and see how even small changes to your site affect the click thru rate.

The click thru rate is the percentage of people who click on an ad after it has been displayed on your site. The higher the click thru rate the better.

For example, if you have a click thru rate of 3%, this means that you will get three people out of every one hundred visitors clicking on the ad. The higher the click thru rate (also called CTR), the better.

If you are not able to increase the CTR, another way to increase adsense revenue is to improve the traffic to your site.

So if you have a CTR of 3% and get 100 visitors per day, you will get 3 clicks on you adsense ads. If you get 200 visitors, you will get 6 clicks and so on.

The best of both worlds is to have a high CTR and lots of visitors.