Google Adsense is a new, fast and easy way for small and medium sites to make money online by displaying relevant, text-based, unobtrusive ads from Google Adwords (Google's own advertising program) and receiving a share of the pay-per-click payment.

Google Adsense is a monetization revolution for small content publishers and encourages higher quality content, helping the Net overall. It rewards for creating sites rich in high-quality and focused content. These are the sites that build traffic and trust, establish credibility. It provides both

• a site that attracts high volumes of motivated, on-target visitors, and
• a powerful model for monetizing that traffic.

It is the program that can give you advertising revenue from each page on your website with a minimal investment in time and no additional resources. It delivers relevant ads that are precisely targeted—on a page-by-page basis—to the content that people finds. And when you add a Google search box to your site, AdSense delivers relevant ads that are targeted to the Google search results pages generated by visitors’ search request.

This new “adsense program” differs from what is now “AdSense Premium”, in that it is CPC based and, offers less flexibility in terms of ad sizes -- only banners and skyscrapers are currently available. Publishers can apply using their existing AdWords accounts, or may request a new account. Applicants are usually notified within a day as to whether they’ve been accepted for the program.

There are no strict criteria for acceptance into the AdSense program, which, unlike other ad networks, does not place minimum traffic requirements on applicants. The only real criteria are the standard “acceptable content” requirements that exist just about everywhere. AdSense wants to attract quality content sites, and will only allow AdSense members to serve one ad per page ,the service can’t be used for both banners and skyscrapers.

How to get started ?

• Go to AdSense, fill in the application form and confirm an email that Google will send you. If you own several sites, you need apply only once.

• Google evaluates your site and will follow-up with you via email within 2-3 days (usually within 24 hours).

• Log in to your account using the email address and password that you submitted with your application, and agree to the AdSense Terms and Conditions.

• Paste the AdSense ad code into your Web pages. There are 10 ad layout choices. In addition to text ads, you have an option of running contextually targeted image ads.

How Does The Targeting Work?

Google uses its search engine ranking technology to decide which ads to show on your site, and on specific pages of your site. For instance, on a Webmaster site, an article about Flash might be accompanied by an ad for Macromedia products, while an article about Web hosting might show an ad from a hosting company. This type of targeting is very effective, and results in good click-through rates in most circumstances.

However, this type of targeting isn’t perfect. One key issue with the system is that Google seems to be doing very little in the way of ad rotation. If a certain ad is highly targeted to your content, it might be shown every time. This means that if you attract a large number of return visitors, or generate a high number of page views per visitor, you may experience declining click-through rates on the ads over time. Another issue is that Google targets the ads based on your site’s content, not your visitor’s desires.

How to get the most out of AdSense?

There are three obvious ways to increase your income from Google AdSense-

1) Increase traffic

Create more keyword-focused pages. The keywords must be profitable ones that can generate traffic to the website.

2) Increase click-through rate

Use simple design with the AdSense ads displayed prominently. According to Google, ads in the skyscraper format works better . Focus to only one topic per page – that should make it easier for Google to serve up the more tightly contextual ads which means better click-through.

3) Increase the value of clicks

However, you can find some "expensive" keywords and create pages optimized for them, within your site's theme. These keywords are highly competitive and you'll unlikely get high ranking for them, but visitors will arrive from other "inexpensive" pages and click on Google's ads.

Google AdSense / Adwords Updates

Change is the only constant in the world of pay per click advertising. Here are a few of the latest changes with Google’s program:

1. Additional Ad Units - AdSense now allows publishers to display more than one ad unit per page, so a publisher could now serve up a skyscraper of ads .This has the potential to increase the amount of content targeted traffic that you’ll receive through your Google Adwords account.

2. Content Targeted Bidding Workaround - Adwords doesn’t allow advertisers to set separate bids for content targeting, but there is a workaround to this problem.

3. Broad Matching is Good for Content Targeting – After setting up a content targeted focused campaign, consider using broad matching on a larger percentage of your terms. This tends to cause your ads to match with more content.

4. Image Ad Sizes – Adwords allows image ads in four sizes: 468 x 60 Banners, 300 x 250 Inlines, 728 x 90 Leaderboards, 120 x 600 Skyscrapers. Creating quality graphics takes time; they receive the vast majority of impressions, which is likely due to the popularity of those two formats with AdSense.

5. Control Image Resizing – The images used by Adwords due not conform exactly to the standard graphic sizes. This is because Google has opted to advertise in conjunction with all of their advertiser’s ads with the line “Ads by Goooooogle”.

Looking to the Future

Currently, the online ad market is in a fairly dismal state. One other reason is that advertising has traditionally been the realm of big publishers and big companies. Ad networks have changed this structure, and allow small publishers to display ads from big companies. However, due to the large minimum buys imposed by ad networks, most small companies have been limited to PPC search engine advertising. Google AdSense takes the PPC search engine model and allows small publishers to benefit from it. Now, for the first time, small companies can easily advertise with small publishers. With AdSense, many publishers will likely end up abandoning low-paying ad networks, as AdSense ads are more lucrative and less annoying to visitors.