Adventures with Google AdSense
In which I try out artificially intelligent pay-per-click advertising
After my initial experiments with affiliate marketing, pay per click advertising seemed like the next logical step. The basic setup is this: you sign up for Google AdSense or something similar (address at the top of the page), use their online advert design process to create snippets of Javascript code, and then paste this code unaltered into the appropriate part of your web page. The code then loads when your web page does, and Google’s server processes the other text on your web page and/or website and selects relevant adverts to display in the colours and layout you have chosen. You’re not allowed to click on your own adverts, but if someone else does you make a small amount of money. So millions of people click on the ads and you make an effortless fortune. Right? Well, so far I’ve found the system works apart from the last part.
The first thing I was interested in was how the adverts were chosen to be relevant. Would it depend more on the content of the page, or the website as a whole? I also didn’t want Google ads for my competitors appearing on my home page, although I did see the appeal of taking some of their money if I was booked up anyway. So I tested out the ad selection process by setting up my first Google ads on a mix of obscure and slightly odd pages to see what they came up with.
Check out how the ads appear on:
Next I tried:
- my ‘Under Construction’ page, with free photos of diggers.
- Then I discovered this was probably against their ‘no error pages’ rule, so I moved it to my Construction Page Hall of Fame
Then I thought of some types of work I was too booked up for at the moment:
While keeping an eye on the Google forums and looking at how Google AdSense is used on the net, I discovered several gimmicky pages along the lines of Find Your Hobbit Name that were designed to keep people reloading and presumably seeing new ads that they might click on. So I wrote this one:
How romantic.
I even tried it on a ‘Lorem ipsum’ page, before realising that would be against AdSense policies by placing them on a page with ‘content primarily in an unsupported language’. For the record, they were mostly about beach resorts, for obvious reasons, and temp agencies, probably because of the ‘tempor’ word fragment.
Adsense Templates Websites…
I can’t believe that I missed your point, I will have to do some research on this….
Trackback by Adsense Templates Websites — 5 February, 2009 @ 10:46 am
Thanks for the info. I love the way you explained it so simple. Great blog
Robert@Private niche empires last blog post..Private Niche Empire Review
Comment by Robert@Private niche empire — 6 February, 2009 @ 12:13 am
I can’t believe some people really have the commitment and patience (and the time!) to do things like these. Wanting to experience whether you can make money with all these ways. Swopping your valuable time for earning a few cents. Unbelievable stuff.
PTC Sites
Comment by Jason @ PTC Sites — 20 February, 2009 @ 7:26 pm
That’s a fair point – the Adsense hasn’t been a high earner for me (though I haven’t really focused on it much either). I guess there are ways of attracting higher paying ads, or drawing attention to them more (within the limits). But as a freelance developer I need to know about Adsense to some extent, and as a programmer I’m interested to see how it works. Plus, once you figure out how to use it in the first place it’s fairly easy to set up and just goes on by itself in the background. It took a long time for it to reach the first $100 payment limit, but you wouldn’t leave $100 in the street so if it doesn’t do any harm, why not set up the Adsense and have it!
Comment by annabelt — 20 February, 2009 @ 7:54 pm
This topic has been updated in a post about Google Adsense and artificial intelligence on my new blog, Ebusiness Technology.
ebusiness-technology´s last blog ..Google AdSense: What Artificial Intelligence does in the Real World?
Comment by ebusiness-technology — 6 October, 2009 @ 12:23 am