Looking back over the way internet advertising has developed, you’ll see that is was similar to newspaper and TV.
You’d enter a site, and in some location you’d get to see a banner (often these were quite numerous and very large), which would present and ad for whatever company was paying for adds on your space.
But there was one problem with this kind of advertising. It really wasn’t exploiting the fact that the adds weren’t in some newspaper, but were instead presented over the Internet.
You’ve probably noticed a lot of things like this over the pages you’ve browsed. You’re shopping online for a watch, however you get a banner ad for an automobile.
While you might, at some later point want to buy a car, right now you’re looking for a watch and it would have surely been nice if the banner were advertising a watch, because then you would have probably clicked it.
Thinking the same thing, the people at Google came up with a great idea. This is knows as Google AdSense, and it’s known as a targeted advertising program
What you do (as a web designer / website owner) is, instead of jumping through hoops to get some banner on your site that your visitors won’t even care about, is you just allocate some region of the screen.
You then sign up for the Google AdSense program, you insert a small snippet of code in your webpage and Google ensures that in the location you specify, a banner will appear, presenting adds relevant to the contents of your site.
Google can do this easily because they are a search engine company. A targeted ad is presented to you after it looks for related keywords in your page, then searches a database of websites to find one that relates closely to yours.
As the webmaster, you’ll get paid a fee for each visitor clicking on the Adsense banner ad on your website. Now that’s bound to happen more often then with a traditional banner because people are actually interested in what’s in that banner (otherwise, they wouldn’t be on your page would they?).
But, this also does wonders for the people who want to advertise. And it’s because of the same reason. All the content in the banner is relevant, which makes it a wonderful thing with Google Adsense.
Since the program is successful because of the relevancy, all remain happy. Google will take their cut from the publisher who earns from the content, while the advertiser gets a relevantly placed advert.
Of course, as always, Google has set some high standards for its AdSense program, in terms of looks and functionality. You can’t have more than two such banners on your website and Google only inserts text in these banners.
Adsense advertising is less obtrusive than regular advertising, which is beneficial. Positioning the banner better would be best, so that possible visitors don’t miss it completely.
So in the end, Google AdSense is an advertising program that is unique because the ads are relevant to the content on the site. Anyone that wants to advertise pays Google for it. Google will pay you by placing advertisements on sites through Adsense.
Advertisers and publishers get access to thier campaign stats, helping them run a well oiled campaign.
From site visitors to advertisers, this process is effective and simple, which is why Google is known for being innovative.
