Advertising from Google

Many website today provide text-based adsunder the caption Ads by Goooooogle. This article explores how your website can also feature these advertisements, and in the process make some money. 

What we are seeing is a case of advertisement syndication, of a central agency farming out advertisements to affi1iates. As with many other things Google has done, they are not the first off the mark. There were quite a few names in this arena before, including search engine top guns such as Lycos and Yahoo. Services such as Web-rings and linkex-changes have proliferated the concept o actually making money out of a visitor to your website clicking on outward links and visiting someone else! With the rapid entry of Google Inc in to everything we do online, it is no surprise that Google has quickly become one of the top players in online advertising. It is only natural that Google seeks to extend the reach of its advertisers by using the same methodology Basically, you as a Web master call upon Google to place some of the advertisements that they are get- ting on your websites. 

The advantages of engaging such a provider, vis-i-vis making your own advertisement engine and having your sales team are many, sans all attendant complexities of rotation of adverts, tracking clicks, managing so many adveriser accounts and so on. And most of all, you don't have to pay providers of these services any money. Before you actually head over to sign up, let's take a peek at what their Greek means. 

How does such a thing work? 



With some providers, you would need to tell them a little something about your website. Others, such as Google, pick it up automatically from the content displayed on that particular page. This is called CSA or Content Sensitive Advertising. Naturally, CSA is a little better since advertising will change automatically according to what you have on that page. Now-a-days pages are increasingly created in template formats (where there is a singular page and all its different components are loaded dynamically) vis-a-vis the archaic system of hand coding each HTML page. And, CSA is perfectly suited for such an environment. You just need to have the advertiser's code inserted on one page and it appears automatically on all pages that use that template. 

With earlier, non content-sensitive advertising, when you set up parameters with the 'advertisement server', each page will have the same type of advertising (let's say 'server equipment'), regardless of the page content (let's say 'technical support options') unless you set up new parameters for every page-a real chore if you're running even a decent sized site. 

Context sensitive 



How does Google know what my page contains? It doesn't even appear on the search results and I have never submitted it to a search engine. CSA doesn't need your site to be indexed or 'robotized'. The advertising provider will usually give you a short piece of HTML or Java script to insert into your pages, where you want the advertisements to appear. If you look closely at the script, you will notice that it's actually calling a script on their servers. For example, Google's AdSense uses the following line.

type="text/javascript"

src=http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js>; 

Notice thecall to "show-ads.jsV. Well, when this script loads,it sends Google your page's URL. A script waiting there accesses your page and takes a quick scan through it, pulling out keywords it can use. Let's say it found 'alternative', 'server' and 'conditioning equipment' on this particular page. It will now search through its database of possible advertisements and match them against these key words extracted from your website. Possibly, it might show you advertising for' alternative servers', 'power conditioning equipment' and 'web hosting companies' on this page. 

Tracking and payments 



Click tracking and tracing is big business and is at the core of this business model. They track who views the pages, where they came from, where they went from there. The means and methods of doing this are many and this is not the place to dwell on that .Suffice to say there are two terms you need to know about: CTR (Click Through Rate) and CPT (Cost Per 1000 impressions, or CPM, cost per million). When someone signs up with Google as an advertiser, they book the number of units they want to display. A unit is 1000 impressions. An impression is when an advertisement has been displayed once on one Web page at a site, say yoursite. CTR,on the other hand, is the percentage of the number of times your advertisement was click on against the number of times it was displayed. If a 100 people saw an advert, that is 100 impressions. Rut if only 10 of them clicked on it, then the CTR is 10 percent. Naturally, providers such as Google pay you on the CTR and not on impressions. The reports Google provides let you see a day-by-day analysis of impressions, CPM and CTR and how much you earned out of that. 

Different types of AdSense



There are three types of Ad-Sense for the advertiser: Premium, Content and Search. While almost any website can qualify to use the free Ad Sense program, your site should receive more than twenty million page views a monthor appear on at least five million search results in a month in order to qualify for the Premium program. The premium service provides a designated Account Manager (a person) with Google who will form your point of contact, provide flexibility in the form of advertisements you want to serve on your website.You can also make use of advanced filtering and optimization features take advantage of better technical support from Google. Further, more options are provided to receive the payouts. 

AdSense for Content delivers advertisements alongside regular website content (like on PCQuest.com). AdSense for Search places context-sensitive advertising on search result pages. These are only different depending on what kind of pages they appear on con- tent or search results. 

Earnings for the day are calculated based on the both CTR and CPM. The value of the advertiser is also important as you notice.

A newer type of AdSense that is slowly taking shape is the much-debated advertising on Gmail pages, where Google serves advertising based on the content of our e-mail. 

How much are they paying? 



Advertisers pay Google only when their advertising is clicked upon. Google pays you aportion of this money. The amount of money you receive is directly proportional to the CPC (Cost Pcr Click) value of the advertisement.This in turn depends on the volume of advertising booked by the advertiser. So, if someone books 100 units of advertising tor s 100, its CPC is Re 1.

With things such as volume discounts in play, a quantity-order like 1000 units may cost only Rs 500, bring down your CPC to just 50 paise. Therefore, there is no hard and fast rule about how much money you will earn through AdSense. See the screenshot of a typical AdSense re port, you will notice different amounts being payable for different advertising displayed on that website.

How do you receive payment? 



Google dispatches the amounts by cheques approximately at the end of each calendar month, or when your account balance (payable to you) reaches US $100. From last year onward, Google demands the signing of a declaration indicating your US citizenship. If you are a US citizen, you are required to furnish tax forms vide, IRS forms W-9, W-8 (various types) or 8233. Indian and other non-US citizens simply need to click on 'No' on the options alongside and submit no further information. 

Other competing services 



Google is not alone in doing such advertising.Other advertising services are also in the fray. Notahly, DoubIe
Click.com, MSN and Yahoo! also provide content-sensitive advertising.However,Google AdSense is the only revenue generating system for the

advertisement-displaying website. Earlier, Microsoft bcentral's LinkExchange program was similar to this, but one rarely hearsabout that service nowadays. Lots of garage banner and link-ex-change proprams and Web-rings also promote similar environments where the displaying website earns revenue. 

Pros and cons 



Obviously, the first benefit is that the overhead of managing an advertising undertaking is now someone elsc's.And,of course, you earn some money The con is simply that the system is as flawed as the internet. You can increase your CTR to
unbelievable figures just by continually refreshing your own page and clicking on the advertising. And unless there are sophisticated scripts on the provider's server that can track, such tricks and prevent them, people can scam them out of a lot of money! CNET recently had a problem, where their CSA did not work properly and incorrect advertising was

displayed-imagine advertisement for a backache clinic when you're reading up on the Mars Rover. In such situations (CNET's advertising is not Cree like Google's Adsense) the providers could end up paying money in damages. Just like the

search-engine technology, such advertising mechanisms have alongway to go. Perhaps with time, we shall see a consolidation

of markets or perhaps the arena is sustainable for .a number of large players to co-exist. 

Sujay V. Sarma