What is AdSense?
AdSense is an advertising network run by Google. It’s a way for websites to make money by displaying targeted Google advertisements on their sites.
Advertisements come in all shapes and sizes. Your site can display images, videos, text, and interactive ads as a monetization strategy.
Arguably the best part about Google AdSense (aside from the cost — it’s free) is that you won’t have to deal with advertisers directly. Everything gets handled through Google’s platform, so you don’t have to worry about collecting money or maintaining relationships when you’re hosting ads.
Google does all of that work for you. It collects money from the advertisers, keeps 32% for its role in facilitating the process, and the remaining 68% goes to the publisher (you).
How to create an AdSense account?
Even though AdSense is free for all to sign up. Not all the website gets approved. Here are few pointers to consider before you sign up with AdSense.
- Make sure your site’s pages are ready for AdSense
For your site to succeed with AdSense, it should have unique content that’s relevant to your visitors and provides a great user experience. Before you sign up for AdSense, you should review your pages to ensure they are in good shape.
- Have clear, easy-to-use navigation: easy-to-use menu bar is a key part of providing a good user experience. When building your navigation bar, consider:
- Alignment – are all the elements lined up correctly?
- Readability – is the text easy to read?
- Functionality – do your drop-down lists work correctly?
Examples:
For a travel website, your navigation bar might look like this:
-> Homepage <> Destinations <> Gallery <> Reviews <> About us
https://www.webmarketingacademy.in/best-digital-marketing-training-courses-in-bangalore/
For a digital marketing website, your navigation bar might look like this:
-> Homepage <> Services <> Digital Marketing <> Social Media Marketing<> Facebook <> Advertisements
- Unique and interesting content: Valuable and original content is paramount to building a strong and loyal user base. When users enjoy your content, they share the experience with others, and this, in turn, helps you to grow your site
Steps to create an AdSense account
- Visit adsense.com https://www.google.com/adsense/start/
- Click Sign up now.
- Enter the URL of the site that you want to show ads on.
- Enter your email address.
- Choose whether you’d like AdSense to send you customized help and performance suggestions.
- Click Save and continue.
- Sign in to your Google Account.
- Select your country or territory.
- Review and accept the AdSense Terms and Conditions.
- Click on Create account.
Sign in and fill in the details
After filling up your blog URL and Gmail id, if you are looking for extra AdSense tips and tricks information at your email address, you can click on the “Yes” option or you can click on “No”. It is your choice.
Thirdly, click the button “Save and Continue”. After that, you would be logged in to AdSense through your Gmail. If you have used the wrong Gmail then also you have an option to change and modify it. In addition to this before clicking “CREATE ACCOUNT” recheck all the information which you have filled within the form.
How to start running ads on your website?
- Once you create your account with AdSense and when your site is approved by Google, you need to set up the ads.
- You need to configure the ads on your website by going to the Overview section (which you will find on the left-hand side of the dashboard under the main heading, Ads) and choose the type of Ads you want to set up.
- After you are done selecting the type of ads you want to show on your site, click on Create and get code.
- Google will automatically create the code for an ad unit and you have to copy and paste this code on to your website.
- If you are using WordPress, you can paste the code in the widgets section.
- Once the code is pasted, Google can take up to an hour to start showing ads on your website.
Types of Ad units on AdSense
At present, there are five types of Ads on AdSense which are as follows:
- Display Ads
- Display ads are responsive by default, which means they automatically adapt their size to fit your page layout and your users’ devices.
- They can be customized to show fixed ad sizes.
- They’re also compatible with AMP pages.
- In-feed Ads
- These are native ads that have an adaptive flow inside a feed.
- For example, a list of blogs or an article.
- In-Article Ads
- Another type of native ad that fits in between the paragraphs of a page.
- This gives the user an enhanced reading experience.
- Matched Content
- These are recommendations that promote your content to visitors.
- Matched content is good for increasing page views, revenue, and time spent on the site.
- Link Ads
- Links ads show a list of topics that are relevant to the content of your page.
- These are responsive in nature, which means they adapt their size to the layout of the page.
- They can be customized to stay fixed on the page.
How to create a custom AdSense search bar for a website?
To create a new custom search bar for your site, follow these steps:
- Sign in to your AdSense account
- Choose Ads for search and then choose Custom Search Engines.
- Click on +New Custom Search Engine
- Give your search engine a name and save it to get the code.
- Copy and paste this code into the HTML of the pages you want to show your custom search engine.
Click on the ‘New Custom search engines’ button. On the next page, fill out the form. For the ‘What to search field, select the second option ‘Only sites I select’ and enter your website URL in the field.
Scroll down the page, click on the Search results, select the last option ‘on my website’ and enter the URL of your website search page where you will display the search result.
Next, hit the Save and get code button. It will open a pop-up window. Copy both the Search box code and Search result code.
The Search box code is to display the google search on your site.
You can add AdSense search to the WordPress sidebar by adding the code to a widget
Edit Google AdSense Custom Search Engine
To edit your custom search engine, Go to https://cse.google.com/cse/all
You’ll see your custom search engine here. Click on it to edit it.
Next, click on Look and Feel from the sidebar.
What is the Ads.txt file?
Ads.txt is a text file that you add to your website to show that your ads inventory is only sold through authorized sellers. This file ensures that you are authorized to run ads on your platform.
How to create an ads.txt file?
- Sign in to your AdSense account
- In the ads.txt alert on the home page click on Fix Now.
- Click on the tab “create ads.txt file for…” and click on Download.
- Once your ads.txt file is downloaded, paste it into the root level domain of your site.
- Add your publisher ID to the ads.txt file for it to get crawled by Google.
How to analyze your AdSense account?
The Analysis of Adsense can be done through performance reports and we can use the filter and metrics to understand how, where, and when the revenue has been generated.
To Analyse the Adsense Account.
Log in to Adsense Account
Then click on Performance reports.
How does a publisher get paid?
Website owners get paid based on various bid types for the ads they display.
- CPC (cost per click)
- CPM (cost per thousand impressions)
- Active View CPM (active view cost per thousand impressions)
- CPE (cost per engagement)
CPC
With the CPC monetization strategy, you’ll get paid for each time a website visitor clicks on an ad displayed on your website. Depending on the content of the ad, some advertisers are willing to pay higher rates for clicks than others.
CPM
In the advertising world, the “M” in CPM stands for a mile, which is Latin for thousand. So, Cost Per Thousand — or the cost per 1,000 impressions. In this case, publishers are paid for displaying the ad, regardless if a user clicks on it or not.
CPM bids are typically lower than CPC bids since the fee structure is not conditional on the user taking an action. Google will display whichever ad type (CPM or CPC) is expected to earn more revenue for the publisher, which is in Google’s best interest since they take a 32% share of the revenue.
Active View CPM
In order to get paid for Active View CPM ads, the impressions must be measured as “viewable.” This means that at least 50% of an ad needs to be shown on the screen for at least one second.
These bids will be higher than traditional CPM bids since the chances of a website visitor actually seeing the ad are increased.
CPE
Cost per engagement is based on how active a user is with an advertisement. For example, let’s say an advertiser decides to run a lightbox ad. These formats are expandable — they take up a large portion of the screen if they’re clicked on. If a website visitor hovers over a lightbox ad for more than two seconds, the ad will expand. This is the type of engagement that is required for CPE payouts.
AdSense best practices
- Never click on your own ads: Since AdSense is based on clicks and other engagement, clicking an advertisement on your own website is considered fraudulent. It’s important that you don’t let any family members in your household click on those ads either.
Google won’t be able to tell the difference between you or your spouse if you’re living together. If they see clicks coming from your house to ads on your website, they can remove you from the AdSense program.
- Run different ad units: Everyone has different preferences. Different website visitors might be attracted to different styles and types of ads displayed on your website.
Find the best placement: It’s also a good idea to look at some of the most popular and successful websites in your industry. Look at their ad placements. If you notice a common trend across the websites, you can try to repeat it.