| What is AdSense vs AdWords? |
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Side 1: AdWords Google's AdWords is an excellent way to advertise a website to a targeted audience. Adwords is just one of many pay-per-click advertising programs. Adwords correspond to AdSense ads. AdSense ads have lists of relevant keywords associated with them. Those words are associated with the ad by the advertiser in Google’s AdSense control panel. Each keyword is bid on by the advertisers for placement in the results pages and on web sites around the world. So the advertiser is bidding on keywords that will prompt a display of his/her ad. Thus: AdWords. If you have a product you wish to sell or a site you want to get traffic to, you can enroll in AdWords and pay for AdSense ads. Assuming you have a product or site to market, the first step is to sign up with Google. The next step is to pick keywords to associate with your product or site. After you have a big list of keywords, you can write ads that will be associated with the words and then place a bid with Google for each keyword. If one of your keywords is searched for or relevant to a site, and you have a good bid and relevant ad, your AdSense ad will be displayed. Only when someone clicks your ad are you charged by Google. The more popular keywords are wanted by many competitors, so the prices per click can get pretty high. It is not uncommon for a click to cost $5 or even $10. If you have 10,000 ad clicks, after you account for your conversion rate (the rate that you convert visitors into buyers) you better be sure you are making more than the ad click costs! But it should never break your bank because you can set the bid limits and the monthly budget. What if you can’t afford $5.00 per click? Since the more popular keywords are so expensive, it is best to bid on less popular keywords because the cost per click is lower. Google presently has a minimum bid of $0.05 per click. If you can get those, you can reduce your advertising budget. But that is another story… There is a lot to know. There is a lot of money to be made. And there is a lot of money and time to be wasted. To avoid waste, you have to learn as much as possible and get the right tools to do the research. There is a really informative e-book called The Masters Course in the free resources section to help educate you further and help get you started. The Flip Side: AdSense The flip side of AdWords is AdSense. When you go to a website and see a section with the “Ads by Google” above it or below it, you are probably looking at ads displayed via AdSense. When you do a search on Google and see ads in the search results pages, they are ads based on your search - similar to AdSense ads, except that AdSense ads are the ads that appear in website content pages - like the ads to the left of this article. AdSense is programming by Google that “senses” the relevance of a page or search. It bases the relevance on keywords. It does this by either “reading” the page, or taking a look at the search term that was typed into Google Search. It can “Sense” which ads are relevant to the content or search and display them – thus: “AdSense.” Before the page is displayed, AdSense goes out to its database of advertisers and finds all ads that are associated with the keywords on the page or in the search. Next comes the interesting part – to decide which of the thousands of ads vying for position are actually displayed. To make this decision, AsSense looks at the advertiser’s bids for the relevant keywords. The advertisers that have a combination of the highest bid and best click through (based on the ad text relevance to the associated keywords) get displayed first. When you click the ad, Google tracks the click and the advertiser pays Google the bid price. If the ad was on someone’s web page, Google then pays the website owner a portion of the payment. Putting AdSense ads on your site is often referred to as “monetizing” your site. This is one very effective method to make money with your website – displaying Google AdSense ads. If you get 10,000 visitors and 10% of them click an ad that pays you, theoretically, $0.75 per click, you just made $750! Not bad for just copying some AdSense code (which Google provides) into your popular website’s HTML (if your site is not popular, you'll have to learn about SEO – Search Engine Optimization). |
