Making Sense of AdSense

Since its inception, Google’s AdSense has revolutionized the online advertising strategies of small businesses around the country. Advertisers enroll in the program to place their ads on specific websites and search results pages around the world. Google uses its Internet search technology to serve advertisements based on website content, the user’s geographical location, and other factors.

Accordingly, website owners can enroll in this program to enable text, image, and video advertisements on their websites. These ads are administered by Google and generate revenue on either a per-click or per-impression basis. AdSense has become a popular method of placing advertising on a website because the advertisements are less intrusive than most banner ads, and the content of the advertisements is often relevant to the website.

According to Google:

To date, we have shown ads based mainly on what your interests are at a specific moment. So if you search for [digital camera] on Google, you’ll get ads related to digital cameras. If you are visiting the website of one of our AdSense partners, you would see ads based on the content of the page. For example, if you’re reading a sports page on a newspaper website, we might show ads for running shoes.

But in a recent AdSense blog, Google announced that they are rolling out a program called ‘interest-based’ advertising.

These ads will associate categories of interest — say sports, gardening, cars, pets — with your browser, based on the types of sites you visit and the pages you view. We may then use those interest categories to show you more relevant text and display ads.

In translation, Google will now begin keeping track of the websites you visit in order to more effectively target you with ads. This raises privacy concerns in some consumers, but as always Google will clearly label the ads and will offer an easy way to opt-out of the advertising ‘cookie’.

What does this mean for business owners and advertisers? Google is making an already outstanding product more efficient and effective… As a result, ads placed through their program are all but guaranteed to reach the audience most likely to spend money on your product or service.

To learn how to expertly position your advertising campaign with Google, we invite you to call us at 682-4990 or Email Us.

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