AdSense is one of the most common ways that people make money online. Almost every big money making site has AdSense advertising (or has had it sometime in its history.) For any blogger who wants to make some extra cash, AdSense is a must have.
AdSense is one of the sites that makes the internet world go round. People use AdSense as a way of making their income online. Basically, AdSense works like this:
- People who want to get their site known go to AdSense.com to buy some advertising from Google. They are paying Google to advertise for them. (In the end, most of that money goes to you, the advertiser.)
- AdSense has a sign up for people who want to make money advertising. All an advertiser needs to have is web space for which they can use to post the ads.
- The advertiser signs up and gets some ad code from AdSense.
- The advertiser pastes the code in the appropriate places on their site, and viola, the advertiser is now able to start making money.
A catch to this whole “easy AdSense money” scheme is that you have to have traffic coming to your site. If you’re one who gets excited when you get onto your blog and see that five more people have visited your site today, then your site is not going to make you much money with AdSense, in all honesty. You’re going to have to check out some ways of getting more people to come to your site (also known as marketing your site) which I may be posting more on later.
Another thing you need to be aware of is that in order to actually receive a check from Google, you must make $100. If you have $100 or more in your account at the end of the month, then Google AdSense will send you a check in the mail. If you don’t have $100 in the account at the end of the month yet, don’t worry. Your money will still stay in your account until the month that you finally make that $100.
Some Common AdSense Terms:
- Ad Unit – a custom made advertisement which can include different sizes, shapes, colors, and 3, 4, or 5 links
- Page Impressions – the number of times someone has loaded up your ad/ad unit whether it be from refreshing the page or clicking a link to get to your page, if you have three ad units on a single page, then every time that page is loaded up, three is added
- Clicks – the number of times someone has clicked one of your ads
- Channel – track how many clicks one site got (for people with multiple sites)
- URL Channel – track how many clicks you got on specific pages of your site
- Clickthrough Rate (CTR) – the ratio of clicks to number of page impressions written as a percent
- Cost Per Thousand Impressions (CPM) – this is how much money your account would be predicted to make when you multiply the number of clicks by 1,000 (Personally, I believe this add in on AdSense to be one of Google’s ways of getting you excited about using your AdSense account which will make you want to get your site marketed more. Google knows that the more people you get directed to your site, the more revenue for them. In other words, don’t worry about CPM unless you want to use it as a visualization tool of what you want to be making each day with AdSense.)
DO NOT tell your family and friends to go onto your site and click the ads. For one, it’s against the rules, but it also may get your AdSense account deleted (like it did for me not even two days ago.) If you have an unusually high clicks to page impression ratio (maybe somewhere over 100%,) then in the next few days, Google will track that and possibly ban your account, and that means no money for you my friend. I’m not saying that you can’t tell your family and friends to check out your site, but you need to make sure that they understand how serious of trouble you could get in from having them click in excessive amounts. That’s just a little something I learned the hard way. 😉
A little secret: The average money made per click from AdSense is somewhere around $.63. That’s good money if you can get 100 or more clicks on your site.
Please comment. How much have you made with AdSense?
DigiJuice 