You’d enter a site, and in some location, you’d get to see a banner (often these were quite numerous and very large), which would present an ad for whatever company was paying for ads on your space.
But there was one problem with this kind of advertising. It wasn’t exploiting the fact that the ads weren’t in some newspaper, but were instead presented over the Internet.
You’ve probably noticed a lot of things like this over the pages you’ve browsed. You’re looking at an online shop, looking for a watch, but you get a banner that advertises a car.
While you might, at some later point, want to buy a car, right now you’re looking for a watch, and it would have surely been nice if the banner were advertising a watch because then you would have probably clicked it.
Well, that’s also what the folks at Google thought of, so they came up with a killer idea. This is known as Google AdSense, and it’s known as a targeted advertising program.
What you do (as a web designer/website owner) is, instead of jumping through hoops to get some banner on your site that your visitors won’t even care about, you just allocate some region of the screen.
You then sign up for the Google AdSense program, you insert a small snippet of code in your webpage and Google ensures that in the location you specify, a banner will appear, presenting ads relevant to the contents of your site.
It’s very easy for Google to do this because Google is a search engine company. It looks for the keywords in your page, searches a database of websites to find the ones related to whatever is on your page, and presto: a targeted ad.
Now that’s bound to happen more often than with a traditional banner because people are interested in what’s in that banner (otherwise, they wouldn’t be on your page, would they?).
But, this also does wonders for the people who want to advertise. And it’s because of the same reason.
This relevancy is the key to the success of the program, and also the reason why everyone remains happy. The advertiser has a relevantly placed advert, the publisher earns money from their content and Google takes its cut.
Of course, as always, Google has set some high standards for its AdSense program, in terms of looks and functionality. You can’t have more than two such banners on your website, and Google only inserts text in these banners.
So an extra benefit is that AdSense advertising is a lot less obtrusive than regular advertising. But this also means you should position the banner better because visitors might miss it altogether.
All transactions are run through Google, and the advertisers and publishers get access to statistics that help them to understand and moderate the effectiveness of their campaign.
The whole process is elegant, simple, and effective for anyone in the chain, from site visitors to advertisers, and it’s one of the reasons Google is known for its innovation and new thinking.
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