How to Use AdSense? Beginner's Guide

Source: My Affiliate Place
Adsense is a quick way to jump-start your earnings when you are first beginning. As a newbie, you may have one of two views: 1) you do not think that Adsense is an important item to have on your site, or 2) in your zest to make money you haphazardly place your ads about in a hodgepodge matter. In other cases, you may unwittingly break the rules. Below is a quick tutorial to get you started. Though it is not comprehensive, it will get you started on the right track.

Define Google Adsense


Google Adsense allows your website or blog to make money. By placing specific targeted ads on your content pages, you can earn money while giving your visitors information. The type of ads that Google gives you are many - textual, image, search options, and video. Just to name a few.

Once you are within Google Adsense, you can design your ads or select some preselected colors designed by Google, copy the code that Google generates for you, and then manually paste the code to your site.

Your job is to determine the best placement of your ads within your web pages. Though it may seem simple-it does require some knowledge. But let start with the basics-which is the rules. If you don't follow the rules, you may find yourself in some trouble. What kind of trouble-being penalized by Google or banned from using Google Ads altogether.

Google Rules


Below are some of the rules that you should consider when placing your ads. By being aware of the rules, it can prevent your website from being penalized.
  1. Ads should not be placed under a title that implies that it is not an ad. For example:
    You have a title that says Business Opportunities, then under the title you have Google Ads. This is a little deceptive, and can get you in trouble. How to avoid this problem?
  2. Indent the Google Ad to help distinguish it from your content or make the Ad or the Title a different color
  3. Adsense ads/links should not be placed by a group of links that are identical in color and spacing.
  4. Do not place your Ads to close to your frequently clickable links. Though this may not directly violate their program rules, it can increase the risk of invalid clicks being generated - which is in violation of their policies.
  5. Repeated manual clicks or impressions, using robots, automated click and impression generating tools such as paid-to-click, paid-to-surf, autosurf, or click-exchange programs are prohibited.
  6. Click your own ads, for any reason is prohibited. (Click Fraud)
  7. You should not place small icons next to your Google Ads because it may suggest to your visitors that you want them to click on the links to get to a specific destination.
  8. Do not place Google Adsense Ads on empty pages
  9. Do not suggest that people click on the Ads to support your site, or offer an incentive for them to click on the ads. (This is Click Fraud)
Click Fraud Defined - Click Fraud is simply invalid clicks. Invalid clicks can come from humans, bots, and from the publisher themselves. The generic term for an invalid click is when you get more than one click on the same ad from the same person.  If you get an invalid click the ad will not be counted as revenue. And it can cause adverse effects on your Google Adsense account if you get too many invalid clicks. (Possible account closure.)

How Many Ads on a Page


As you can see, Google does offer you quite a few ads per page. 
  1. Google allows you to place 3 link units and 3 content ads on a web page
  2. Up to two Google Adsense for search boxes may be placed on a page.
As, I will indicate below, just because you can put 3 link units and 3 content ads on a web page-length and content will also have to be considered.

Competitive Ads


Here is an important rule to remember. Google does not allow any Google ads or search boxes to be published on websites that contain ads or services whose format, layout and color are identical to Google. I've personally tried different ads and noticed a downturn in my Google ads.

You can have paid advertisements on your site, however, it is your responsibility to ensure that the paid advertisements can be distinguished from that of Google Ads.

Placement of your Ads

There has been much testing done as to the placement of your ads. They have found that the left-top of the page catches the eye of the visitor first. Why? Because that is usually where you most commonly find your navigation to a website.

Some Ideas on Placement

  1. placement of the ads showed better results within the body of your content. 
  2. Ads should not draw down the copy, but compliment the body of the copy within the page.
  3. According to Google Ad size of: 336X280, 300X250, 160X600 have more clickthroughs. (These are only suggestions, it is totally dependent on the design of your site.)
  4. Test different placements of your ads on the page to determine where the ads perform the best.
Even though Google states that you can place 3 link units and 3 content ads on a web page, please consider the following advice.

When you include more ads, you will find the ads toward the bottom of the ad pyramid will have a lower price. Thus, it is wise to experiment with the number of ads on a page. 

In addition, consider your content. If your content does not support more than one set of ads, then that is all you should have. Why? The other ads may be Public Service Ads, which you do not want. Or you can direct Google to take the content from a different area on your page. Refer to Adsense, CTR and Public Service Ads.

If the content is long, and supports the different ads, then you can put 3 content ads on the web page. But length and the type of content that can be matched by Google's crawler is important, in other words, does Google have enough ads that will compliment your copy, or will you see repeat ads in the other units on the page.

These are only suggestions to where to begin-because each site is different, each layout is different, which in turns requires you to experiment with the ad size, color and placement. What is right for one site, is not right for another.

Color of Your Ads


Google has found that the following pattern works at creating higher click-through rate:

  1. Colors that blend in well with your site. But don't blend the ad in so much that the reader is blind to the ad.
  2. Using ads that match your background color and a blended border
I would experiment with several different colors. Why? When your visitors get use to your ad in one color, they soon become a little banner blind (they become accustomed to the ads and ignore them completely).

Size and Style of Your Ads

Size of your ads can be set to Google default, your overall default setting,  or customized. This is a new change that Google Adsense has just put into place (6/19/2009). The current Google default size is small. But that too will change to "Medium". Through their own experimentation, it has shown that performance of the ads were better at the "Medium" setting.
You will be able to size your ads to: Small, Medium, Large.
The available font styles will be: Verdana, Arial, Times.

Managing Your Ads


Now that you know the font sizes and styles, most importantly, how do you manage your new and old ads?

1. Old ads will need to be updated within Manage Ads on an ad  by ad basis. Note: these changes will remain, even if you change the overall default setting.

2. New ads, you will be able to change the ads accordingly: 1)  Google default size; 2) Your new  account-wide size; 3) or a separate customizable size for a specific ad group.

Adsense offers some of the following ads:

Please note as their advertising continues, so does the changes in what they offer. It
is dependent as always, on how the ads are received by the viewers, publishers and advertisers.

Mobile Ads- Mobile ads are ads that are directed to your ipod or cell phone. To make
your website "mobile ready" you will have to do so tweaking of your site.
Here are some of the things you need to do to have your website mobile compliant:
  1. You will need to use the mark up language XHTML,WML or CHTML with a layout that properly displays the information specific to a cell phone.
  2. Develop your website using server-side scripting - PHP or ASP. (Many web hosting services provide support for PHP or ASP-but before you get gunho, I would suggest that you contact your web hosting provider to verify that it is available to your plan-or if you have to pay additional for the service.
    If they do offer PHP, all you would have to do is ad the snippet of Adsense PHP code to your web page and then change the ".htm" or ".html" extension to the PHP extension.
  3. Last but not least, preview your web page before pulling it to your website. You don't want it to blow up on you if something is not right.
Adsense for Domains-This is fairly new option given by Google Adsense. It allows publishers with unused domains to help users reach relevant information by presenting content on the domains.

This is how it works. Users will type in an expired link that leads to sites with no content. You will find either "Under construction" page or a 404 error. Now, Adsense for domain will provide links, search results, advertisement and other content.

If you have a page with no content on it, then Adsense for domains can help your users. To get started you need to follow the Domain Set-up Guide for the specific registrars.

Adsense for Search- Adsense has made some improvements to their Adsense for Search. You have the option of having the search option on your site, search your
site, a collection of sites, or the web.

Adsense for Contents - Adsense for contents lets you display ads that are are text, image or text and image ads.

Links - Links units. This is just a list of topics within a link. Let's see how a link works when a visitor click on a link.

When a visitor clicks on a link they will be taken to a page that will display a list of topics that is relevant to the content of your site. If they click on any of the Adwords ads on the resulting page you will be paid for the click. 

Remember: you are not paid when the visitor clicks on the link within a link unit on your site, but only when the visitors clicks on the Adwords ads on the resulting pages.

Reminder: The program rule allows you to place three ad units and three link units on any page.

Forums with Adsense

You can monetize your forum with Adsense. Google advices using a skyscraper above the fold to the left side of your forum, with a leaderboard ad directly below the top navigation and below the first post.

Forums leads you into a whole new avenue of compliance issues. You will need to monitor for "inappropriate content" from your users or spam bots that direct you to inappropriate sites. Thus, any image, content, link, etc. that Google finds inappropriate for "user-friendly advertising" is not allowed.

Google suggests some of the following:
  • Within your forum place a link that says: Report Inappropriate Content
  • Have a moderator keep an eye on different sections of your forum
  • Proactively review pages
  • Implement spam-bot protection for your forum
  • keyword filtering

As you can see there is a lot to learn about Adsense. But the most important thing to remember once you got the basics is to experiment and track the results.