How to Google Adsense

Publishers, authors who write content online to make money, invite Google to place Adsense ads on their websites, pages, or articles through the use of unique code.  Publishers can choose where to place their ads, what size ads they want, and how many ads per page up to a limit of three per page.  Adsense ads are usually placed near the top of the page, or the top of the sides of the page, because that is where most people will see the ads and click on them.

The way a publisher earns money from Google Adsense is when someone clicks on an ad.  Each ad has a predetermined monetary value based on the subject of the ad and the price the advertiser is willing to pay, and if a reader clicks on an ad, you get paid by Adsense.  This payment is for your willingness to have the ad where someone might click on it.  Remember, that the reason for the ad is to get a person to the website of the advertiser.  They are really the people that are paying you.

Because you get paid when someone clicks on an ad, this is called Pay Per Click advertising or PPC.  Therefore, it is considered to be click fraud if you click on your own ads.  If you are found by Google to be clicking on your own ads, you will be banned from using Google Adsense on any website, and your account will be closed.  It is also good practice to avoid clicking any ads on a site that you have Google Adsense on.  This will alleviate the chance of the appearance of click fraud.

There is a wide value range of ad prices, and ads can pay you as little as .01 per click to as high as $10 dollars per click or more.  Publishers who know which topics pay the most, and can rank highly in the SERPS (search engine results pages) for those topics will make more money.  I also believe that when you, as a publisher, show that you can drive buying traffic to your Adsense ads over time, you will get better and better paying ads for your topic.

To sign up for Google Adsense, you need to be an established publisher.  You can use Adsense on any blog or website that you own, and on many community websites.  You only need to have one Adsense account.

Certain countries have a waiting period for being able to use Adsense, and people from those countries should use the waiting period time to establish themselves as quality publishers.  These are rules put in place by Google, not by any other sites, and if a site wants to have Adsense as a revenue source, the Google rules need to be followed.  Sites that want to keep Adsense will follow the Google Adsense TOS including types of subject matter.

I originally signed up for Adsense when I started blogging several years ago on Blogger, which is also a Google website.  I have used this same account since then.

It is important to understand that not everyone gets accepted by Google for Adsense immediately, and if you don't, then you can reapply later.

While it may be nice to see your total income on Adsense go up, it is even better when you can track where it is coming from, and what pages, so that you can continue to tweak your ads, or keywords to improve the performance.

I highly recommend setting up channels.  Channels is the Adsense term for a tracking method to watch specific site's earnings.  If you look at the dashboard screenshot above, you can see my channels listed on my dashboard.  It is against Google's policy to talk about specific click through rates (CTR) and earning percentages, so I have blanked that out.

You can view your earnings by day, week, month, or since last paid.  Google Adsense pays out each month that you reach the threshold, which in the U.S. is $100.00.  You can have the payment mail you a check or direct deposit to a bank account.

The list of sites on the left side are my channels.  As you can see Wizzley is listed as a separate channel.

To set up a new channel, click on the Adsense Set Up tab at the top of the screen next to Reports.

In the Adsense Set Up tab section, you have several items that can be set up.  Click on Channels.

The screenshot above is the top of the screen for the Channels tab.

In most cases, you are going to be using Adsense for Content, which is why it is the first option.  Adsense can also be used in other ways that are listed: search, domains, and feeds.

To set up a new channel, you can create a custom channel or a url channel. 

To connect the Wizzley system with the system on Google Adsense, you need to set up a custom channel.  This will show all of your earnings on Wizzley under one channel.  After the custom channel is set up, Adsense will assign a number to that channel.  The number is listed in the column to the right of the channel name.  This is what you put into Wizzley form as the Adsense channel. 

To create the custom channel, just click on the Add new custom channels link, and follow the instructions.

The second option is to the create URL channels.  These will track any Adsense income that comes through a specific URL.  You can create a URL channel for each Wizzley article, up to a total of 200 channels.  This is a good feature if you have a specific article that you want to track.  Keep in mind that your total Wizzley earnings will include the separate url channel earnings.  You can also use channels to track your blogs, or any other website that earns money from Google Adsense.

Using Google Adsense on Wizzley is only the beginning.  You can also set up Adsense on any of your own blogs and websites.  Wizzley has the configuration for the ads already set up in their code, so as a publisher you do not need to worry about setting that up.

If you set up Google Adsense on your own sites, you will need to create the ad blocks on Adsense, then place the code on your site dependent on the configuration of that particular website.

To set up your own ads, you just go to the Get Ads tab on the Google Analytics Dashboard, and follow the instructions.  You can modify ads by size, type of ads, and colors.  Then Google will give you the code to plug in to your website.