Many marketing professionals are using Google to place targeted ads in front of prospective customers. This is increasingly effective due to the highly targeted nature of Google AdWords.  Google AdSense, the other side of the online advertising equation, allows website owners to make money by provided contextually targeted ads to their website traffic. 

Providing targeted ads to your online visitors creates a better user experience and communicates your knowledge of the audience you serve. Google AdSense automatically delivers text and image ads that are precisely targeted to your site and your site content through the Google AdSense advertising system.

If you're involved with an affiliate program such as commission junction, you know that signing up with, and maintaining relationships with advertisers is a full-time job. With Google AdSense, Google manages the relationships with advertisers for you, making the process simple and easy to manage.  Once you place the appropriate code on your website, the AdSense program requires basically no maintenance.

How You Make Money

When you display Google ads on your website, you create the potential to generate revenue. Google places relevant cost-per-click and cost per thousand impressions ads into a real-time auction and lets multiple advertisers compete against one another for displaying their ad. The auction takes place instantaneously and when it's over AdSense automatically displays the text or image ads that will generate the maximum revenue for a given page, resulting in the maximum revenue for a web site owner.

Ads Are Updated When Your Content Changes

Google AdSense technology analyses the content of your web pages and delivers ads that are relevant automatically, no matter how many pages of content your site may have.  As your content changes, Google's ads change to match.

Google Ads Can be Customized in Look and Feel

AdSense allows you to customize the appearance of your ads to fully match the look and feel of your site.  As of the writing of this article, Google AdSense provides more than 200 colors and 24 pre-set color palettes to choose from.  Additionally, you can create and save your own custom palettes using a point-and-click color selection tool which is relatively simple to use.  This ensures a consistent user experience for those browsing your web site.

Track Your Earnings Online

The key to making money with Google AdSense is to monitor your ad performance with customizable online reports.  These reports are available online and offer details regarding the number of page impressions delivered, clicks, and click-through rate. You can also track the performance of specific ad formats, colors and pages, allowing you to spot trends quickly and easily. The reporting tool lets you group your web pages however you want, so you can gain insight into your earnings by viewing results by URL, domain, ad type, and category.  When you spot revenue trends, develop more content for your site in the areas that produce the highest Google AdSense revenue.

If you are interested in getting started as a Google AdSense publisher, just go to your web browser and type in Google AdSense.  You'll find information about the program and a link to the program registration form. Signing up is pretty easy. It only takes a few minutes to apply online for both content and search ads. Once you're approved, you simply need to log in to your account, copy and paste a block of HTML code t into your existing ad server or directly into any of your web pages. Relevant ads start to appear on your web pages right away, and you start making money from the first impression or click. 

Be sure to evaluate the effectiveness of your program at least once per week.  Doing so allows you to determine what type of content is driving the largest percentage of your online advertising revenue.  As mentioned previously, when developing new content for your site, be sure to focus on the areas that are driving the greatest ad revenue as indicated by your online Google AdSense reports.