Week 4 Blog: Google’s AdWords and AdSense
Originally Google was designed purely as a search engine: to deliver the most relevant search results to users. However, as Google expanded, it became a business and needed to commercialize. The idea of AdWords started with Bill Gross who thought of it based off of Yellow Pages. Google couldn’t purchase the idea so created Adwords which led to legal disputes settled out of court.With the introduction of AdWord and AdSense, search results that are completely determined based on relevancy rather than payment are called organic searches.
AdWords allows businesses to create ads that will appear on the Google search page when relevant keywords are inputted. Ads are usually short, a headline of 25 characters and two additional lines of 35 characters each. They are distributed locally, nationally and internationally. Ad placement can be controlled through location and language targeting. Additionally, Google allows for certain IP address ranges to be excluded from the campaign.
AdWords has become Google’s main source of revenue, bringing in $42.5 billion in 2012. It offers a pay-per-click/cost-per-click or cost-per-thousand-impressions advertising. Pay per click, just like it’s name, is when the ad owner pays Google every time the ad is clicked. Cost-per-thousand-impressions is when the owner pays Google for every thousand times the ad is shown to a search engine user. AdWords operates through an auction system. Advertisers can submit a sealed bid, one that is not observable by competitors. For companies looking to work with AdWords, Google started the Google Advertising Professional program to certify individual consultants or agencies to advise other companies on how to reach a global online audience through AdWords.
AdSense on the other hand is when ads are put on individual websites and Google will pay web publishers to display ads. Once the ads are clicked or viewed, the web publisher is paid by Google and Google is in turn paid by the original owner of the ad. Google evaluates what the webpage is about to place ads that are relevant including content of page and language of page. For site-targeting advertising, ad locations on the page can be chosen too. This program has become very popular with smaller websites that don’t have the resources to have their own marketing or sales department. The program offers income through just simply placing the ads in non-obtrusive locations. The program also runs with GMail now. If you have a gmail account, you can see the ads located on the sides or tops of emails.
-For content: the ads are placed in websites for their content and relevancy
-For search:websites can place a custom Google Search Bar so that when users use that search bar, Google will share the revenue with the website owner.
Just like linking farming, there are Adsense farms called “splogs” (spam blogs) that center around a keyword and try to bring users into their Adsense sites in order to earn money. These are illegal and can be reported to Google. It used to be popular to create websites that were almost completely populated by ads. However, now Google has disabled these sites. Another illegal practice is to make ads that appear to be from Google but actually are Trojan horses that lead to malicious viruses or illegal download or corruption of data.
