Google: The Missing Manual, 2nd Edition

Chapter 9. Making Money with Google

You’ve mastered searching with Google, you’ve gotten your site in Google’s index, and you have a healthy PageRank. So how do you pay the bills? Unless your site makes a profit on donations from visitors who just love your wacky sense of humor, consider trying Google’s advertising programs: AdWords and AdSense.

AdWords lets you buy spots among the sponsored links—the ads you see on many Google results pages. AdSense lets you sell advertising space on your own site for other people’s ads. Both programs, shown in Figure 9-1, draw from the same pool of about 150,000 advertisers—everyone from 16-year-old babysitters selling hand-knit cellphone pouches to Fortune 500 companies selling cellphone service.

AdWords and AdSense are both easy to get started with, but neither is intuitive. This chapter provides an introduction to the programs, explaining how they work, when to use them, and how to get the most out of them.

Note

If this chapter doesn’t answer a question you have about Google’s ad programs, check the Google help pages for AdSense (https://google.com/adsense/online-help) and AdWords (https://adwords.google.com/select/index.html), which are pretty thorough and generally good. This chapter points out some of the more useful help pages.

Google AdSense

AdSense is a great program, though Google has given it a confusing name. If they’d called it AdSpace, you’d know right away what it’s about: selling advertising space on your Web site. Despite the nomenclature ...