Google AdSense Review: Strengths, Problems And Weaknesses

Google's AdSense program allows third-party sites (like mine) to run Google's famously successful text ads, which also get tailored to each of site's pages' content. Already, there have been a few examples of the money this could bring to small sites.

Source: Potential Effects of Google AdSense.

Google AdSense has recently lifted a ban prohibiting independent publishers like me to report about the use and effectiveness of their unique advertising program for independent publishers, bloggers and Web site owners.

Google AdSense is a virtual advertising agency, which automatically places ads on your Web pages and selects which ads to publish according to the specific type of content available on each.

All of this process is automatic.

"Simply put, we provide you with AdSense HTML ad code to place on the web pages on which you want to display AdWords ads. Then, we take care of the rest by leveraging award-winning and proprietary Google search and page-ranking technologies to deliver relevant AdWords ads to those content pages.

"We go beyond simple keyword matching to understand the context and content of web pages. Based on a sophisticated algorithm that includes such factors as keyword analysis, word frequency, font size, and the overall link structure of the web, we know what a page is about, and can precisely match Google ads to each page."

Source: Google AdSense FAQ

After signing up, you need only to place one short script inside your Web site page template so that it will be used on all the pages where you want your ads to appear.

After the Google ads start appearing on your pages your AdSense counter starts ticking the number of clickthroughs generated by your site visitors on those ads. Though as a Web site owner participating in AdSense, you are fully prevented from knowing which ads were clicked and how much each click brings to you, the overall result is that, without doing anything more than what many Web site owners would normally do, one can end up making a tangible amount of streaming income built upon the interaction between quality content and ethical ads.

Google uses their search engine ranking technology to decide what ads to show on your site, and on specific pages on your site. For instance on a webmaster site an article about Flash might show ads for Macromedia products and an article about web hosting might show ads from different web hosting companies. This type of targeting is very effective and results in good click-through rates in most circumstances.

This targeting isn't perfect though. One issue is that Google seems to be doing very little in the way of ad rotation. If a certain ad is highly targeted to your content it might be shown every time. This means that if you have a lot of return visitors or a high number of page views per visitor you may experience declining click-through rates.

Another issue is that Google targets ads based on your site's content, not based on your visitor's desires. The difference between the two might not be readily apparently, but it can be very significant.

Source: Google AdSense Review

Google pays Web site owners with a monthly check that is sent directly to your specified address (for now some limitations apply if you live outside of north America).

So far it sounds and looks as an ideal marriage between ethical and contextual advertising and the growing number of niche writers, reviewers and reporters adding themselves successfully to the universe of online news, educational and reference sites and more.

But let's look a bit under the surface.

Thanks to Mihai Bocsaru I finally scouted an excellent article about some of the features and characteristics of Google AdSense that any Web site owner should be aware of:

1) Pages with single theme topics are highly effective.
2) Targeting effectiveness increases over time.
3) Hosting AdSense ads has no effect on the level of spidering from the "normal" Googlebot.

Having been fiddling and playing with AdSense myself, in the effort of optimizing my Web site pages to trigger the most relevant ads I have also made a few discoveries:

4) Critical factors that determine Google ad selection are clearly related to off-page factors. These may be variables, link relevancy or other categorization mechanism that Google uses to determine the type of content displayed on any Web page.

5) Highly descriptive file names with dashes between the words work extremely well.

6) Domain names that clearly specify what you are all about about do have a tangible effect on Google AdSense selection of ads.

7) It is true that Google AdSense fills in the adstrip with public service announcements when:

a) it does not have sufficient ads to run for a they keyphrase it has identified

b) it has not yet "cached" the page on its own servers.

That means that if you take any page from the Web, and report the content on an empty page of your site, you will see public service ads appear on it, until that page is effectively "public" and becomes cached by Google.

Unless your Web page is very simple (design-wise) and your content is very focussed optimizing any Web site page for Google AdSense can appear to be quite difficult, if not altogether impossible.

But there are a lot of simple logical steps one can take to make things work for the better than the worst. And it all comes down to publishing high quality content that is focused on one or more very specific topics.

On the other hand, it is also likely that Google AdSense will gradually refine and improve its invisible keyword-matching engine, but it is also possible that we are asking Google something we could maybe doing ourselves.

Now let me express some very personal ideas:

a) What I would want from Google AdSense:

If I were to decide and design my ideal Google AdSense this is what I would do.

Make these considerations:

a) Who would be most interested in placing the very best ads on a site?

b) Why does this process have to be ONLY automatic?

c) Can Google ever be as good as the advertiser or Web site owner in establishing whether an ad best fits a page or another one?

It seems to me that as much as the talent, skill, experience and ability of advertisers and web site owners is fully leveraged, much of the extra potential of this approach remain untapped.

I know that there are tens of thousands of good reasons that you are already thinking up for why this is not so, but please, let me play my role and let's try to stretch a bit our view of how things could really be.

Picture this:

What if I had inside my Google AdSense control panel the option to access and see all of the ads available through Google AdSense searchable and sortable by category and type of products.

What if I could select which ads to run on my site and which ones to run on different types of pages. Would I be a more apt gardener than Google automatic keyword technology?

What if I could also set Google to operate in automatic mode for all those pages where I see it doing great keyword matching, while having the option to go on manual on those, maybe very important and trafficked pages where AdSense keep stumbling on itself?

Who do you think would benefit the most?

What if advertisers could themselves target and control with a finer degree of accuracy the sites and minimum requirements they would want to consider any site a viable advertising channel? Advertisers could well use criteria as category of content, Pagerank, number of inbound links, keyword relevancy, categorization and presence, inside DMOZ and much more.

b) What I don't like at all about Google AdSense

I frankly feel very uneasy to be in a business relationship where my business partner, Google acts like God and I have to maintain blind faith and full trust in whatever it does.

Fact is that I have no way to check or verify whether is Google effectively providing me with what I deserve for my marketing communication effort.

The issue is particularly thorny because Google claims the right to nullify any clickthroughs that it will identify as unethical efforts to boost the AdSense traffic. (I have already heard in person horror stories of very serious and credible independent publishers being cancelled their AdSense payment on the basis of such rules. Having talked to some of these people I have had the net impression that they had not acted unethically and that they were themselves very surprised of Google decisions.)

I, for one, have been surprised at how wide the percentage of "valid" clickthroughs may vary from one day to the next, and have been perplexed at some of the reported clickthrough data. But can I verify? Can I see if I have been penalized because someone has been clicking too much on these ads?
No. I have no way to check, verify or even test the effectiveness of my work.

Would it be so outrageous then to ask Google to play its "private" testing game on my sites for a few months, and then, having seen my reliability, relevance and content, grant me a forfeit advertising budget for the aggregated worth of my online property (reach, Pagerank, clickthrough, relevance, etc.)?

Conclusions

Overall I like Google AdSense very much because it DOES offer a tangible opportunity to support many independent Web site owners, small businesses and thousands of good writers and reporters who would have otherwise no easy to way to maintain an information-based online business.

This is certainly much better and more effective than considering the much touted micropayments solution for example.

If advertising can be made to be as non-intrusive, contextual, relevant and targeted as AdSense intends to be, the positive results can be seen not only in the wonderful opportunity to stretch the potential for effective marketing in new directions, but also in the fact that this approach opens the advertising marketplace to many small players, while, for the first time, incentivating the creative publishing work of those who are least commercially oriented.