Douglas Wolfe   Web Designer & Developer
Hello Everyone,
For those of you who are unfamiliar with Adsense. It has 3 main Variations or categories if you prefer that term. They are Adsense for Content, Adsense for Search, & Referrals.
Each has a different purpose and pays out somewhat differently. I will attempt to explain briefly what all 3 are.

Adsense for Content.
This feature is for placing Adsense ads on your web site or your pages in Apsense and other sites. It is where you show Google Adwords ads and you get paid for all visitors who click those ads to see the sites who advertise through Google Adwords. These can be text ads or a combination of text and images. It is your choice what type of ads you show and you get to choose the size of the ad box. They come in a huge variety of shapes and sizes. Rectangles, squares, one liners and more. The widest is 728 wide, the tallest is 600 tall, Button size as little as 110x32 and many many sizes in between. You can customize the colors and layouts quite a bit of let them run in the default style Google has set up. They also offer a variety of themes all to help you integrate the ads into your web site or page.

Adsense for Search.
This feature allows you to put a search box on a web site or page. Your visitors can then search the entire site or the entire web from your page. You choose whether to let them search only the web or have a choice of searching the web or the site the page is on. For example, if you put a search box on your ABC (apsense business center) page in Apsense. It would allow visitors to search the web or if you choose the site option. It would allow your visitors to search the entire Apsense site. Further you can set it to customize the search results based on the site content the page is on.
Google goes on to allow you the option of having the search results open on the same page they search from, A new page or a special search results page you set up on your web site. I use this on my 1sy Monday site so that visitors can search from my site, Search the web or my entire domain and so that when they see the results they are still on my site. Great options that allow you to ad value for your visitors but also allows you to retain your visitors instead of sending them off to Google's pages. Here again they allow you to customize the look and feel of the search box. To widen it however you must change the input type="text" size attribute. This will allow you to widen or shorten the width of the box to fit its location on your page. Alternately you can alter the width when setting up the search on the Adsense for Search setup pages by changing the Length of text box value. Though it is easier to see the actual results of your changes when working on the html in an editor where you can preview your changes as opposed to going back to the Adsense site over and over to get just the right width for your purposes.

Referrals.
Referrals for Google Adsense are when you refer someone to one or more of the Google products or groups of products. These are things like Firefox with the Google Toolbar, Google Apps, the Google Pack. It also works for referring people to Adsense, Adwords and more Google products and services.
Finally it will allow you to set up pages just to refer people to a wide variety of products from other providers than Google. Then it allows you to set up a shopping cart and show up to 15 products in it.

Google has made an awesome array of products and features available for us all to use on our sites and pages. Depending on your needs you can also change the html page encoding to match your site and the language the ads or results show up in.

Here is my Adsense for Search results for yesterday on one page on one site:
AdSense for Search Queries: 11 Clicks: 3 CTR: 27.27% eCPM: $26.89 Earnings: $0.30
While this is not a great amount, this is on one page on one site. I have several sites, many pages and my main site has thousands of pages. I have Adsense for Content, Search and Referrals on most of them. So you can see the advantage of using Adsense in all its variations on all your sites and pages. Remember what you are paid for each click through varies from one feature to the next and also depends on what the advertiser is paying per click to Google. For Adsense for Content and Search you are paid per click through while on Referrals you are paid differently. For example, every time someone downloads Firefox with the Google Toolbar after clicking your referral link you will get paid $1.00. The payouts vary from product to product so be sure to spend the time on the Adsense pages to determine what you want to offer your visitors.

Douglas Wolfe
www.1stmonday.com
Jul 19th 2007 19:07