What is Google Adsense?

Google AdSense is a monetization platform from Google that allows small to medium sized publishers to monetize their content with a wide variety of ad formats and ad products. Adsense is a great place to start for publishers who are looking to monetize website because it's relatively straightforward to implement and earn revenue.

Here's a more specific overview of Google Adsense explained:

Adsense Login: Publishers can apply to Google Adsense here to start the approval process. Adsense will give you a script to place in the head of your site so they can review the content to make sure it adheres to their policies. Getting Adsense approval can be tricky because they are actually quite strict when it comes to policy enforcement. If your site is approved, violating policies can result in revenue clawbacks, suspension or termination of an account.

Ad Placement and Integration: Once you get Adsense approval, publishers can use the Adsense self-serve tool to implement a wide variety of ad sizes, ad products and ad sizes. Adsense offers standard IAB ad sizes, responsive ad units and several ad products through Adsense Auto Ads like the anchor ad, vignette and in-page ads. The best mix of ads does depend on the site, the content, the users on the site and several other factors.

Audience Targeting and Contextual Advertising: Google Adsense offers a combination of ads targeted by Audience and by Contextual signals. Audience targeted ads require tracking users and targeting ads specifically based on past behaviors across the web. While Contextual ad targeting displays ads that are relevant to the site content.

Ad Auction and Bidding: Advertisers bid for impressions through Google Ads which then run on publishers sites through Google Adsense. The upstream bidders set their campaign goals which could be based on cost per click (CPC) or cost per thousand impressions (CPM), then Adsense will run the auction and pick the highest paying bidder on an impression basis.

Revenue Sharing: The typical revenue share model for Google Adsense is 68% to the publisher and 32% to Adsense. The revenue is paid out to the publisher on a net 30 basis, which means payments for the previous month are sent 30 days after the last day of the month. For publishers looking to earn a higher percentage of the revenue, Google Ad Exchange, the premium version of Adsense, does pay at least 10% more.

Ad Performance and Reporting: Once you get an Adsense login and your ad units set up on your site, tracking performance is a delight via the Adsense reporting tool. The reporting tool provides in-depth, real-time reporting on a wide variety of dimensions and metrics like, impressions, revenue, cpm, cpc, viewability, impressions rpm, page rpm, pageviews by ad units, ad products, dates and more.

While Adsense is a great place to start for publishers, it also has some limitations and is best utilizes wihtin a hybrid ad stack that can provide incremntal revenue. This would include the higher paying Google Ad Exchange, Header Bidding, Open Bidding, and premium ad products like Video ads. That, in combination with Adsense is usually the best way to monetize your website.