Experimenting with Google AdSense: Getting it working
I previously wrote that I’d be trying out AdSense soon. Well, that time has come. It’s not as easy as one would hope, and not for technical reasons. I have to enter tax and payment information before I can start receiving payments. Yuck. Although this probably won’t ever get in my way, as Google only sends a check once the account balance reaches $100, and I really don’t foresee that happening. I don’t have the patience to put up with, what?, a year of ads before I receive any monetary benefit out of it. So I’m approaching this strictly as an experiment on using Google AdSense, and I don’t have high hopes of ever seeing any money out of it.
Google has a walk through that details how to set up and start using an AdSense account. Unfortunately, it’s a little bit annoying to listen to. The woman speaking it has a slight lisp, which is most unfortunate because she very frequently has to say words like “AdSense” and “ads”. Also, it sounds like she’s speaking a bit too close to the microphone; there’s the occasional breathy puff of air.
The actual setup of making ads is easy. Google has a wizard that makes the appropriate HTML code given a step-by-step set of directions. For instance, do you want to make a link box or an ad box? Do you want ads with text and images, just images, or just text? Etc. Everyone should be able to figure this stuff out. For the record, you’re limited to three ad boxes and one link box per page. But I can’t imagine putting that many ads up. Google also has a handy page listing all of the various available ad formats. I’ve chosen the basic (and small) 120×240 vertical banner of text ads, which has two ads in it. I don’t really want to clutter up my site too much, but I’m limiting those payments I’m never going to see anyway. Later on I’ll experiment with different sizes of banner ads and report back on the payment differentials between them.
So I’ve added the ad code into this site, but Google AdSense is saying it could take up to 48 hours to actually start displaying. Grrr. I guess the server cluster that serves up the ads needs to be synchronized with the server cluster that handles account management, and this doesn’t happen instantly. But hopefully they’ll start displaying soon and I can start seeing what kind of hits Google thinks are relevant to the content of this site.
Update: The ads are working. I just wasn’t seeing them because I had AdBlock turned on (d’oh).
