You created your account, waited, and were approved. Now AdSense is
active. Now you can fill that blank space on your Web site with money-generating
ads. But first you have to set up your ads.
Log in to your new AdSense account by using the username and password
that you set up during the registration process. The page that appears at
login is the Reports tab (AdSense always opens to this), which features
a quick overview of your earnings and the reports that are available for
AdSense. Because you don’t have any data to be reported yet, you’ll have a
big, fat zero on that page, much like the one
If you want to change that big fat zero into something a bit more lucrative,
you need to set up a few ad blocks. Here’s how:
1. If you haven’t already done so, log in to your AdSense account.
2. Click the AdSense Setup tab, immediately to the right of the
Reports tab
3. On this page, select the type of ad block you want to set up.
For this example, go ahead and select AdSense for Content. The other
options are covered in later chapters.
The page that appears is the first step in the Ad Wizard, which walks
you through setting up your ad.
If you prefer a single-page form instead of using the wizard, click the
wizard’s Single Page link. The information you’re asked to enter is the
same, but on the single-page form, you just scroll down the page instead
of clicking a Continue button.
4. Choose your ad type and click Continue.
Your choices here are
• Ad Units: A graphical text box inside of
which linked ads are displayed.
• Link Units: A set of linked keywords that
lead to advertisers’ pages.
Just to keep it simple for now, select Ad Unit.
5. In the new page that appears, choose the size of ad you want to have
appear on your Web site.
Google offers a variety of different shapes, sizes, and types of ad formats.
The format that works best for you depends on the space you
have available, the content of your Web site, and the design of the page
on which the ad appears. For now, select 234 x 60 Half Banner from the
Format drop-down menu. (I give you all the details about ad styles and
formats in Chapter 7, when I cover designing the perfect content ad.)
6. On the same page, choose a color scheme for your ad.
Google has several pre-made color schemes available in the drop-down
list to the right, or you have the option to specify border, title, background,
text, and URL colors by hexadecimal number. This is useful if
you know the exact hexadecimal numbers of your Web page design and
want to match them.
For your purposes, select Seaside from the drop-down list.
7. Still on the same page, choose Slightly Rounded Corners from the
Corner Styles drop-down list.
The other options available here are Squared Corners or Very Rounded
Corners. Visually, each has a different appeal to people in different situations
and on different Web sites.
8. For the last option on the page, choose Show Public Service Ads from
the drop-down list and click Continue.
What’s this about public service ads? Well, Google shows public service
ads when your site is so new that it can’t be properly populated with
paid ads and when your site content doesn’t match ad content. You can
choose to have these ads displayed, to have ads from another service
displayed, or to have a solid color displayed as a placeholder if either of
these situations applies.
9. In the new page that appears, click Continue.
This page of the wizard gives you the option to assign the ad to a channel,
but you have not yet set up channels. I show you how to set up
channels in Chapter 14. For now, channels aren’t an aspect of AdSense
that you need to worry about. They’re for tracking your ads, but before
you can track them you need to know how to create them and get the
highest percentage of clicks possible. After all, tracking nothing — which
is exactly how many clicks you’ll have if you do your ads wrong — still
leaves you with nothing to track.
10. In the new (and final) page that appears, enter a name for your ad unit
in the appropriate field and then click the Save and Get Code button.
When the page appears, a default name is already filled into the Name
text box. I recommend renaming the ad unit something useful, but if you
want to leave the default name, that’s fine.
The page appears with the code for your ad unit.
11. Copy the code provided by AdSense and paste it into the HTML code
of your Web site.
How you access your HTML code depends on how you got your code in
the first place. If you’re using an HTML Editor/Web Page Creation program
to design your Web site, you may need to dig around the menus to find out
how to get the raw HTML code on-screen. If you’re writing your code from
scratch, though, all you need to do is pull up the Web site code and paste
the ad code into the spot on which you want AdSense ads to appear.
Creating the ad for your Web site is an easy process. Getting it to appear on
the right spot on your Web site might be a little bit like landing a jumbo jet in
the median of the New Jersey Turnpike. It’ll take a little practice, and in the
beginning, it could get a little hairy.
One resource you may find helpful during the implementation process is the
AdSense help page for code implementation:
www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=44511&sourceid=
aso&subidww-ww-et-asui&medium=link#3
The one thing you need to remember is that this is just an exercise in creating
your first ad block. There are more details to implementing ads that work
than there are quills on a porcupine. So maybe you do have an ad that you
think is ready to go online, but it might not be. You can put it online now, and
tweak it as you have time. Or, flip through some of the more detailed chapters
about creating specific types of ads. Putting a basic ad on your Web site
probably won’t hurt you, but your time might be better spent figuring out
how to make that ad really sing to your site visitors.
Creating ads seems easy enough. Even getting the ads to display isn’t all that
difficult. However, getting site visitors to take note of those ads is a completely
different tale. One way that you can get users to click your ads is to
ensure they appear in the right context on your Web site. In Chapter 3, you
find out about building content-rich Web sites and how you can optimize
your Web site content for AdSense. Use those tips to help create pages that
are complemented by the ads Google dishes out to your site.
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