Yesterday I got it!
At first, it seemed like the typical email: “Congratulations! You are approved …” followed by the deflating “… to buy (some-thing) from (some-company)” I certainly never heard of nor did need their product.
Yesterday it was different and the “good news” was indeed great. The message was from Google and the approval was forAdSense (not to be mistaken with AdWords ). After two years of trying, just to be rejected for lack of compliance or relevance, Google finally recognized our website’s value as a reliable marketing vessel.
I was thrilled!
For the ones that do not know the difference, AdWords is an ad distribution product and Google’s billion dollar revenue source, where businesses pay to advertise. It is also the reason Google is indeed “googol” in financial terms. At the other side of the internet advertising spectrum is AdWord’s sister application: AdSense . This product pays approved owners to display targeted media ads on their webs and blogs. In accounting terms, the first is logged under A/P (accounts payable) while the second under the much desired A/R (accounts receivables).
This way it becomes clear why AdSense has a much longer, harder and more restrictive approval process. The sellers (all of them AdWords customers) need a strong reassurance their products will be featured on relevant pages thus generating real revenue and a decent ROI.
In a previous post I discussed about blogging as a viable marketing tool at AND Inc. Besides the obvious: promoting brand and services; a strong presence online assures an increased “real-estate” value for one’s website. This translates in increased inbound traffic easy to monitor by Google’s crawlers, which in turn helps with monetizing content. It might seem counterintuitive but this actually means selling free information, in layman’s terms also known as “money for nothing”. This way, AdSense is another reason why blogging (and doing it properly) helps with the bottom line; becoming even more relevant in an economic environment where competing for the next best way to broadcast a message is close to the proverbial technological singularity .
Upon being granted access to my new AdSense interface, it took me a few hours to navigate the setup and understand the logistics of creating and implementing the Ad units. For a full disclosure the process was easy mainly because I was familiar with the basics of Analytics and evidently with Google Accounts where everything follows pretty much the same installation path. All went painlessly as anything so far with our Google products and by end of day I was ready.
As you can see now all is in place. Our widget toolbar is augmented with shiny new ads – flawlessly matching the post content. Even with a basic understanding of mathematics behind, I am still amazed by the way Google does this whole “speed-of-light matching” between content of pages and corresponding ads.
It seems counterintuitive but seeing AdSense in action on our web – how clear ads relate to content – convinced me once and forever that money are well spent on AdWords. But then again, what isn’t counterintuitive with everything-free-forever Google?
Until the day before yesterday, the answer to the question posed at the top of this post would have been an unconvincing “maybe”. Today I know it is a definitive “Yes!”
I’ll be back with more (real $ numbers) in a future post.
Until then, be well.