Google expands methods of online income generation from AdSense
Howard Lake | 17 June 2004 | News
Web sites such as UK Fundraising that earn income from carrying Google’s targeted adverts now have another way of generating income, courtesy of Google’s new WebSearch option.
UK Fundraising has been earning a regular monthly income from Google’s AdSense system since it launched in 2003. Every time a visitor clicks on one of the ads, the advertiser pays Google and Google shares a percentage of that payment with the Web site owner.
Now Web sites have a further way of earning income from the Google AdSense programme. Web sites can now opt to include Google’s Websearch option to show search results with related Google adverts. Site owners can opt to let users search just their Web site or the whole Web.
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As with the original AdSense programme you have some degree of customisation available to you to ensure the ads appear where you want them to on your pages and in an appropriate size.
We plan to integrate this new option within UK Fundraising. We’ll probably share the results with our clients and at our training programmes, sticking within Google’s quite restrictive terms and conditions of course, which limit what you can say about the results.
Many charity Web sites already use the free Google site search facility, so signing up for AdSense is an easy way of making these Web sites’ search facility generate income.
In addition, Google say that the new facility “can keep visitors on your site for a longer time, since they can search from right where they are on your site, instead of having to go elsewhere.”
Incidentally, don’t try to encourage people to click on the adverts by including a message such as “clicking on an advert will earn income for our charity”. Google forbids it in its terms and conditions, and recent discussions in online forums dedicated to Google AdSense show that Google does find out in many cases and has the right to terminate your participation in the programme.
This is what the AdSense search box looks like. You can of course place it anywhere on your site. We have chosen to allow visitors to search UK Fundraising or the whole Web. Try it out and you’ll see we’ve customised the search results page a little already. Note that the adverts appear at the top of the page, above the actual search results. As yet, you can’t customise this page to put the adverts in a column to the right.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.