Head over to www.google.com/adsense .

Press Click Here to Apply. Google takes you to a page that lets you log in if you already have an account or sign up if you don’t.

Create an account.

Even if you want to put AdSense ads on 285 different sites, you need only one account, because you can paste your AdSense HTML code on any page of yours that meets the Google guidelines.

If you’re new to Google advertising, use the form on the right side of the page to create a Google AdSense account. Simply enter your email address and make up a password you’ll use for subsequent visits.

If you already have a Google AdWords account, use the form on the left part of the page to add AdSense.

Click Continue.

Provide contact information.

Fill in the Account Information form with your contact information, Web site address, and language. Even if you plan to run ads on more than one site, you need to fill in only one site for now.

Choose the type of AdSense that you want to use.

Google gives you the option of ordinary AdSense (called “AdSense for content”) and a search-based feature called “AdSense for search.” So far, this chapter has focused on the most popular choice, which is AdSense for content. With AdSense for search, you provide a Google search box on your page that visitors can use to search the rest of the Web using Google’s famous search engine. The neat part is that when Google shows promotional links alongside the search results, they’re treated like ads on your Web site. That means you get paid if a visitor clicks any of the sponsored links. You may as well choose both AdSense programs since you can decide later what you actually want to add to your Web site.

Click Submit. The final page shows a summary of all the information you supplied.

Click Continue to finish the process.

Wait.

While Google reviews your application, you can dream about upgrading your daily coffee to a large mocha latte with all your AdSense loot. A day or two after signing up, you should receive an email confirmation that your account is ready.

Log in.

When you get the confirmation email, head back to www.google.com/adsense and log in using your email address and the password you created in step 2. (The next section gives you the skinny on logging in.)

That’s all there is to signing up for a Google AdSense account.

Log in and click the “AdSense for Content” tab.

This tab includes four separate pages, whose links are shown just under the row of tabs. These sections are: “Ad layout code,” “Ad colors,” “Channels,” and “Competitive Ad Filter.” Right now you’re in the “Ad layout code” section (shown in Figure 9-4), but you can use the other links to define custom colors and custom channels, or to block out URLs you don’t want to use in your ads, as you’ll see.

Choose the type of ad you want to create—either an ad unit or a link unit.

An ad unit is a group of one or more ads, complete with descriptive text or (optionally) images. When a visitor clicks an ad, he winds up at the advertiser’s Web site (and you get paid). If you’re used to seeing AdSense ads on Web pages, ad units are what you’ve probably seen most of in the past.

A link unit is a slim box of links with no descriptive text. The title of the box is “Ads by Google” and the links are one or two word entries, like Digital Cameras or Consumer Electronics. If a visitor clicks one of these links, Google serves up a new page that’s filled with ads for that topic. If the visitor then clicks one of these ads, you get paid.

Figure 9-4. As you make changes to the various settings, Google automatically adjusts the code in the window at the bottom of the screen. When you’re done choosing options, you have some nifty, customized code that you can paste right into your Web pages.

Choose the exact type of ad (from the list box next to the “Ad unit” or “Link unit” option).

If you’re creating an ad unit, you can choose whether you want to use text or image ads. Generally, image ads stand out more than text ads. However, you need to balance two conflicting goals: the desire to make money by attracting clicks with eye-catching ads, and the desire to minimize the distraction on your Web page by choosing ad types that are less obtrusive.

If you’re creating a link unit, you’re limited to choosing how many links appear in the box.

Select the ad layout.

AdSense provides a nice selection of ad styles, from single-ad buttons at 125 x 125 pixels, to five-ad skyscrapers measuring 160 x 600 pixels (a pixel is the smallest dot you can place on a computer screen, and it’s a common measurement in Web pages). To see the examples in Figure 9-5, click “View samples” or head to https://google.com/adsense/adformats.

Figure 9-5. Google provides a bunch of sample ad formats. How to choose? On your site, is there anywhere an ad might fill in some empty space or even draw the page together—especially above the fold (the first screen your visitors see without scrolling down). Where might your readers’ eyes end up? Use these observations to guide your decisions.

When you choose an ad layout, start small. Don’t crowd your page with a skyscraper or rectangle just to get the most ads possible on your site. The ads should never dominate your pages, or you’ll risk turning off your visitors.

Once you’ve decided on a shape and size, head back to the layout page, open the layout menu, and select your preference.

Choose a color palette.

The ads on your site can incorporate up to five colors: one each for the background, border, title, text, and URL. To take the guesswork out of color coordination, AdSense provides a nice selection of color palettes, everything from Peach Melba to Swamp Green. Figure 9-6 explains how to choose them.

Figure 9-6. Use the pop-up menu to find existing color palettes and select the ones that sound intriguing. The sample ad just to the right of the palette list changes to reflect your selection, giving you a live preview of what your ads could look like. If you can’t settle on one, you can choose up to four palettes, and Google will rotate them on your site. To select multiple palettes, Ctrl+click (⌘-click) them. (In this example, three color palettes are selected.)

Provide an alternate ad if you want to.

If Google can’t provide targeted ads for your page—either because they haven’t indexed your page yet and so don’t know what’s appropriate, they have nothing suitable on hand, or AdSense has simply hiccupped—it serves up a public service advertisement instead, as shown in Figure 9-7.

Figure 9-7. Google’s alternate ads are usually from organizations like the Red Cross, ASPCA, or some other nonprofit.

If you’d rather not waste good page real estate on nontargeted advertising, you can provide an alternate ad or picture of your own to replace the public service announcement. You have a few choices for the substitute:

Add channels, if you wish.

Channels are Google’s name for tags that you can add to any of your Web pages, letting you track pages separately and compare their performance in your AdSense reports. Channels are useful when, for example, you want to find out whether your index pages or your archive pages draw more click-throughs over time. Channels are also good for determining whether your tower ads work better than your leaderboards (horizontal ad panels), or whether a contrasting color palette gets more attention than one that blends in.

To create a couple of channels, click the “Manage channels” link, which takes you to the page shown in Figure 9-8.

Tell Google if your page has frames.

If you use frames to lay out your pages, you have to let Google’s crawlers know which frame to look at when they come by seeking clues about your pages so that AdSense can serve up relevant ads. To alert them, simply turn on the"Ad will be placed on a framed page” checkbox.

Copy the code from the box labeled “Your AdSense code.”

When you’re done choosing all the settings, the box at the bottom of the page reflects your choices of color palette, ad layout, and so forth. Highlight all of the code in the box and copy it by typing Ctrl+C (⌘-C).

Figure 9-8. Creating a custom channel is easy—just type in a name, click “Create new channel,” select your channel, and then click Activate. Repeat the process to add as many channels as you want. When you’re done, click “Continue to Ad Layout” to get back to the ad creation page.

Edit your Web pages.

With ad code in hand, it’s time to head on over to your Web site for a quick paste. Use whatever editing tools you usually do; the only stipulation is that you need to get to the HTML source view because the code from Google uses HTML to connect to your site’s code.

Open the Web page or pages on which you’d like to display the ads you just set up. Paste in the code you copied during the last step—Google asks that you don’t make any changes to it—then save your pages as you usually do.

Take a look.

View your Web pages in a browser, which automatically sends a message to Google, telling its robot to come on by at its earliest convenience. While you’re there, assess your ads. If they don’t seem to fit in with the rest of your décor, play around with ad placement and, if necessary, go back and rebuild the ad, choosing a different color palette and/or layout.

Log in to your AdSense account, and click the “AdSense for Search” tab.

This shows the “AdSense for Search” page (Figure 9-9).

Figure 9-9. The “Adsense for Search” page is a lot like the “AdSense for Content” page. It asks you a series of questions and gives you a block of HTML you can copy into your Web page at the end. Unlike the ads, the search HTML doesn’t use JavaScript—it’s just an ordinary HTML table.

Select the language and country of your Web site.

The standard options are English and United States. As you probably know, Google has country-specific pages that can tweak search results, providing them in different languages or giving priority to local sites.

Choose Google Search (if you want visitors to be able to explore the whole Web, including your site) or Google SiteSearch (if you want them to be confined to just searching the pages on your site).

Google SiteSearch is an innovative idea—it’s a search box for searching just your site. For example, if you have dozens of pages of travel stories, a visitor could home in on the page she wants by typing "funny story about rubber chicken in Peru" into a SiteSearch box. However, there’s one catch. SiteSearch still uses Google’s standard, centralized catalog of Web pages; it just limits the search to the pages from your site. But if Google doesn’t have the page in its catalog (either because you just created it or because Google doesn’t know your site exists), SiteSearch won’t find it.

If you want to provide both options (Google Search and Google SiteSearch), just follow these instructions twice to create two different text boxes. But be careful you don’t wind up confusing your visitors.

If you want to filter out profanity and sexual content from search results, choose the SafeSearch option.

SafeSearch is useful in two situations. First, it’s de rigueur for sites that provide children’s content. Second, it’s handy if your Web site deals in a topic that shares some keywords with adult-only sites. For example, if you’re creating a breast-cancer awareness page, you don’t want searches for "breast exam" to dig up the wrong goods.

Tailor the appearance of the Google search box.

You can tweak the background color, width, and placement of the logo and search button.

Choose any optional features you want.

Turn on the “Open search results in a new browser window” checkbox if you want a new page to pop up with the results of the visitor’s search. This is usually annoying to Web surfers, but handy if you want to make sure your Web site sticks around on the visitor’s desktop.

Choose a style palette for the search results page. This way, the search results can blend in with the color scheme used for the rest of your Web site. Style palettes are almost the same as the color palettes discussed with ad creation (Section 9.1.3), except they also allow you to add a custom logo.

Choose a channel if you want to track the ad dollars you make from this search box. See Section 9.1.3 for more information about channels.

The text box at the bottom of the page now has your complete, customized search engine box.

You can copy this with a quick Ctrl+C (⌘-C) and paste it into any Web page.

Go to the Google AdWords home page: http://adwords.google.com .

To get things rolling, click “Sign Up Now: Click to begin.”

Pick target languages, countries, and particular regions.

Not only are your ads specific to the keywords folks are searching for, but you can also decide who sees them based on the language people search Google in, and their country or region (Figure 9-17).

Figure 9-17. Top: First, you choose a combination of languages; Ctrl+click (⌘-click) to select more than one in a list. You should also decide what level of location-specific targeting you want to use. When you’ve picked your settings, click Continue. Bottom: If you choose regional targeting, Google takes you to this page. Choose the country you want to target, and then choose as many specific areas as you want. After you select an area, click the add button. (You can remove a region from your list by highlighting it and then clicking Remove.) If you want to focus in even closer, you can type in a list of city names (one per line) in the text box at the bottom.

Google provides regions for many countries, and these regions may correspond to states and metropolitan areas (in the U.S.), provinces (in Canada), and so on. If you want to reach people in a limited geographic area, regional targeting can bring down your cost-per-click substantially, because many fewer sites tend to compete for keywords in smaller physical areas.

When you’re ready to move on, click the Continue button.

Fill in the ad form.

It’s time to inject those creative juices into your ad. (Hopefully you’ve been giving it some thought, as suggested in Section 9.2.1.) Create your first ad by filling in the form shown in Figure 9-18.

Figure 9-18. As you fill in each line, Google changes the sample ad at the top of the page to reflect your choices. When you’ve filled in everything up through the line for the display URL, you can see what your ad will look like when it appears in Google results.

The first thing your audience sees (or summarily ignores) is your ad’s headline, so make it stand out with a phrase that’s enticing and novel, yet explanatory. And do it all in 25 or fewer characters. Similarly, Google gives you only 2 lines of 35 characters apiece for your description, so every letter counts. If you can, focus on products or services you offer that distinguish you from your competitors.

Google gives you two slots for URLs. First is your display URL, which is the one that appears in your ad. It should be short and sweet—again, no more than 35 characters—and for advertising purposes, it ought to represent your whole site, so your home page URL is probably best.

The destination URL is the page people actually go to when they click your ad (no matter where in your ad people click, they go to the same page), so you can bring customers to just the right page for the product or service you’re advertising. Here you’ve got 1,024 characters, and the URL doesn’t appear in the ad itself, so link to as wide or deep a page on your site as you’d like.

Click Continue to move to the keywords page. At this point, Google checks your ad for inappropriate language. For example, if you inadvertently leave out the “r” in Shirts, Google rejects your ad.

On the “Choose keywords” page, type your keywords.

You should already have thought of these, tried them out earlier, and honed ‘em (Section 9.2.1). Once you’ve got your list, type each keyword or phrase on its own line. Start with some obvious choices for your products or services (Hawaiian shirts). Then widen the circle to include synonyms (Hawaiian clothing), misspellings (Hawaiin shirts, Hawaiian shorts, Hawaiin shorts), singular or plural forms (Hawaiian shirt), associated phrases (leisurewear), and so on. You can always add keywords, so consider starting with just a few to test the waters. Later on, you can play with the mix as you learn what’s working and what’s not.

As you go, you also need to tell Google how you want it to deal with your ads when somebody searches for your keywords. You have four match choices, described in the box in Section 9.2.5, each of which has punctuation you can use to indicate your choice:

It can be tedious coming up with all the keyword combinations you want to use. For help thinking of similar keywords and phrases, give the Keyword Tool a whirl (Figure 9-19). A similar version of the tool is available for you to use at any time at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordSandbox.

When you’ve finished setting your keywords, click Continue.

Set your currency and your daily budget.

AdWords suggests a daily budget, but if it’s more than you can afford, you can change the “Daily budget” number. (Remember that your monthly expenditure equals no more than 30 days times your daily budget.)

No matter your daily budget, Google tries to show your ad evenly throughout each day. The lower your daily budget, however, the less often Google shows your ads. Unfortunately, Google doesn’t provide an estimate of how a lower daily budget might affect your exposure, so you have to simply try out an amount you can afford and keep an eye on your reports (Section 9.2.7) to see what happens.

Figure 9-19. The Keyword Tool uses Google’s powerful understanding of relevance to help you choose related, effective keywords. If you want to test new terms, head to the box that’s just to the right of the keyword list, type in a keyword, phrase, exact match, or negative keyword, and then click the Search button. A list of similar keywords appears under the text box. If you see a keyword you like in this list, click Add, which removes it from the search list and pops it into your list of chosen keywords.

Choose your maximum cost-per-click.

Remember, when you bid on keywords, you’re actually agreeing to pay Google anywhere from five cents to $50 for each person who clicks through your ads. But you don’t have to guess at the marketplace for your keywords, because Google automatically suggests a maximum cost-per-click, based on what existing advertisers are already paying for your keywords. To find out how that suggestion will play out, click View Traffic Estimator, and check out Figure 9-20.

The Traffic Estimator is a terrifically handy predictor of the number of clicks you can expect for each of your keywords, your average cost-per-click and cost per day, and what position your ad is likely to reach (1.0 is the highest, 2.0 is second, and so on). At the top is your total cost per day. If it’s more than you’re prepared to pay, you can delete keywords, reduce the maximum cost-per-click you’re willing to pay, or limit your target languages and countries. Conversely, if you want more exposure and you have a bigger budget, you can add keywords, increase your maximum cost-per-click, or expand your target language and countries. After you’ve changed any of those factors, click Get New Estimates (above the Traffic Estimator) to find out how your new scenario will work.

Figure 9-20. The Traffic Estimator suggests a maximum cost-per-click for all the keywords in your Ad Group. (If your local currency is not U.S. dollars, choose another from the currency list.) If you want to set the cost-per-click for each keyword individually, you can do so after your account is established (Section 9.2.5).

As you work with the Traffic Estimator, use its numbers to refine the projections spreadsheet you created before you signed up (Section 9.2.3). The reality check of the Traffic Estimator, combined with your own calculations on cost-per-sale, units sold, and daily budget, may lead you to reconsider whether AdWords is worth your precious time and money. If the numbers don’t look good but you’re still itching to try it, you can always run a campaign for a few hours or a few days to see how things really play out.

When you’re satisfied you’ve set your costs properly, click the Continue button.

Confirm your choices.

Google gives you a final look at your ad, daily budget, and keywords. To back up and take another whack or three at any of these numbers, click the Back button (at the bottom of the page).

When you’re comfortable with your ad (and its cost), click the Continue to Sign Up button. Finally: It’s time to sign up for an AdWords account.

Use an existing account or create a new AdWords account.

If you have an existing Google account (one that you use for Gmail, for example), you can use that as your AdWords account as well. Click the “Sign in to AdWords with your Google Account” option, and supply your email and password.

If you don’t have a Google account or if you want to keep it separate from your AdWords account, click “Create a new Google Account to be your login to AdWords” instead. Fill in the AdWords sign-up form, providing an email address and making up a password. Be sure you choose an email address that is actually up and running, as Google sends a confirmation email to that address, and you need to retrieve it to finalize your account.

Either way, you click the Create AdWords Account button to seal the deal.

Check your email, verify it, and log in.

An email message from Google AdWords soon lands in your inbox. Click the hyperlink in it to go to the page where you complete the AdWords sign-up process. Log in using your email address and password.

Set up billing.

After you’ve logged in, click the My Account tab and then Billing Preferences to get to the page where you can set up your billing options (Figure 9-21). Google deploys your first Ad Group and the associated ads the moment you provide your billing details.

That’s it. Now you can start wondering how your ads are faring. The next section tells you how to find out.

In the Reports tab, click Create Report.

The Create Report page appears (Figure 9-25).

Figure 9-25. Top: To create a new report, click Create Report. The first step is to choose one of several handy report types. Bottom: From the Report Center page, you can review the reports you’ve generated in the past.

Select the Report Type.

In the Report Type box, Google provides a number of handy prefab report options. They include:

Choose a view.

The view determines how detailed the chart is. You can choose Summary, Daily, Monthly, Quarterly, or Yearly, depending on whether you want to look at the big picture or hone in on daily fluctuations.

Change the date range (optional).

Reports cover the last seven days if you don’t change the date range.

Choose a specific campaign or ad group (optional).

If you don’t make a selection here, the report includes data from all your campaigns.

Add or remove columns (optional).

Google provides a lengthy list of columns for every report type. Based on the type you choose, Google selects certain columns. However, you can add or remove individual columns—just add a checkmark next to the ones you want.

Add a filter (optional).

If you don’t want to see everything, you can limit your report with a filter. For example, if you’re performing a keyword report, you could show only keywords that resulted in a minimum 10 clicks, cost more than a certain amount, or were served a minimum number of times.

Choose a name for your report.

This is the name that the report will have on the Report Center page. By default, this name matches the report type (as in Account Report or Keyword Report). If you’ve applied more settings, you should customize it to be something more meaningful.

If you want to reuse your report, choose “Save this as a new report template.”

This choice lets you create a new report based on this report in this future. You can also use the scheduling options (described in step 10).

Set scheduling options (optional).

Complex reports can take some time to generate, so you might want to schedule them so the information is ready when you want it. You can configure a report to run automatically on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Even better, if you switch on this option (by selecting “Schedule this report to run automatically”), you can also have the report emailed to you (select “Whenever the report runs, send email to” and fill in an email address) so you get the results without needing to log in to AdWords.

Click Create Report.

There’s a short delay while Google generates the report. Once it’s finished, the page refreshes. Click the “View data” link to continue on to your report. (Figure 9-26 shows you the Keyword Report, which is one of the handiest.)