Re: Anyone know how AdSense works?

From: Leon Mergen <leon_at_antrophia.com>
Date: Tue 14 Feb 2006 10:21:58 -0600

Hello Ivan,

I do not work for Google, am in no way associated with them, etc etc
etc, but I develop advertisement delivery systems so I should be able to
know a bit about it...

Ivan Pope wrote:

>Not in the general sense. Of course I know how it 'works'.
>
>I would like to talk to someone who understands chapter and verse how
>the system works technically:
> - what the script placed on your web page does

The script on your web page basically tells the browser of the visitor
"Hey, there is some additional content of this web page inside a small
frame, and you can get it from http://adsense.google.com/url"... there
are some additional parameters passed on there, such as your website's
registration number passed on, so AdSense knows which site the visitor
is coming from.

> - how the ad is pulled into the web page

Well, like I said, you basically put in some additional content into
your website with a remote location, just like, for example, and
image... but this time it's text.

> - how the ad is selected (context)

Ahhh, and this is exactly the tricky part - AdSense uses the content of
the web page to select the advertisements to deliver. I have thought
about this a bit, and there are two approaches - one is where AdSense
uses the Google database to classify the content on the website, the
other is where AdSense tries to immediately look up the webpage where
the request is coming from, and then determines the content. The second
approach will not work from things like member areas, so most likely
AdSense uses a lot of Google's algorithms to determine which ad is
selected...

But really, "selecting an ad" is so much easier said than done... things
can get really, really complicated in that area (if you also consider
adding some sort of automatic campaign optimizations to delivering ads,
etc).

> - what happens exactly when someone clicks on an advert

The advertisement being clicked on gets looked up, the click gets
recorded (meaning increase in money of the publisher, decrease in money
of the advertiser) and the user is redirected to the correct url.

> - how AdSense knows where the click comes from

There basically are three approaches to this:
1) if the advertisement is delivered dynamically (such as with
javascript of an iframe), all these things can be included in the url
the visitor clicks on... basically, then the bare minimum to be provided
with the click is the id # of the advertisement clicked on and the id #
of the publisher's site.
2) if the advertisement is delivered using a static invocation, cookies
can be used, however, about a third of the people online have these
disabled, so we're going with #3 then:
3) record the "last advertisement shown to a certain ip address on a
certain site" - this approach really doesn't work very well, but if you
do not have the possibility to deliver ads dynamically AND the visitor
has cookies disabled, there really isn't much room for tracking visitors
left... although you can add some tricks to optimize this a bit.

I hope these answers were a bit in the direction you wanted...

Regards,

Leon Mergen




Received on Tue Feb 14 2006 - 10:21:58 CST