Re: Anyone know how AdSense works?

From: Leon Mergen <leon_at_antrophia.com>
Date: Wed 15 Feb 2006 10:50:20 -0600

Ivan Pope wrote:

> Leon,
> Thanks very much for your time and knowledge.
> Is this right then:
> - When a page is requested by a browser, the script embedded in the
> HTML passes information (i.e. site ID etc) to AdSense and in return
> gets the content (i.e. the ad) which is then served along with the
> rest of the page.

No, incorrect; your webserver delivers a document which contains a
reference to an external source of data, and the client visiting your
site will then retrieve the remote (AdSense) content.

> Is this
>
>google_ad_client = "pub-6306685443532046";
>
> the site ID?

Yep :)

> It seems to me that this ID only identifies the account, not the URL -
> because I can generate code to place on different sites without
> informing AdSense of the specific URLs. Thus, it seems that the URL
> must be passed to AdSense separately. Do you know how it is passed?

This is passed by a so-called "referrer" - this is embedded within the
HTTP protocol. When you click an url on the internet, every web browser
passes on the "HTTP-REFERER" parameter, which contains the url where the
visitor came from. With embedded content, this is the url of the page
containing the reference to the embedded content.

This way Google knows which page your visitors requested without
explicitly requiring different code for every page.


> I want to use a CMS to put the ad on the page, but I want to make sure
> that the correct parameters (specifically the URL) are passed to
> AdSense - or the contextualisation will go out the window.

I don't see any problems when using a CMS to serve AdSense
advertisements - if there are, Google sure needs to fix them since then
the problem is clearly on their side...

Regards,

Leon Mergen
http://www.solatis.com/




Received on Wed Feb 15 2006 - 10:50:20 CST