Adsense for Indian Bloggers: How Good?

Even if you are the newest kid-on-the-Indian-blogstreet, you would have heard of Google Adsense before anything else. Barring a tiny percentage of Indian blogs, most employ Adsense in one form or the other. Let's try and understand Google Adsense and see if adsense makes sense for Indian Blog Sites.

What is Google Adsense?

It is an advertising programme managed by Google, wherein Google acts as an intermediary between the blog/site owner and the advertiser. Google places advertisements on your sites in the places designated by you. Revenues are shared between Google and the blog owner.

Within Adsense, there are 3 primarily different options:

1. The most popularly used form of Adsense is Content Based Ads or Contextual Advertising. It is also sometimes referred to as PPC or Pay Per Click Advertising. Essentially you are paid only when someone clicks on the ads on your site. It is called contextual because the Google software will serve ads that are in context to your site - for this it will mainly use the text matter you write.

Within this there are 2 variations:

a) Direct Ads on your site - someone clicks, you make money.

b) Links on your site - someone clicks on the link and is taken to another page with ads. If he clicks on them you make money.

2. Add a Google Search Box to your blog site: Someone searches through this and if he then clicks on any Google ad on the next page, you make money.

3. Referral Ads: You refer your users to certain products or websites. He will then be asked or motivated to perform a certain action - it could be to fill up a form or to purchase a product or service or something else. If he does that, you earn money. This is the most difficult one because you need your reader to make an 'extra' effort here, so the conversion rates are low. However you typically earn more than the regular PPC route whenever the conversion happens.

This is what the main page of Google Adsense looks like, with the 3 earning options for you to choose from.

If you haven't started using Google Adsense you can do it now by clicking here.
All the very best.

Now to the most important question: Does Google Adsense work for Indian Blogger?

Yes, it does. I have been using it myself for a year now and have seen it work. You need to be patient with adsense - You may not see any results or poor results in the first days or months. Look at other blogs that you think may be doing well. See how they have placed their ads on their blogs. Sometimes copying a successful format is not a bad idea. Else you may have to experiment with various permutations and combinations to arrive at your right format.

In certain cases, Adsense doesn't deliver as well for Indian bloggers as it will for bloggers in some other countries. For example - the referral ad for Firefox. While the US blogger may end up making a dollar for every conversion, you may end up making a measly 10 cents. But Google has now come up with lots more referral products. There are quite a few products and services specific to India and will deliver best for Indian bloggers. Spend some time searching for the right products. Do factor in the 'action' required. Indian net users are not as likely to purchase a product on the web as their counterpart in Europe or US. Realising this aspect, I don't refer products where the 'action' is purchase. Go instead for a 'form filling' or a 'sign up' action. However the final decision has to be yours, depending on the nature of your blog and the demographic and psychographic profile of your readers. Of course, it is also not necessary that Indian blogs will be read by Indian only. You may have a high percentage of NRI readers or even pure non-Indians. That can affect your decision completely.

( To be continued )