The questions that immediate came to mind were:
Q: Who controlls advertising content on Blogger blogs? It is Blogger (i.e. Google) or the the creator of the individual blog?
A: I'm not 100% sure, but it appears the the creator of individual blogs have to enable AdSense (http://www.google.com/support/blogger/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=42534)
Maybe we're going to have a sweet end of the semester party with all the ad revenue our blog rakes in :)
Q: How does Google AdSense decide to show public service ads instead of normal ads?
A: According to Google, its public service ads (PSAs) are "non-profit organization ads that are served to pages when targeted ads are unavailable, or when Google is unable to gather content from the page. Publishers do not receive earnings for clicks made on PSAs."
Specfically, the following reasons lead to PSAs being shown instead of more targeted ads according to Google (https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=10035):
- Our system has not yet crawled all the pages of your website.
- Your page may contain sensitive content for which relevant paying ads will not be displayed.
- Your account may be disapproved or awaiting review.
- Your site has restricted access using a robots.txt exclusion.
- Your website is using session IDs in the URL.
- Your website is using frames.
- Your ad unit is set to display image ads only.
- Your webpage may not contain enough content.
- Your site has content which doesn't comply with our program policies.
- The AdSense ad code was placed within an IFRAME.
- Your webpages are behind a login.
- Your ad code has been modified.
- Your page contains a refresh tag.
Any guesses about which reason applies to our class blog?
Q: How does Google choose the non-profit organizations that are advertised in its PSAs? Does Google charge those non-profits or it this a CSR-type initiative.
The public service ads by Google are part of the Google Grants program, which upon researching further, I have officially decided is awesome!
One of my pet peeves is businesses that do CSR initatives that have nothing to due with their core competencies or line of business and therefore have much less impact than they could.* On the flip side, I love when businesses are as innovative about their CSR / charitable initatives as they are about their business activities. Unsurprisingly, Google is in the second camp:
Google Grants is a unique in-kind donation program awarding free AdWords advertising to select charitable organizations. If you want to learn more, check out their site (http://www.google.com/grants/), but here are the highlights:
- The Google Grants program empowers over 4,000 organizations to achieve their goals by helping them promote their websites via advertising on Google. Google ads appear when users search on Google. For example when you search for "world poverty" on Google, text ads related to world poverty appear on the right hand side. When you click on one of the ads, you are brought to the website being advertised.
- Non-profit organizations must build a Google Grants AdWords account and be responsible for managing their account, just like commercial clients. Grantees have access to the same metrics and analytics as commercial customers as well.
- Just like commercial customers, Google Grantees are charged a "cost-per-click" and have the ability to bid on keywords. However, the money they use comes out of the Google Grant (up to $10,000 in free advertising per month).
*More than one of you have probably heard me complain about that stupid BU Alum from Deloitte who spoke at our orientation last year (remember, the one who was born in an Igloo or something). She went on and on about how awesome Deloitte was because one day a year they all went and picked up trash in parks or something. All I could think about was home much more useful it would be if they provided accounting, finance, audit, consulting, etc. services to non-profits instead.
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