AdSense Dictionary

The part of the screen where a user does not have to scroll to see content. In other words, the top part of the screen. This term comes from newspapers where the top part of the page is above the actual fold in the page.

After submitting an AdSense application and verifying your email address, the AdSense team will evaluate your application and send you an email within 1-2 days. If accepted into the program, you’ll be able to log in to your new account and copy-and-paste the AdSense ad code into your web pages to begin serving ads. This activates your AdSense account.

An AdSense account will be created for you if your application to the program is accepted. You’ll then be able to log in to and activate your account.

This is the amount an advertiser actually pays for each click his/her ad receives. The AdWords Discounter automatically gives advertisers the lowest possible price in order to maintain their ad’s position. The actual CPC will be equal to or less than the maximum CPC specified.

This is the amount an advertiser actually pays for each impression of his/her ad. The AdWords Discounter automatically gives advertisers the lowest possible price in order to maintain their ad’s position. The actual CPM will be equal to or less than the maximum CPM specified.

The way the ads are displayed on a publisher’s site. You can choose the format that best fits your site. For example, the banner ad layout will display up to 2 ads horizontally across the page and the skyscraper will display up to 4 ads vertically.

The HTML that is placed on any page of an approved site by the publisher who owns the site, allowing ads to be shown on that page in a specific ad layout format.

Positioning. An ad’s position on a web page is determined by a combination of its maximum cost-per-click (price) and clickthrough rate (performance).

A computer, normally operated by a third party, that delivers and tracks advertisements independent of the web site where the ad is being displayed. Use of an ad server helps establish trust between an advertiser and publisher since the statistics are maintained by a objective third party.

A set of ads displayed as a result of one piece of the AdSense ad code.

Your earnings may include debits or credits for various reasons, all of which are listed on your Payment History page. Possible adjustments include AdSense for search fees, Check fees, Invalid Clicks, and others.

As stated in the Google AdSense Terms and Conditions, your AdSense for search earnings may be offset by fees. This applies to a small number of publishers only

Software that collects a user’s information without their knowledge through the user’s Internet connection. This information is often used for the purposes of displaying advertisements through pop-ups or other means. Sites associated with Adware are not allowed to run the AdSense ad code.

AdWords is Google’s branded P4P service. This offering classifies Google as part Pay per click (PPC) Search Engine. The service places relevant text-based ads both within Google – termed “sponsored links” – and on external sites willing to host Google ads – termed “Ads By Google.” These external sites are those that use AdSense, the other side of the Google advertising model. Companies wishing to promote their products/services can enroll in this program.

Any type of revenue sharing program where an affiliate web site receives a portion of income for delivering sales, leads, or traffic to a merchant website.

Alternate Ads allow you to monetize your ad space in the event that Google is unable to serve targeted ads to your page. By specifying an image or ad server of your choice, you can make sure that your advertising space is always being used effectively, either by targeted AdSense ads, or by your own choice of content. Alternate Ads, if specified, will be shown when there are no targeted ads available for your page. The ad space will not be branded as ‘Ads by Google.’

A work of prose, usually on a specific topic, identified by its title (or heading) and often by its author(s), and usually includes a resource box that has information about the author and a link to his web site.

A third-party service that offers unlimited autoresponders and newsletter hosting.

Sites that violate Google’s guidelines are considered to be in bad neighborhoods. You shouldn’t link to sites that are considered “bad” because, not only does Google penalize bad sites, they also penalize sites that link to them.

An image file that displays an online advertisement, typically sized for placement at the top or bottom of a Web page and linked to another page.

A phenomenon where a website visitor completely overlooks a banner because they’ve seen them so many times.

Short for weblog, a personal journal published on the Web. Blogs frequently include philosophical reflections, opinions on the Internet and social issues, and provide a “log” of the author’s favorite web links. Blogs are usually presented in journal style with a new entry each day.

A technique for getting search engines to spider your web site quickly. Basically, you add entries to a blog with links to your web site and then ping other web sites to let them know you updated your site. When you ping yahoo, for example, they will send their spider to your site to see the new content. This helps you get indexed into Yahoo quicker.

A service that provides Web-based tools used by individuals to publish to the Web. Also a word generally used to refer to someone who blogs.

A method of storing links to individual web pages or web locations on your computer. Bookmark is the term used by Netscape; Favorites is the Internet Explorer term.

A publisher-specified group of pages used for reporting purposes. Publishers can create channels to track specific metrics across pages, sites, and domains.

The costs associated with special delivery of checks, or stop payment requests

In AdSense publisher reports, a click corresponds to a user’s click on any ad on a publisher’s page. The Click column may also include clicks that are deemed to be invalid, and for which no earnings are generated. Clicks on PSAs are not included in publisher reports.

A scam involving displaying Adsense ads, and then using various methods to fraudulently increase the number of clicks to the advertiser. The person commiting click fraud receives money generated by the click throughs even though the clicks were not generated by genuine customers.

The act of clicking a banner, or other ad, which links the user to the advertiser’s Web site.

In AdSense publisher reports, clickthrough rate (CTR) is the number of clicks an ad unit receives divided by the number of times the ad unit is shown (impressions).

Any software application that is used to access or make better use of the internet and is installed on the user’s machine, such as browsers, email clients, and internet messaging programs. This often includes hidden downloads or interferes with other applications.

Involves serving a specific page to each search engine spider and a different one to human visitors. In most cases this is frowned upon by the search engines.

AdSense offers publishers the ability to customize the colors of ads that appear on their sites. Color palettes allow you to make sure that the ad text, background, and border colors complement your website. For added variety and freshness, you can even choose to rotate through up to 4 different color palettes at a time.

A list that AdSense publishers can create and store in their accounts in order to block ads from certain URLs from running on their sites. After a publisher adds a URL to the list, ads for that website list will not run on his/her site.

Content is a generic term used to describe information in a digital context. It can take the form of web pages, as well as the information contained in files such as sound, text, images and video.

Sponsored links that appear next to related non-search-engine-generated content, such as news article.

Appearing to be mass-produced; identical in appearance.

The CPC is the amount an advertiser pays each time a user clicks on his/her ad. Google AdWords has a CPC pricing system.

The CPM is the amount an advertiser pays each time a user views his/her ad and an impression is

recorded.

Because of the way a spider/bot moves through web sites, it is said to ‘crawl’ the page or site.

Sites such as these are not allowed to run the AdSense ad code. Cybersquatting is using a domain name with bad-faith intent to profit from the goodwill of a trademark belonging to someone else. Typosquatting is a form of cybersquatting, based on the probability that a certain number of Internet users will mistype the name of a URL when surfing.

This is the URL to which ads link. This is the page users see when they click through to an advertiser’s site from an ad. You will need to know this URL if you would like to add it to your URL filter list and block an advertiser’s ads from appearing on your site.

This is the URL displayed on ads to identify the advertiser’s site to users.

The distribution preference selected by an AdWords advertiser indicates whether he/she elects to show his/her ads on the search and/or content sites or products in the Google network. Not all Google ads will appear on AdSense web pages.

The unique name that identifies an Internet site. On the Web, the domain name is the part of the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) that tells a domain name server where to forward a request for a Web page.

To run AdWords ads on Google, search, and content sites or products in our growing ad network, all AdWords advertisers must follow these guidelines.

Cost per 1000 impressions. From a publisher’s perspective, CPM is a useful way to compare revenue across different channels and advertising programs. It is calculated by dividing total earnings by the number of impressions in thousands. For example, if a publisher earned $180 from 45,000 impressions, the CPM would equal $180/45, or $4.00.

An exit window is a web page that only appears after a person leaves a web site. Usually the exit window contains some kind of advertisement.

An online discussion group where participants with common interests can exchange open messages.

Web pages can be built with frames such that there are multiple sections of independent HTML code. The AdSense ad code should be placed within the frame containing the content you wish to target with the ads.

A writer, programmer, or artist who sells services to different employers without a long-term contract with any of them.

A third-party service that offers Unlimited Autoresponders, Follow-Ups, Lists and Messages.

AdWords advertisers can choose to show their ads only to certain locations and languages. The AdWords ads served on an AdSense web site will therefore depend on the advertiser’s geo-targeting and a user’s settings.

AdSense allows web publishers to deliver Google ads that are relevant to what their readers see on their web pages and increase their site’s revenue potential.

Google AdWords ads are displayed across Google as well as the Google advertising network. Sites and products in the network include Search sites (America Online, CompuServe, Netscape, etc) and Content Sites (Content sites: New York Post, Macworld.com, JavaWorld, LinuxWorld, HowStuffWorks, and others)

Google’s advertising program based on cost-per-click pricing.

A questionable measure of web site traffic. Count one hit each time a browser request is made from a web server. For example, a page containing 5 images counts 6 hits each time it is viewed (once for each image and once for the page itself). Page views are a much better way to measure traffic.

Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is programming language used in the creation of Web pages. In addition to text, an HTML page may include graphics, video, audio, and other files.

An index or searchable index refers to the database of web pages maintained by a search engine or directory. To be “indexed” is to be included in a search engine’s database.

The number of impressions is the number of times an ad is displayed on Google or on sites or products in Google’s ad network. A page impression is counted each time an ad unit is displayed on a publisher’s site. Page impressions are used when calculating reports for AdSense publishers, rather than ad impressions.

Clicks or page impressions generated through prohibited means, and intended to artificially increase click or impression counts on a publisher account. Google’s proprietary technology analyzes clicks and impressions to determine whether they fit a pattern of use intended to artificially drive up an advertiser’s clicks or a publisher’s earnings. Clicks or impressions deemed by us to be invalid should not be included in your earnings.

A string of four numbers separated by periods used to represent a computer on the Internet. The format of the address is specified by the Internet Protocol in RFC 791. When a PC accesses the Internet through an ISP, it sometimes receives a temporary IP address.

JavaScript is a scripting language developed by Netscape to enable Web authors to design interactive sites. Although it shares many of the features and structures of the full Java language, it was developed independently. Javascript can interact with HTML source code, enabling Web authors to spice up their sites with dynamic content. JavaScript is endorsed by a number of software companies and is an open language that anyone can use without purchasing a license. It is supported by recent browsers from Netscape and Microsoft, though Internet Explorer supports only a subset, which Microsoft calls Jscript.

The word or words that relate to a particular topic. Keywords or phrases are used to construct a search statement to find information.

A percentage measure of how many times a keyword is repeated within text of a page. For example, if a page contains 100 words and ten of those words are “house”, then “house” is said to have a 10% keyword density. There are programs that will rate keyword density by singular words or by groups of words, “new home for sale”.

Doing research on a single keyword to find it’s relatives and related keywords. This is often done to find the highest producing keywords..

A technique used by Web designers to overload keywords onto a Web page so that search engines will read the page as being relevant in a Web search. Because search engines scan Web pages for the words that are entered into the search criteria by the user, the more times a keyword appears on the Web page the more relevancy the search engine will assign to the page in the search results (this is only one way that search engines determine relevancy, however.) Search engines often penalize a site if the engine discovers keyword stuffing.

A large group of web pages created that contain hyperlinks to one another or a specific other page. Link farms are normally created by programs, rather than by human beings.

A measure of how many other sites indexed by the same search engine have links to your site. Link popularity is essentially simply a count of links to a particular site.

The maximum cost-per-click (CPC) an advertiser is willing to pay. Our Discounter automatically reduces this amount so that the actual CPC the advertiser is charged is just one cent more than the minimum necessary to keep his/her ad’s position on the page.

The maximum cost-per-thousand-impressions (CPM) an advertiser is willing to pay. The AdWords Discounter automatically reduces this amount so that the actual CPM the advertiser is charged is just one cent more than the minimum necessary to keep his/her ad’s position on the page.

Malignant tumor of the mesothelium caused by exposure to asbestos fibers. Also known as one of the highest costing keywords on the Internet. At one time this keyword cost up to $100 per click.

Netiquette is etiquette on the Internet. Since the Internet changes rapidly, its netiquette does too, but its still usually based on the Golden Rule. The need for a sense of netiquette arises mostly when sending or distributing email, posting on Usenet groups, or chatting. To some extent, the practice of netiquette depends on understanding how email, the Usenet, chatting, or other aspects of the Internet actually work or are practiced. So a little preliminary observation can help. Poor netiquette because youre new is one thing, but such practices as spam and flaming are another matter.

A periodically published message containing news, information and announcements on a subject. Email Newsletters are an excellent vehicle for communicating with small to large audiences. Also referred to as an Email Newsletter, eNewsletter, and eZine.

A special area of demand for a product or service. A situation or activity specially suited to a person’s interests or abilities. A very specific market.

A site directory run by volunteer editors. This is one of the great internet success stories of 1999. The ODP is used by Lycos, Hotbot, AOL-Netfind, Netscape Netcenter, and the home base www.dmoz.org itself. Currently there are around 700,000 hand picked and selected sites in the directory. The first edition of the ODP was known as NewHoo (a play on Yahoo). Netscape provided server space for the NewHoo directory and it was collectively renamed The ODP.

Optimization is the process of making your Web site or Web page search engine friendly. Changes made to a Web page to improve the positioning of that page with one or more search engines. Optimization is the means of helping potential customers or visitors to find a Web site. Optimization may involve Web design, layout changes, new text for the title tags, meta tags, alt attributes, title tags, headings, and changes to the first 200-250 words of the main text.

An approach to email marketing in which customers must explicitly request to be included in an email campaign or newsletter.

A mechanism by which an individual can specifically request to be excluded from or deleted from a telemarketing, direct mail or e-mail marketing list.

Overture, formerly known as GoTo, is Yahoo’s advertising program that allows webmasters to display Overture ads for revenue and advertisers to recieve targetted traffic for their websites. It’s a program similar to Adsense except, at this time, Overture is not open to everyone. Only webmasters with extremely popular sites have been allowed to display Overture ads on their web sites.

Cost per 1000 impressions. From a publisher’s perspective, CPM is a useful way to compare revenue across different channels and advertising programs. It is calculated by dividing total earnings by the number of impressions in thousands. For example, if a publisher earned $180 from 45,000 impressions, the CPM would equal $180/45, or $4.00.

A page impression is counted each time an ad unit is displayed on a publisher’s site. Page impressions are used when calculating reports for AdSense publishers, rather than ad impressions.

The number of times users request a web page. Page view is used interchangeably with page impression.The loading of a webpage by a browser. A single User Session may result in multiple page views and numerous Impressions.

PageRank is one of the methods Google uses to determine the relevance or importance of a Web page. PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.”

An ad pricing structure by which the advertiser pays the publisher according to how many times an ad is clicked on by users. With pay-per-click search engines, the highest ranking goes to the highest bidder.

A server-side, cross-platform, HTML embedded scripting language that lets you create dynamic web pages. PHP-enabled web pages are treated just like regular HTML pages and you can create and edit them the same way you normally create regular HTML pages.

A popular free and open source forum system using the PHP scripting language and a variety of database management systems including MySQL, PostgreSQL, MSSQL, Microsoft Access and, with modification, Oracle.

Ping is an Internet program that lets you verify that a particular Internet address exists and is working.

A type of advertisement that is automatically displayed in a second smaller browser window behind the current window apon loading or unloading a normal web page. Pop behind advertisements tend to cost advertisers more since their visibility is higher but are considered less annoying than pop ups by web site visitors.

Pop-up ads are a form of online advertising on the World Wide Web intended to increase web traffic. It works when certain web sites open a new web browser window to display advertisements. The pop-up window containing an advertisement is usually generated by JavaScript, but can be generated by other means as well.

The process of ordering Web sites or Web page titles by a search engine or a directory so that the most relevant (as the engine defines relevant) sites appear first in the search results list for a particular query. The search engine’s algorithm for positioning may consider term frequency, term position (eg in the title), and/or number of previous hits by searchers on the page.

PSAs (Public Service Ads) 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.

A participant in the AdSense program, who is running a website with ad code on one or more of their web pages.

A word, phrase or group of words characterizing the information a user seeks from search engines and directories. The search engine subsequently locates Web pages to match the query.

The position a site is listed in search engines.

By using particular HTML-code in a Web page, one can redirect a visitor seamlessly to another Web page. Some people use it as a tactic to send a user to a different page from the one clicked on in the search results, the final page being less relevant. This is often considered unacceptable by most search engines.

A measure of how closely a database entry matches a search request. Most search tools on the Web return results based on relevance. The specific algorithm for computing relevance varies from one service to another, but it’s often based on the number of times terms in the search expression appear in the document and whether they appear in the appropriate fields.

Displaying an article on multiple web sites. Reprint rights are the rights offered by a distributor to reprint his or her article.

The actual or perceived future value of an expense or investment. Ad campaign ROI is a metric that attempts to determine what the advertiser receives in return for the cost of the advertising, usually in terms of new sales.

Stands for “Rich Site Summary” or “Really Simple Syndication.” A text file formatted to the XML (eXtensible Markup Language) standard. Commonly used by websites to syndicate news headlines. Freely downloadable RSS newsreaders are available for all computer platforms.

A general online advertising rotation package that allows an advertising campaign to be delivered on all Web pages.

A computer program written in an interpreted language, such as JavaScript or Perl, used to create dynamic Web content.

A computer that processes requests for HTML, images, and other documents that are components of web pages.

A unique number that is assigned to a Web site visitor and which is used to track the visitor’s path and the time of entry and exit.

Also known as a Site Strippers or Scraper Sites. A program that some people use to create web sites that look like directories. They take (scrape) bits content from other web sites or search engines and post them onto web pages to create instant content. Most Scraper Sites have no original content of their own.

The process of delivering an advertiser’s ad to the user through either content matching, profiling, or filtering.The control of the distribution of ad creative to only those web sites or those users that fit within the particular targeting parameters.

A tall, thin, vertical online ad unit. The IAB guidelines recommend two sizes of skyscrapers: 120 X 600 and 160 x 600.

Google is constantly analyzing data across their network, and if their data shows that a click is less likely to turn into business results (e.g. online sale, registration, phone call, newsletter sign-up), they may reduce the price the advertiser pays for that click.

An automated software program, also called a bot, that retrieves webpages and follows the hyperlinks contained in them. Used to generate indexes used by search engines.

An advertiser who has sponsored an ad.

A sub domain allows you to create separate web addresses from just one domain, for example www.shop.com could become shoes.shop.com. Some hosts set a limit for the number of sub domains you can create.

An individual who has requested to be added to a specific newsletter or email list.

A standard layout usually containing basic details of the page dimensions.

Teoma, pronounced tay-o-ma, is an Internet search engine founded in 2000 by Professor Apostolos Gerasoulis and his colleagues at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

Services offered by another company which are typically hosted on their servers.

A domain name that has little value. These are most often used to test out new search engine optimization tactics and they may get banned.

A small representation of a picture on a Web page, usually containing a hyperlink to a full-size version of the graphic. Thumbnails are used to load pages that have lots of graphics or pictures more quickly in a Web browser.

the very top of the browser – displays the title of the page. The title of a web page is also displayed in search engine result pages; in minimised window titles at the bottom of the screen; and in lists of bookmarks or favourites.

In the Domain Name System (DNS), the highest level of the hierarchy above second level domains. The .com .net .info .org is the top level domain. Second level domain names are what you register by or on behalf of registrants (or name holders) in a Top Level Domain registry. There are two types of Top Level Domains. The most common type is Generic or gTLDs, such as .COM, .NET, .INFO .ORG. New gTLDs such as .NOM, or .WEB and others may be introduced sometime in the near future.

Terms of Service are rules by which one must agree to abide by in order to use a service. For example, breaking Google’s TOS could get you kicked out of Adsense. You can find Google’s TOS at: https://www.google.com/adsense/policies

The number and types of people who come to a Web site. Measured in many different ways.

The prefferred industry method of counting visitors is to count on a unique level. When a person visits a site they are counted once, no matter how many times they open certain pages within. Thus creating a better idea of how many people are visiting rather than if a few people visit the same pages over and over.

A mechanism enabling email recipients to remove themselves from a mailing list.

Stands for Uniform Resource Locator. A URL is the address that identifies the location of a Web page on the World Wide Web.

Each visit to a web site by one person. The session is usually “ended” when all pages have been closed or after a specific time of inactivity.

Another way to compare and measure Web site traffic. A visit is activity on a Web site from a specific individual. That activity usually counts as a new visit if the individual has been away from the Web site for a period of fifteen minutes or longer.

A site (location) on the World Wide Web. Each Web site contains a home page, which is the first document users see when they enter the site. The site might also contain additional documents and files. Each site is owned and managed by an individual, company or organization

web crawler (also known as web spider) is a program which browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner. A web crawler is one type of bot. Web crawlers not only keep a copy of all the visited pages for later processing – for example by a search engine but also index these pages to make the search narrower.

Also known as a Blog. A web site that contains brief, discrete pieces of information called posts that are arranged in reverse chronological order. A weblog can contain a wide variety of content including written essays, annotated links, documents, graphics, and multimedia.

A term referring to a domain name search or look-up feature for a database – typically for Top-Level Domain name registries. Information such as name availability can be found through a query or search using a whois protocol (standard). Most Top-Level Domain registries maintain their own whois database containing domain name contact information.

Extensible Hypertext Markup Language – A reformulation of HTML 4.0 in XML 1.0. XHTML is a new language for building web pages that has recently been proposed as a W3C Recommendation. This proposed Recommendation caused lots of debate on account of XHTML’s usage of XML namespaces.

Short for Extensible Markup Language, a specification developed by the W3C. XML is a pared-down version of SGML, designed especially for Web documents. It allows designers to create their own customized tags, enabling the definition, transmission, validation, and interpretation of data between applications and between organizations.

This column of AdSense publisher reports shows the earnings for the selected channels, or as an aggregate for your account. Earnings are not final, and may be adjusted for invalid clicks, fees, or deductions.