Google AdSense

Google AdSense is Google’s advertising programme for website owners. They provide space on their pages, Google fills it with ads from Google Ads and gives the owners a share of the revenue. For merchants, AdSense is the other side of their own campaigns: this is where it is decided whether their ads appear next to a relevant expert article or on a site built only for ad clicks.

Reviewed by Zoran Artmagic · November 7, 2026

What Google AdSense is

Google AdSense connects two sides. On one side are advertisers who run ads via Google Ads. On the other are owners of blogs, magazines, forums and portals who want to earn money with their content. AdSense brings both together: the website owner embeds a code in their site, Google serves ads there, and the owner receives most of the advertising revenue.

Before ads appear, Google reviews the website. Only sites that comply with the AdSense policies are approved. Excluded are, for example, illegal, misleading or adult content, sites without original content and copyright infringements. It is strictly forbidden to encourage visitors to click on ads or to click on ads yourself. Anyone who does risks having their account suspended.

How AdSense works

Google decides in real time which ad appears on a page. The basis is the topic of the page and, if the visitor has given consent, their interests. If several ads compete for the same space, an auction decides. The ad expected to bring the highest revenue is served. Depending on the campaign, payment is per click or per thousand impressions.

AdSense offers several formats:

Display and text ads: classic ad units that, as responsive formats, automatically adapt to the available space and device.
In-feed and in-article ads: ads that fit into lists or between the paragraphs of an article and are visually adapted to the content.
Multiplex ads: several ads in a grid, similar to recommendations for further content.
Auto ads: Google analyses the page and places various formats itself, including anchor ads at the edge of the screen and full-screen vignette ads on mobile devices.

The former limits on the number of ads per page no longer exist. But Google requires that advertising must not cover or push aside the content. Google discontinued the former link units in 2021.

For online stores, AdSense on your own website is not a good idea. Every ad in the store is an invitation for the customer to leave, often to a competitor who pays precisely for that.

Why AdSense matters for advertisers: topical relevance

AdSense becomes interesting for merchants from the other direction. Anyone running Display, Demand Gen or Performance Max campaigns in Google Ads also appears with their ads on AdSense sites. And there is a real opportunity here.

An example: a guide blog explains in detail how back pain develops when working from home and what helps against it. Whoever reads this article has exactly this problem and is taking time to understand it. If the ad of a store for ergonomic office chairs appears in the middle of this article, it reaches a person at the right moment, with the right problem and in the right frame of mind. That is topical relevance: the ad doesn’t feel like an interruption, but like the logical continuation of the content.

Such placements reach customers before they even search for a product. They don’t yet know a store or a brand, but they have a problem your range solves. In Google Ads, this can be controlled by targeting topics, content keywords and selected websites where your own ads should appear.

Where the budget drains away

The flip side is placements with no connection whatsoever to the product. They arise mainly in three places:

Sites without topical relevance: The ad for office chairs appears on a page about celebrity gossip or recipes. It may be seen, but nothing is bought.
Sites built only for ad clicks: Thin content, endless picture galleries, six ad units on one screen, constantly reloading vignettes. Such sites look more like spam than an expert article and live off visitors tapping ads by accident.
Apps and games on mobile devices: Advertising in free game apps generates many clicks, often from children or through accidental taps, and practically no orders.

Typical warning signs in the figures are a conspicuously high click-through rate with almost no conversions, visitors who leave after a few seconds, and placements with names nobody on the team knows.

How merchants control their placements

Read placement reports regularly: Google Ads shows on which websites and in which apps the ads appeared. Here you can see in black and white where the money goes.
Exclude bad placements: individual websites, entire app categories and unsuitable content types. Account-level exclusions also apply to Performance Max.
Target topical relevance: topics, content keywords and selected websites instead of unlimited delivery.
Measure cleanly: Without reliable conversion tracking, you can’t tell which placement sells and which only produces clicks. Server-side tracking makes this data much more complete.
Evaluate by revenue, not clicks: A placement with few clicks and a good conversion rate is worth more than one with many clicks and no purchases.

Doing this consistently lets you use the advantage of AdSense placements while cutting the losses. How arboro sets up and monitors Google Ads campaigns for Shopware and Shopify stores is shown on the page about Google Ads for Shopware and Shopify.