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Google announced this week that its AdSense program was going to implement interest-based advertising.  Behavioral advertising, as it is more commonly termed, is already a standard practice in many other advertising networks, including Google’s closest rivals Yahoo and MSN. What Google is planning to do is allow advertisers to show ads based on a user’s previous interactions with them, such as visits to the advertiser’s website and also to reach users based on their interests (e.g. “sports enthusiast”).

The element of tracking and interpreting a surfer’s browsing habits inevitably entails huge privacy concerns with such behavioural based advertising practices and this may have been a reason why Google was so late in entering the market beyond its YouTube asset. 

A more pressing question for AdSense participating webmasters though is : will Google’s new interest-based advertising earn me extra money?

I haven’t made my mind up on this one, and nobody will really know until the new system has been tried and tested.  I believe the answer could be both yes and no, depending on how well you are doing presently from the pure system of contextual advertising.

If your site is a blog on a niche subject which is full of high-paying keywords, then I’m not sure if google showing you ads on a different subject or product, based on the fact that you had spent time surfing numerous websites on that subject, will lead to more value clicks coming your way.

On the other hand, if you have a general site that pulls in a lot of traffic but which tends to show low paying ads that might not even have much revelance to your site, then it should be a boost to your AdSense CPM if Google decides to show an ad for the liposuction private clinic that your surfer was searching for the previous night.

In other words : the existing AdSense contextual advertising benefits niche websites with high paying keywords, whereas the new system will benefit those with low paying keywords and might be a Godsend for the webmasters of  high traffic general sites (for example viral videos) poorly served by contextual ads.

O.K., it’s hardly rocket science to realise that if you don’t follow Google’s AdSense policies, you might have your account closed and your future AdSense income is likely to be $0, zero, zilch.  But there is a slightly more nuanced way in which making sure that all your websites and pages are adhering to Google’s AdSense rules will positively affect your AdSense earnings. 

All of the pages on your website are regularly crawled by the adsense bot, not only in order to determine which relevant ads should appear on each page, but also to check for obscene or adult language, something which is against their policies.  Not only are you risking suspension or termination of your AdSense account, you are likely to find that no AdSense advertisements will show on the page that is showing content contrary to their rules.  No AdSense advertisements = no AdSense clicks = no AdSense earnings.

So what do you do?   Ensure that every single one of your pages adhere to the AdSense rules.  Print out a copy of the terms and conditions, read it and read it again several times, check regularly to see if they have been updated, know them inside out.  If your AdSense income is important to you, you would be foolish not to.