How to Sign Up For Google’s Referral Program

Putting referral ads on your site is very simple. Just click the Referrals link on the AdSense Setup tab and search for an ad by product, keyword or by category. Search by product and you’ll be able to pick exactly the ad you want. Search by keyword and Google will choose the ad for you, giving you what it thinks is the best performing ad to match the keywords you choose. You can enter up to ten keywords.

Search by category and Google will choose the best-performing ads within that category. You’ll also need to select your ad format — the formats available vary from product to product — and create a channel so that you can track the ad’s performance. Finally, place the ad (the category or the keyword) in your “Shopping Cart” and past the code. 

Start the process by deciding where you want the ad to go. It might take a bit of experimentation to find out which really is the best spot on the page — you’ll have learn whether that location will perform better with a referral ad or an AdSense unit — but you’ll have to put it somewhere. 

In general, you’ll probably find that it pays to keep the ad as close to the text as possible but the only way to find out which is actually the best setup for your Web page is to try different combinations and follow the results. If you find that over a week, an AdSense unit earns more income embedded in your text than a referral unit, try using a different referral unit to see if the problem is the product rather than the placement. And if the AdSense unit still performs best, move the referral unit somewhere else.

One good option is to use a square or rectangular AdSense unit at the start of an article and place a smaller referral unit lower down as though it were illustrating the text. You can put up to three referral units on a single page but if your page isn’t very long, you might be better off sticking with one unit and optimizing it properly (I’ll explain how to do that later). You want your referral ads to be closely tied to your content and you don’t want them to compete with each other