If you're considering taking the big step of adding Google Adsense paid advertising to your particular blog in an effort to extract some extra money from the internet, it can often be a great decision. In using your current blog to present legitimate contextual advertising, you have also created a unique opportunity, not just for the particular blog in question, but also for your future goals too. Many blogmasters often enter the Adsense arena without any experience in online advertising at all, or even its basic terminology. However, in an effort to best understand precisely what will be going on, it's very important to get familiar with as much of the unique terminology used as possible when looking into Adsense and using it to monetize your blogs.

Here we have some potentially important terms and common abbreviations, and their meanings:

Terms of Service (TOS). All aplicants in the Google Adsense program are expected to abide by Google's Terms of Service. The "rule book" for Adsense. Those participants who do not conduct themselves in accordance with the TOS may well be banned from participation and and potentially have their entire account suspended. Each participant should make sure they carefully read through the entire Google Adsense TOS document.

The Publisher. That's you if you have a site running contextual advertising, like Adsense. Anyone operating such a site displaying Adsense ads is therefore considered a publisher for this purpose.

PPC, or Pay Per Click. Google's Adsense program operates predominantly on an individual pay per click system. This means that each advertiser pays for every time a visitor clicks on one of their ads. This is how you will get paid, every time someone clicks on an advertisement.

CTR, or Click Through Rate. This is the representation of the percentage of ad page impressions which results in a click of an ad on your blog. For example, if your blog receives 100 impressions and 16 of them result in a click, then the CTR for your site would be 16%.

Ad Unit. The ad unit is a block of Google Adsense ads displayed on your site. There are varied ad units from which you can choose. They are determined by their size in pixels. For example, a 160 x 600 column ad unit would be 160 pixels wide and 600 pixels high - tall and narrow.

Ad placement. This is where the ads are positioned on the page. Publishers can place Adsense units anywhere on their website page, while remaining consistent with their TOS. There exist a variety of online guides, charts and considerable recommendations demonstrating the numerous locations, options and how successful you might expect them to be in producing a consistently high CTR.

Channels. You are able to set up different 'channels' to track the performance of individual URL's, pages or specific Adsense ad units or to track earnings on particular sites. Channels can be established within the Set Up area of an Adsense account.

Competitive Ad Filters. Google enables the option to block certain advertisements by inclusion into their competitive ad filter. This will allow your website to avoid advertising a competitor, for instance.

Adsense brings with it an entirely new vocabulary which must be understood in order to achieve a high rate of success. Terms like the ones above have become common place in a reasonably short period of time for many Adsense publishers. By understanding the meaning of these terms, you'll be able to understand your advertising performance and will be able to optimize your Adsense strategy to make a decent profit online.