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Since we launched AdSense for Maps many developers have shared their experiences with monetizing their Google Maps API implementations. Here is a detailed, first hand account from one developer..

Hi, I'm Martin Fröhlich from Maplandia, a world gazetteer based on Google Maps. I'm delighted to share our experience with recently launched monetization tools available through the Google Maps API. We have been successfully using traditional AdSense to monetize our traffic for some time, so we were happy when the Geo Developers Blog announced two new ways how to generate revenue designed purely for Maps.

Maps Ad Unit

There are some significant advantages of Maps Ad Unit in comparison to classic ad units: the relevance of ads is determined not only by the content of the page but also from what is currently shown on the map itself. The other advantage is that the ads are updated (re-targeted) each time a user moves or zooms the map, so they are always tailored to what is viewed on the map.

These two reasons lead to more relevant ads. From the entrepreneurial point of view, this leads to more revenue which is very important to us. We have experienced a 35% increase in our daily revenue from AdSense For Content (This number stands for the portion of total revenue generated by our Maps Ad Unit channel, calculated for the last two months since we implemented the Maps Ad Unit). We didn't notice any decline in the revenue from other AdSense ads placed on the page, so this is really pure increase of profit. The only drawback was that we had to remove GOverviewMapControl (which I always liked) due to the ads. However, this is not necessary if you decide to place ads in other than bottom right corner.

Finally, the implementation is really simple, consisting of adding these few lines to your code:

var publisher_id = yourPublisherID;

var adsManagerOptions = {
 maxAdsOnMap : 2,
 style: 'adunit',
 // The channel field is optional - replace this field with a channel number
 // for Google AdSense tracking
 channel: 'your_channel_id' 
};

adsManager = new GAdsManager(map, publisher_id, adsManagerOptions);
adsManager.enable();

GoogleBar

GoogleBar was introduced back in 2007, but only the latest update made it possible to monetize this search experience. We have a lot of visitors looking for many different places all over the world. Unfortunately, there are (and always will be) some places we can't provide any information on, so this is why I find GoogleBar with its local search functionality to be a very useful tool for our users. Advertising revenue from GoogleBar is a nice bonus: adding GoogleBar to our maps more than doubled our daily revenue from AdSense for Search (which we used with Google Custom Search Engine already).

On Maplandia we have been using both these features together for more than two months now. So far, the results are impressive. There are plenty of mashups with much less non-map content than we tend to have. I sincerely believe that those of you with these types of sites can easily beat our AdSense revenue increase numbers. I highly recommend trying Adsense For Maps, if you haven't done so yet. Good luck and happy coding!

Posted by Mike Pegg, Marketing Manager - Google Geo APIs