Teachnology

Teachnology offers services and resources designed to support educators who want to effectively incorporate technology into their classrooms. The company provides a reservoir of online resources and delivers effective tools for designing instruction. At TeAch-nology.com, educators can find best practices information, as well as a variety of free classroom materials and support tools. A seasoned team, including pre-K to K-12 grade teachers, professors of higher education, leading educational consultants, small business consultants and experienced web designers, maintains TeAch-nology.com.

There’s no charge for accessing many of the resources found on TeAch-nology.com. Educators who want more in-depth content and resources can purchase memberships for a modest annual fee.

Founder Paul McKee explains that he can offer the site as a free service due to advertising campaigns and sponsorships. For several years, TeAch-nology has relied on Google AdWords search-based advertising to help drive traffic to the site and encourage membership sales. The site now receives 3 million page views each month. "AdWords provides an unbeatable return on investment for us," says McKee.

McKee started investigating other ways to increase his income. He saw TeAch-nology’s ads showing up on other relevant education sites, and was impressed with how well his ads matched the content. "When we saw how relevant our ads were to users on other education sites, we decided to investigate use of contextual advertising ourselves on TeAch-nology," says McKee. In the fall of 2006, TeAch-nology began running Google AdSense ads throughout the site.

It was easy to implement AdSense, McKee says, but what impressed him most was the relevance of the ads his users now see. "The quality of the AdSense ads is superb," says McKee. "It’s almost as if a specialist hand-picked ads for every page. The ads match our content so perfectly, it’s amazing."

In terms of revenue, McKee notes that AdSense ads outperform other forms of contextual advertising by 8 to 9 times. He notes that he’s "extremely satisfied" with AdSense, which now accounts for 50 percent of company revenue. Equally important, McKee says that filling his ad space through AdSense frees up efforts to sell memberships, another key source of revenue. "We don’t have a full-time ad sales team," McKee observes. "AdSense takes care of itself, allowing us to focus on running our business."

In all, McKee believes he’s found a powerful tool to make the most of the educational site he runs. "It’s vital to us to be able to continue offering a wealth of resources to educators at no charge," he says. "Without revenues from AdSense, that goal would be difficult if not impossible to achieve."

Google AdSense is a program enabling online businesses to earn revenue from serving ads precisely targeted to specific web content and search pages. With service levels ranging from online sign-up to dedicated support management, a broad range of sites profit from AdSense. Thousands of Google advertisers also benefit from AdSense by gaining exposure on sites across the Google Network, which includes many of the Top 100 Media Metrix sites such as AOL, About.com, Amazon, Ask.com, and Lycos.