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Inside the science of contextual matching

As an AdSense Product Manager for ads quality, I'm part of a group that works to make the ads on your site relevant for users. One of the ways we do this is through contextual targeting, which matches ads to the content of your webpages. With contextual targeting, our system parses and analyzes the content of your page, conducts an auction among the relevant ads, then serves the winning ads -- all in the blink of an eye! Pretty simple, right?

Actually, matching relevant ads to the content of your pages is quite a scientific challenge involving semantic analysis and machine learning. It's a challenge that keeps me and my team busy. Our machines are very good at the matching process, but there are still a few cases where their definition of relevance differs from our human definition of relevance. In these few cases, the system might end up serving ads that don't seem immediately relevant to users. We understand that increased ad relevance contributes to a positive experience for users, publishers, and advertisers, so we're continuously working on ways to improve the relevance and quality of ads that appear on your sites.

I'm excited to let you know that this week, we'll be rolling out a series of enhancements to AdSense's contextual targeting capabilities, which will more accurately match relevant ads to webpages. You won't need to update your AdSense account or ad code, as these changes will be applied automatically. In many ways these types of improvements are par for the course at Google - but I wanted to let you know about the kinds of improvements we've been focusing on. Please keep in mind that these changes won't affect how other types of ads are matched to your sites; for instance, you'll continue to see placement-targeted ads when advertisers bid to appear specifically on your pages.

This is by no means the end of our efforts to perfect the system, but we believe that with these changes users will start to see even more relevant ads, advertisers will generate more attractive returns by finding the right users, and publishers should make more money over time.

As always, we're interested in your feedback on these improvements!

Posted by Woojin Kim - AdSense Product Manager

Tuesday, August 18, 2009 at 2:18:00 PM

Default font faces to be updated

In the same way that you regularly try out changes to your AdSense ads to increase your earnings, we're also constantly looking for new ways to help you earn more. We've been analyzing the performance of the three available font faces (Arial, Verdana, and Times New Roman), and have found that each font performs best in different ad formats due to factors like character width. Based on these findings, we'd like to let you know that we'll be updating some of the default font faces associated with specific ad formats within the next few days.

This upcoming change will only affect ad units in Latin-based characters which have 'AdSense default' selected as the font face. If you've set an account-wide font face, we hope our findings will encourage you to experiment with other font faces on an ad unit basis.

Currently, most ad units set to the AdSense default font face are displayed in Arial, with a few in Verdana. Here are the new default font faces we're launching for our ad units:

Arial: 728x90, 336x280, 120x600, 120x240
Verdana: 300x250, 160x600, 468x60, 250x250, 234x60, 125x125, 180x150
Times New Roman: 200x200

While we're optimizing the default font face based on performance across all AdSense sites, we also recommend experimenting on your own to determine the best font faces for your ad units and your sites. Just sign in to your account to manually select specific font faces on an ad unit or account-level basis.

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

Monday, August 17, 2009 at 3:43:00 PM

North American publishers: Participate in AdSense email interviews

To help us better understand what's most important to our publishers, we've recently started conducting email interviews. Interviews are currently available only to publishers located in North America, but we're aiming to expand this program to other countries in the future.

If you're located in North America, you can sign up for a chance to participate in an email interview and openly discuss your opinions about AdSense with a market researcher. Participants will receive a $50 AdWords credit for their time.

If you're interested, fill out this form to let us know. We'll be contacting chosen participants via email; because space is limited, we won't be able to accept all applications.

Posted by Erica dela Cruz - Inside AdSense Team

Thursday, August 13, 2009 at 11:19:00 AM

Become a fan of AdSense

To date, we've been sharing AdSense information with you through this blog, Twitter, the AdSense Help Center, and the AdSense Help Forum. You also expressed your interest in Facebook by creating a number of AdSense groups, and we listened. We're pleased to announce that the official AdSense Facebook Fan Page is now up and running! A one-stop shop for up-to-date information, our Facebook Fan Page will be synched with the blog and Twitter, and will house optimization photos and videos that are currently found on our YouTube channel. (If you're unfamiliar with Facebook, learn more on Facebook's profile.)

The AdSense Facebook Fan Page will open up a new method of communication between our team and our publishers. You'll be able to respond to poll questions and complete surveys, helping our team better understand your needs so we can keep improving our products. You can also find out about upcoming events under the 'Events' tab and look out for posts about new AdSense features, webinars, and more on our wall. Our team will be contributing to the page, so be sure to check the page often for different opportunities to provide us with your input and learn more about AdSense.

To make this new page as useful as possible to all of our publishers, we won't be responding via Facebook to questions regarding individual AdSense accounts. Please continue to visit our Help Center and Help Forum to troubleshoot your specific issues.

Sign up to become a fan, and start taking advantage of all of the benefits our official Facebook Fan Page has to offer.

Posted by Simone Davis - Inside AdSense Team

Monday, August 10, 2009 at 2:47:00 PM

Site maintenance on Saturday, August 8

Our engineers will be performing routine site maintenance this Saturday from 10am to 2pm PDT. Although you won't be able to access your AdSense or Ad Manager accounts during this time, your clicks, impressions, and earnings will continue to be recorded as normal. In addition, ad serving and ad targeting on your pages won't be affected.

For our international readers, here's the maintenance start time converted for a few cities around the world:

London - 6pm Saturday
Athens - 8pm Saturday
Mumbai - 10:30pm Saturday
Kuala Lumpur - 1am Sunday
Melbourne - 3am Sunday

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

Thursday, August 06, 2009 at 10:16:00 AM

Extending the category filtering beta for English-language ads

In April, we gave you a sneak peek into category filtering, a new feature we've been developing to give publishers more control over their ads. Today, we're excited to announce that we're extending the beta to publishers in a number of English-speaking countries including, but not limited to, Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, the U.K., and the U.S.

As a reminder, category filtering lets you prevent ads from up to 5 specific categories such as religion, politics, and dating from appearing on your pages. Your filters will be applied to ads in English, regardless of how they're targeted. In addition, you'll be able to see the percentage that each category contributes to your earnings, which can help you understand any revenue impact you might notice as a result of filtering.

Based on feedback from our initial beta testers, we've also made a few improvements to the feature:

• Ad impression impact: To give you a better sense of how many ads you'd be filtering, we've now added an extra column to show you the percentage of ad impressions on your pages which fall into each category.
  
  
  
• More accurate percentages: Ad impression and earnings percentages are now calculated based on impressions from the previous 30 days instead of three. This extended time frame should provide a more accurate picture of the types of ads you're receiving and how much revenue they're contributing.
  
  
• Category descriptions: We've added details about each category directly within your account to help you understand the types of ads that may fall into each.
  

To see whether category filtering has been enabled for your location, sign in and visit the Ad Review Center, located under the 'AdSense Setup' tab. We're working on expanding this beta to additional languages and countries, and will be sure to announce any updates here on the blog. If you'd like to learn more about category filtering, please visit our Help Center.

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

Tuesday, August 04, 2009 at 10:31:00 AM

In North America? We recommend EFT for your next payment

We want to get you paid by the fastest means possible. As many of you know, we offer Western Union in 23 countries and courier service in many other countries.

We'd like to take a minute to remind our North American publishers that the fastest way for you to receive your payments is via Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT). EFT is quick and easy to set up. When payments are issued, there's no need to wait for the delivery in the mail -- the funds appear in your bank account shortly after they're issued. That means if we processed a payment for you this month, your earnings would be in your bank account already.

Also, EFT is good for the environment, since a check doesn't need to take a ride by sea, plane, or land to reach you. In available locations, it's the Google-recommended form of payment, so we hope you won't hesitate to sign up. You can learn more in our Help Center.

To our publishers in regions where we don't offer EFT yet, please know that we're always working towards expand our payment options, so stay tuned to Inside AdSense to learn when new forms of payments launch in your location.

Posted by Elizabeth Ferdon - AdSense Payments Team

Thursday, July 30, 2009 at 2:29:00 PM

Tips for maintaining an AdSense-friendly site with user-generated content

These days, user-generated content is everywhere, from the comments below newspaper articles, to the photos and videos shared on social networks. So it's no surprise that many publishers are monetizing this type of content with AdSense ads. But, while you're familiar with types of content which are compliant with the AdSense program policies, your users might not be. We understand that it's not always easy to monitor hundreds of new comments, posts, user profiles, videos, or photos every day, so here are a few ideas on how to maintain an advertiser-friendly environment on your pages.

As a quick note before we head into the tips, remember that inappropriate content can come in many forms -- images, forum posts, comments, links, and so on. For example, adult content isn't only limited to pornographic images; it can also be sexually explicit forum posts or spam bot comments with links to adult sites, which aren't permitted by our policies. We recommend reviewing our previous Inside AdSense post on this topic for further clarification and a few tests you can try on your content.

Now for the tips, which we've divided in two sections - 'Prevention' and 'Monitoring'.

Prevention

Here are some recommendations for ways to prevent your ads from appearing alongside user-generated content that isn't compliant with our policies:

1. Publish clear content guidelines and policies that your users will have to accept and adhere to in order to sign up and use your site's services.
   
   
2. If you own a photo or video sharing site where users are permitted to upload adult or other non-compliant content, clearly structure your content to avoid placing your ad code in sections/categories containing this type of content. The same idea could also be easily applied to online stores with adult sections or to classifieds sites which offer adult dating classifieds.
   
   
3. Ask users to tag their inappropriate content (e.g. sexually suggestive pictures or videos) as being non family-safe. This can help you perform human evaluations of potentially inappropriate content for AdSense ads. You can also try installing keyword filters for content related to adult topics, violence, or drugs, for instance. While we're unable to provide you with details about setting up these filters for your site, we recommend searching for terms such as "keyword filtering" or "content filtering" on Google.com.
   
   
4. Implement spambot protection for your comment forms, forums, and guest books. If you need more information on this topic, try a Google search for "spambot protection".
   

Monitoring

We suggest these tips to ensure that your existing user-generated content pages remain compliant with our policies:

1. Set up ways for your community to monitor itself. For example, try adding a "Report inappropriate content" link to your pages, to allow users to flag content for you to review.
   
   
2. Proactively review pages, videos, photos, etc. with high pageviews on a regular basis.
   
   
3. Spot-check content based on keywords, content search, or related user accounts. For example, try entering keywords related to inappropriate content in your own search engine and checking the results. Alternatively, you can search on Google.com using the following parameter, replacing 'example.com' with your own site's URL and 'keyword' with a specific word or phrase: "site:example.com keyword".
   
   
4. Create editorial policies and exercise moderator control in your comments, forums, and guestbook sections.
   

We hope you find these tips helpful. You can also read related information and suggestions from our Search Quality Team in a recent post on the Webmaster Central Blog. If you have any other ideas, or if you've already implemented similar measures on your sites with user-generated content, please feel free to leave a comment below and share your experience.

Posted by Gergana Marinova - AdSense Publisher Support

Tuesday, July 28, 2009 at 10:49:00 AM

Inside...Google Ad Manager

In March 2008, we launched Google Ad Manager, our ad management solution for publishers with small direct sales teams. Following the rapid growth of this product, we're excited to announce that we're now devoting a new blog to Ad Manager at http://googleadmanager.blogspot.com . The Ad Manager team has lots of information to share, and we encourage you to visit the new blog for the latest Ad Manager news, tips, and resources.

For those of you new to Ad Manager, it can help you sell, schedule, deliver, and measure all of your directly-sold and network-based ad inventory. It offers an intuitive and simple user interface, Google serving speed and reliability, and significant cost savings. Best of all, Ad Manager can be optionally integrated with AdSense to offer you an automated way to maximize the revenue of your unsold and network-managed inventory. If you don't have an account yet, visit http://www.google.com/admanager. We also recommend looking through our two-part series on getting started.

Thanks for following our Ad Manager posts here on Inside AdSense for the past year; we hope that you'll stop by and visit the new Ad Manager blog for the latest announcements and tips.

Posted by Stephen Kliff - Google Ad Manager Team

Thursday, July 23, 2009 at 10:17:00 AM

Expanding availability of local currency reports

We've been working to enable local currency reporting in more countries, and are happy to announce that this feature is now available for publishers located in Denmark and Norway. As a reminder, switching to these new reports means that all earnings generated from advertisers paying in other currencies will be converted to your local currency each day. If you receive payments in your local currency, there won't be any additional conversions at the end of the month, but you can still update your payment method and currency at any time.

If you're located in one of these countries, we recommend that you first download and save copies of your past reports in U.S. dollars for your records. Once you're ready to switch to local currency reports, sign in to your account and look for the green prompt in the upper right hand corner of your Reports Overview page. Click on the link, and you'll then be asked to agree to a new set of Terms and Conditions. If you have questions or need legal advice on interpreting the new Terms, please don't hesitate to contact your attorney.

We encourage you to switch to local currency reports soon, as we'll be requiring this change in the future. To learn more about these new reports, visit our Help Center or review common FAQs in a recent Inside AdSense blog post -- all references to 'Euros' in the post now also apply to your local currency.

Updated for accuracy

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

Tuesday, July 21, 2009 at 9:39:00 AM

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Speeding up: Attracting more advertiser spend

In the final week of our educational series about speeding up your business in a slowdown, you'll hear tips from Christian Ashlock, an AdSense Optimization team manager, about attracting additional advertiser spend. If you have any final suggestions for growing your business, we hope you'll leave them as comments. If you missed a week or want to re-read tips from our team, you can revisit the series at any time at www.google.com/ads/speedingup.

I'm Christian Ashlock, and I manage an AdSense optimization team at Google that works to help publishers get the most out of their AdSense accounts. Once you create a site with great content and great ad inventory, the best way to earn additional revenue is to make sure advertisers can find you. Today, I'll share two tips to help attract advertisers to spend money on your site, and a third tip to help you access a new pool of advertisers you may not currently be reaching.



Tip #1: Define ad placements in AdSense so that AdWords advertisers can find them and bid directly for them.

Ad placements are simply custom channels that you can expose to advertisers to encourage more placement targeting spend on your site. Ad placements are most effective for sites with lots of different topics or with different sections like articles, a blog, and a forum. You can set up ad placements based on specific categories of interest on your site, like fine arts or sports. You can also set up ad placements to cater to advertisers who are more interested in specific ad unit locations, like above the fold placements, or popular ad unit sizes including the 300x250 medium rectangle or 728x90 leaderboard.

Tip #2: Help advertisers find your inventory outside of AdWords.

Google Ad Planner is a media planning tool that advertisers use to find sites for their media buys. With the recently launched Publisher Center in Ad Planner, you can claim your site and provide information that helps advertisers better understand your content, audience and advertising options. You can also share your Analytics data with Ad Planner to ensure that advertisers see the most accurate traffic numbers for your site. All of this will help advertisers who use Ad Planner as a media planning tool understand the value of your site, and may even help new advertisers learn that your site exists!

Tip #3: Tap into a new set of advertisers: search advertisers.

Google has relationships with many advertisers -- some advertise on Google.com, some advertise on our partner sites through the AdSense program, and many do both. You can tap into advertisers who choose to advertise on our search partner sites by using AdSense for search. AdSense for search lets your site's visitors find what they're looking for on your site and across the web. Just like on Google.com, we'll display ads targeted to what your visitor is looking for along with the search results.

Additional Resources:

• Learn more about placement-targeted advertising, and read about best practices for setting up ad placements.
  
• To get the most out of AdSense for search, try our five optimization tips.
  

Thanks for following our educational series for the last five weeks. We hope you've gained a better understanding of the tools and resources you can use to improve your site and your AdSense earnings.

Posted by Talia Brodecki - AdSense Product Marketing

Thursday, July 16, 2009 at 12:28:00 PM

Now offering AdSense in Google Sites

As an AdSense publisher, you manage and develop websites. Google Sites is a free product that simplifies the process of creating secure group websites, whether you're building a family website or a company intranet. You can publish pages with the click of a button, edit web pages like documents, and add videos, presentations, and calendars to your pages. Information is stored securely online, and you decide who can edit or view the site. And now, with a recent integration, you can place AdSense ads on Google Sites to earn money.


If you're new to Google Sites, we encourage you to take it for a test drive today. After you've built out your site and ensured that it complies with our program policies, follow these instructions to add AdSense to your pages. You'll have the option to place ads in the sidebar as well as the main content of each page, and you can choose the formats that work best for your site. If you're not sure where to start, we encourage you to check out our optimization tips to make sure you're maximizing your site's revenue.

For more information about getting started with Google Sites, watch this video:



Posted by Ryan Rennaker - AdSense API Team

Tuesday, July 14, 2009 at 10:02:00 AM

Speeding up: Increasing your revenue potential

It's week four of our five-week educational series about speeding up your business in a slowdown, which we kicked off three weeks ago. Today, you'll hear tips from Mel Ann and Tim, two AdSense Optimization Specialists from our Sydney, Australia office as they take you through a complete optimization. The series will conclude next week with tips to attract more advertiser spend. Keep on commenting with your own suggestions for growing your business! You can also follow the series at www.google.com/ads/speedingup.

Mel Ann and Tim are two AdSense Optimization Specialists from the Google office in Sydney, who work with publishers to help them improve the performance of their ads. Today, they'll walk you through a 5-step process to optimize the AdSense ads on your sites, and will also share tips that many publishers have found successful.



Step 1: Analyze your webpages

The first step to a successful optimization is to analyze your webpages. Ask yourself the following questions as you think about where to place ads on your site:

• What type of content do you have? People interact differently on articles, forum, and video sites, for example, so think about how people will be interacting on your site.
  
• Where is visitor attention likely to be focused? You should place ads where your users are most likely to look, but as Ricardo Prada mentioned in week two of this series, make sure that they won't get in the way of users trying to complete tasks on your site.
  
• How can you integrate ads into an area without getting in the way of your users? You can view a heat map we've put together showing where ads perform well, and keep in mind that above the fold ads and ads close to primary content tend perform better.
  
• Don't forget to think about how advertisers would like to appear. If you can make your site more appealing to advertisers, while keeping the above tips in mind, you're more likely to be able to attract advertisers and placement targeted ads.
  

Step 2: Set up custom channels

Custom channels will help you figure out how different ad units are performing based on a number of variables you can choose, like placement, size, and color. Create a channel for individual ad units and categorize them to see how they're performing. For example, you can track your leaderboard and medium rectangle to see which performs better, and use this information in step four below. Custom channels will also allow you to track and measure results from your optimizations.

Step 3: Optimize your ad unit design and placement

The next step is to look at color, position, and size of your ad units and optimize these for user experience, advertiser experience, and performance. We've found that the medium rectangle (300 x 250), wide skyscraper (160 x 600), and the leaderboard (728 x 90) tend to perform best. You can also opt in to image ads to receive rich media and video ads, which tend to perform well too. It's important that you implement your ads in a consistent manner and in a way that is desirable to advertisers. Use colors effectively. Blend ads in, but not too much that users don't see them. Borderless ads tend to work well, as does highlighting the link and URL. Test different colors and placements, and then keep the changes that perform best.

Step 4: Maximize revenue from multiple units

We recommend adding multiple ad units to your pages, while still keeping the user experience in mind when deciding on placements. You can use custom channel reporting to determine which ad unit performs best, and structure your page to optimize performance based on that. The highest paying ad we have for your site will be shown in the first ad unit that shows up in your HTML code. If you have a leaderboard at the top, but learn with custom channel reporting that a medium rectangle halfway down the page is outperforming it in terms of CTR and eCPM, try putting the medium rectangle first in your HTML code. You can do this by switching the location in the HTML if you're comfortable editing the code, or by changing the actual location of the leaderboard on the page.

Step 5: Track and measure results

The last step is to understand whether your optimizations have made a difference. Here, use the custom channels you set up earlier to generate reports on your different ad units. Generate reports on your custom channels and group results by channel (remember, this depends on how you've set them up) to see how different sizes, colors, and placements are performing. You can also look at placement targeting reports to see which ad units are receiving placement-targeted ads, and if they've resulted in improved performance.

We hope these steps and tips are informative, and strongly encourage you to take the time to try an optimization on your own.

Additional Resources:

• We'll be re-hosting the optimization webinar from last month again on Thursday, July 23 at 11am PST. Sign up if you're interested in attending.
  
• You can also see valuable information in Analytics after linking your AdSense and Analytics accounts.
  
• For more advanced optimization, you can use Website Optimizer to run live experiments based on ad placement, format and more.
  

Posted by Talia Brodecki - AdSense Product Marketing

Thursday, July 09, 2009 at 3:38:00 PM

Site maintenance on Saturday, July 11

This Saturday, July 11th, our engineers will be performing routine maintenance. While you won't be able to access your AdSense and Ad Manager accounts from 10am to approximately 2pm PDT, your ad serving and targeting won't be affected. In addition, your clicks, impressions, and earnings will continue to be recorded as normal.

We've converted the maintenance start time for a few cities around the world:

London - 6pm Saturday
Cairo - 8pm Saturday
Agra - 10:30pm Saturday
Singapore - 1am Sunday
Brisbane - 3am Sunday

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

Tuesday, July 07, 2009 at 3:23:00 PM

Speeding up: Attracting more visitors with content and community

We're well under way with our five-week educational series about speeding up your business in a slowdown, which we kicked off two weeks ago. This week, you'll hear tips from Jack Herrick, the founder of wikiHow.com, about attracting new visitors to your site. As we share more tips over the next two weeks about increasing your revenue potential and attracting more advertiser budget, we hope you'll leave comments with your own suggestions for growing your business. You can also follow the series at www.google.com/ads/speedingup.

Jack Herrick is the founder of wikiHow, a collaborative writing project to build the world's largest, highest quality how-to manual. wikiHow is a wiki, which means that any visitor to the site can create or edit wikiHow articles. wikiHow is currently ranked as the 100th most popular site on the web by Quantcast, and receives over 16 million unique visitors each month. Today, Jack shares three of his favorite tips to attract visitors. We hope they'll help you come up with new ways to entice visitors to your sites as well.



Tip #1: Produce great content

The first tip is obvious, but it's also the most important. The articles on wikiHow vary widely in quality. We have some of the highest quality how-tos on the net, for example How to Hard Boil an Egg, and we also have some fairly ugly, unfinished drafts we call stubs. Interestingly, the high-quality articles don't get just a little more traffic than the mediocre articles, they get hundreds of times more. When you can produce the single best page on the Internet on any given topic, people will find it and share it with their friends. Don't settle for acceptable content, always strive to produce amazing content that your readers can't resist sharing.

Tip #2: Learn to share

My second tip is more counterintuitive. To attract more readers to your website, consider putting your content under a Creative Commons license so it can be widely distributed. Everything on wikiHow is under a license that allows other websites to publish and even modify or adapt our content for re-use on their sites. In fact, we have a button at the bottom of every article that allows webmasters to copy and paste the HTML right onto their site. Many webmasters are afraid to share their content, because they worry they will only be aiding competition. By sharing, what you are really doing is encouraging your competitors to provide free advertising for you. The more people who see your content on other sites, the more likely they are to eventually come straight to you.

Tip #3: Make your community a team

Finally, I'd encourage you to allow real collaboration on your site. Lots of websites try to create online communities. To use a basketball analogy, most online communities are just groups of individuals shooting freethrows alone. On wiki websites, people play together as a real team. Humans are hard wired to want to work in groups and collaborate. By allowing this to happen, you can create a passionate community of people that will build something bigger than any one person could accomplish on their own. And that will in time attract a large audience.

Hopefully Jack's tips will help you come up with some new techniques to attract visitors to your site. In addition to Jack's tips, here are a few extra resources focused on attracting more visitors.

• Learn the basics of Search Engine Optimization with Google's SEO guide.
  
• Submit your content so that Google can help you distribute it across Google Web Search, Maps, Product Search, iGoogle, and more.
  
• Drive more traffic to your site with programs like AdWords.
  

Posted by Talia Brodecki - AdSense Product Marketing

Thursday, July 02, 2009 at 10:10:00 AM

Generate revenue from mobile applications

If you develop iPhone or Android applications, we're happy to let you know about the beta launch of AdSense for mobile applications. Participants in the beta will be able to display text and image ads in their mobile applications to earn revenue. We've seen positive results in our trials, and we're excited to roll this out to new developers to continue supporting the growth of mobile applications.

You can visit our new microsite to learn more about AdSense for mobile applications, see our beta requirements, or sign up. If you're selected to participate in the beta, we'll be in touch with you shortly with next steps for getting started.

You can also learn more about the program by watching the video below, in which Howard Steinberg, Director of Business Development at Urbanspoon, describes how he tested AdSense for mobile applications:



Posted by Alex Kenin - AdSense for Mobile Applications Marketing

Monday, June 29, 2009 at 10:18:00 AM

Speeding up: Retaining your visitors with great user experience

Last week, we kicked off a five-week educational series about speeding up your business in a slowdown. This week, you'll hear tips from Ricardo Prada, a user experience researcher at Google, about designing for the user. As we continue to share tips about attracting more visitors, increasing your revenue potential, and attracting more advertiser budget, we invite you to share your own suggestions for growing your business by leaving comments on each post. You can also follow the series at www.google.com/ads/speedingup.

Hi, I'm Ricardo Prada. As a user experience researcher here at Google, one of the things my colleagues and I are responsible for is making sure that Google websites are efficient and fun to use so that visitors keep coming back to them. I'd like to share three tips we think about daily as we do our jobs. Ultimately, they all fit into our guiding principle: if you focus on the user, everything else will follow.



Tip #1: Design for the tasks that visitors complete on your site.

Think about tasks on your website first and layouts second. It's tempting to want a flashy design that exercises your CSS skills, but remember that vistors come to your site with specific goals in mind, like reading your essays, or checking out your collection of sports photos. Write down the top three tasks your users might want to accomplish on your site, and design to make those tasks quick and efficient.

Tip #2: Use ads as potential exit paths, not interruptions.

Ads should complement your site, not distract from it. The most natural place for a user to evaluate an advertisement is after they've completed their goals on your site. Instead of interrupting your user's main tasks, try to offer ads as potential exit path for users who were probably ready to leave anyway by placing them at the end of completed tasks.

Tip #3: SEO - only if it makes sense.

Only do search engine optimizations that benefit your users. For example, page titles that are relevant to the page content make it easier for your visitors to understand what your articles are about. On the other hand, there are lots of sneaky strategies out there for improving search engine rank. Most of those don't work anymore, and they might actually harm your site's reputation.

Additional Resources:

• Our Help Center has more suggestions about where to place ads.
  
• The Google Webmaster Tools team shares their design and content tips.
  

Posted by Talia Brodecki - AdSense Product Marketing

Thursday, June 25, 2009 at 10:05:00 AM

Default font size increased

As a follow-up to last week's launch of font size controls, we'd like to let you know that we've just increased the default font size for AdSense ad units. This change will affect your ad units if you haven't yet customized your font sizes, or if your ad units are set to 'AdSense default font size' -- you'll notice that the text in your ad units is now the equivalent of 'medium' instead of 'small'. We decided to make this change based on publisher feedback and our testing, which showed that this increased font size improved performance.

If you'd like to change the font size in your ad units, you can do so on an account-wide basis or by individual ad unit -- just follow the instructions listed in our Help Center. Again, we recommend testing these new font size options with your existing customizations to determine which combinations perform best on your pages.

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

Monday, June 22, 2009 at 5:54:00 PM

Speeding up: the basics and Analytics

Today, we're kicking off a five-week educational series about speeding up your business in a slowdown. We'll be revisiting the basics of online publishing to help you grow your business, and we'll share tips about using AdSense and other Google products that you can apply to your business now. In the coming Thursdays, you can look forward to tips for making your site more user-friendly, bringing in more visitors, increasing your revenue potential, and attracting more advertiser budget. Along the way, we invite you to share your own suggestions for growing your business by leaving comments at the end of each post. You can also follow the campaign at www.google.com/ads/speedingup.

In today's post, you'll hear from Avinash Kaushik, Google's own Analytics Evangelist, about the importance of understanding your traffic, analyzing how your site performs, and using data to make decisions. Here are a few small to mid-sized ideas that -- in Avinash's own words -- can add up to remarkable results for your website. They're all things you can do today with free web analytics tools, like Google Analytics.



Idea #1: Discover what content and traffic sources keep people coming to your site again and again.

How many times does a visitor have to visit your site to be considered valuable? Use the Visitor Loyalty report in the Visitors section of Google Analytics to pinpoint the visitors who come to your site that many times or more. Put that data into an advanced segment and apply that segment to your core reports to understand things like where these valuable visitors come from and what content they consume. You can then use this information to optimize how you acquire new visitors and the content on your site for loyal visitors.


Idea #2: Figure out which pages to improve on your site.

Many people ask the question: "How do I know which pages on my site to improve?" Take a look at the Top Landing Pages report in the Content section of Google Analytics. This report tells you the first page people see when they enter your site. Sort this report by bounce rate. Bounce rate measures how many people come to your site, only see one page and leave right away (or as Avinash calls it: "I came, I puked, I left"). Once you identify which of your top landing pages are not able to get a single click from your visitors you know which pages need to be improved.


Idea #3: Find out where AdSense performs best on your site.

If you've linked your AdSense and Analytics accounts, the Top AdSense Content report in the AdSense section of Google Analytics will tell you where on your website AdSense ads get the most clicks. This is a win-win for your business and your customers, as it helps you identify what type of content to produce more of based on what content people are most interested in as well as where people most often click on your AdSense ads.


If you haven't already, link your AdSense and Analytics accounts in order to take full advantage of what Analytics can offer. If you don't yet have an Analytics account, you can sign up today.

Additional Resources:

• Read more from Avinash at his blog, Occam's Razor, which has more tips like the above and additional ways to use Visitor Loyalty metrics, or on the Official Google Blog.
  
• To learn more about using Analytics on your website, visit Conversion University.
  
• See great ways to use AdSense and Analytics together by watching this video.
  

Posted by Talia Brodecki - AdSense Product Marketing

Thursday, June 18, 2009 at 12:06:00 PM

Font size matters

Since February, you've been able to change the font faces of your ad units. We're now happy to announce the launch of a related feature you've been asking for -- the ability to change the font size of the text in your ad units. You can now select from small, medium, and large font sizes for ad units on pages in Latin-character languages. Just like with the current font face options, size options appear in every account but will only be applied to ad units on pages primarily in Latin-based characters for now.

The font size you choose will be applied to the body of the ad, with the title scaled appropriately. In order to fit the ad text correctly, the actual font size will vary for each format size, font face, and user-specific settings such as browsers and operating systems. In addition, some formats sizes currently have very limited room, so the font size application will be most apparent in cases where the number of ads appearing in your ad units varies automatically in order to maximize your performance. Here's an example of what the three font sizes could look like in a 336x250 large rectangle:


Your ads are currently set at the default size for AdSense, which is the equivalent of 'small'. You can select a new font size on an account-wide basis in the Ad Display Preference section of your My Account tab, or on an individual ad unit basis for new and existing ad units.


If you're creating new ad units, you can choose between the AdSense default font size, your new account-wide font size (if you've selected one using the instructions above), or a separate size. To update existing ad units you've created using the Manage Ads feature, visit the 'Manage Ads' page under your AdSense Setup tab. Any font size changes you make on an individual ad unit basis will be maintained even if you change your account-wide default in the future.

Also, a bit of advance notice: soon, we'll also be changing the default font size across AdSense in ad units from 'small' to 'medium'. We've heard from some of you that the current font size can be too small, and our testing also showed that slightly larger font sizes improved performance. Any ad units set to the default font size will automatically be updated to display the larger setting. If you'd prefer to stick with today's font size, you can set your desired font size as 'small' across your account.

We encourage you to combine these new font size options with the other customization options in your account to test the optimal layout for your pages. We're excited about this launch, and we'll be sure to follow up with another post to let you know once the default font size has been changed.

Updated to include an example of each of the three font sizes

Posted by Amy Wu - AdSense Product Manager

Wednesday, June 17, 2009 at 1:28:00 PM

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Local currency reports for nine more countries

Following our launch of Euro reporting for publishers in five European countries, we're happy to announce that local currency reports are now also available in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Finland, Greece, Portugal, South Africa, Switzerland, and the UK.

If you're located in one of these countries, you can now update your account to display earnings in your local currency. After you've updated your account, any earnings generated from advertisers paying in currencies other than your local currency will be converted daily. If you receive payments in your local currency, this means that there also won't be any additional conversions at the end of the month. However, you can still choose to receive payments in U.S. Dollars or change your payment method at any time.

Before enabling local currency reports in your account, we recommend downloading and saving copies of your past reports in U.S. Dollars for your records. You can then update your account by signing in to AdSense and clicking the link in the green prompt on your Reports Overview page. You'll be asked to review and agree to a new set of Terms and Conditions. Unfortunately, we're not able to interpret the meaning of changes in our legal documents for publishers -- if you have questions or need legal advice on interpreting the new Terms, please don't hesitate to contact your attorney.

We'll be requiring this change in the future, so we recommend updating your account to report earnings in your local currency soon. You can find answers to common FAQs associated with these new local currency reports in a recent Inside AdSense blog post -- all references to 'Euros' in the post now also apply to your local currency. In addition, detailed information about these new reports can be found in our Help Center.

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

Monday, June 15, 2009 at 12:26:00 PM

More countries go Western Union

Good news! We’ve expanded Western Union Quick Cash as a payment method to 7 new countries: Barbados, Bolivia, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Nepal, Uruguay, and Vietnam. If you live in any of these locations, you can now sign up to receive your AdSense payments from your local Western Union agent. With Western Union, you’ll receive your earnings sooner, since you won't have to wait for checks to arrive in the mail or clear at the bank. Plus, AdSense won't charge you a fee to use this payment method.

Please keep in mind these important points:

• Payments will continue to follow our normal payment schedule and will be available for pickup at your local Western Union agent the day after they're issued.
  
• You'll need to present a government-issued ID that matches your AdSense payee name when picking up your payment. If you need to update or correct the payee name listed in your account, please follow the instructions in our Help Center.
  
• Right now, only individual payee names can receive payments by Western Union, not businesses.
  
• Payments must be picked up within 60 days of issue or they'll expire and be credited back to your account.
  
• Payments will be made in US dollars, but depending on your local Western Union agent, they may be picked up in your local currency.
  

These instructions will help you to sign up, and our Help Center has more info about picking up your payments and other countries where Western Union payments are currently available. We're working towards making this payment option available to publishers in additional countries, and we'll be sure to announce any updates here on the blog.

Posted by Deborah Chang - AdSense Payments Team

Monday, June 08, 2009 at 11:20:00 AM

Top ten myths about Google Analytics

A few weeks back, we announced that all publishers can now integrate their AdSense accounts with Google Analytics. If you're not very familiar with Analytics yet, you might be interested in reading a recent post on the Analytics blog that addresses ten common myths about the product. For example, did you know that you can use Analytics to segment visitor data in real time, or that you can use the new Analytics API to tie your website data to your financials? Check out the post to learn more about these features and other ways you can use Analytics to better understand your site stats.

If you haven't yet linked your AdSense account with Analytics, follow these steps:

1. Sign in to AdSense.
   
2. Click the link that says "Integrate your AdSense account with Google Analytics" on your Reports Overview page.
   
3. Follow the onscreen instructions, and watch our video for additional guidance.
   

Even if you use AdSense in a language that's not supported by Analytics, you can still link your accounts and view your Analytics reports in a different language.

Posted by Sebastian Tonkin - Analytics Product Marketing

Friday, June 05, 2009 at 12:49:00 PM

Two upcoming maintenance periods

We'd like to let you know about two upcoming maintenance periods for the system which processes AdSense statistics. As a result, you may see slight delays in your reports during these times:

Wednesday, June 3: 3pm - 6pm PDT (GMT -07:00)
Saturday, June 6: 10am - 2:30pm PDT (GMT -07:00)

Please be assured that you'll be credited for all valid clicks, impressions, and earnings generated, and these temporary delays will not impact the amount you earn. In addition, you'll still be able to sign in to your AdSense and Ad Manager accounts during these hours, and your ad serving and targeting won't be affected.

We understand that many of you check your stats multiple times a day, and so we hope this notice helps alleviate any concern on your part. Thanks for your patience, and if you'd like to learn more about how frequently your reports are usually updated, we recommend reading this past Inside AdSense post.

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

Tuesday, June 02, 2009 at 4:01:00 PM

You've got a Friend Connect gadget

Social networking features are all the rage these days. (AdSense has even joined the trend with Twitter!) Now your site can be part of the social web by using the features offered through Google Friend Connect to awaken and strengthen your community of visitors.

With Friend Connect, your visitors can join your site using credentials they've already created with Google, Yahoo, AOL, and others, and link in the people they know on services like Google Talk, Plaxo, Twitter, and more. There's also a gallery of gadgets where you can choose from features like commenting, ratings and reviews, and the social bar to add to your site. Just like AdSense, you can simply copy and paste a few snippets of code to add these features to your site. Or, if you want to do some deeper integrations, you can use the Friend Connect APIs.

Watch this video to learn more about Friend Connect:



We're constantly adding more social gadgets, such as the event gadget, the Polls gadget, and the Get Answers gadget. To learn more about Friend Connect and other Google products helping to make the web -- and your site -- more social, check out the Social Web Blog.

Posted by Mendel Chuang - Google Friend Connect Team

Friday, May 29, 2009 at 11:19:00 AM

Image ads join link units

If you use link units, you may have noticed a small addition to the page users see after clicking a link unit topic. We recently added an image ad to the bottom of each of these pages, after our testing showed revenue improvements for many publishers.


These image ads are contextually targeted, based on the link unit topic users clicked to reach the ads. If no image ads are available for the given topic, we'll only show the original text ads -- in other words, we won't show a PSA or insert a blank space in place of the image ad in this case. Advertisers can bid on these image ads on a cost-per-click (CPC) and cost-per-impression (CPM) basis, so you'll generate earnings for valid clicks and impressions. You can review the performance of image ads on your link unit pages by generating a link unit report on your Advanced Reports page.

If you aren't using link units on your pages, we encourage you to give them a try. They don't take up much space and can help add to your AdSense revenue -- learn more in our Help Center, or visit your AdSense Setup tab and select 'AdSense for content' to get started.

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

Tuesday, May 26, 2009 at 9:41:00 AM

Euro reporting and you: your questions answered

Since introducing reports in Euros for publishers located in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Spain, we've received a number of questions about this launch. For publishers in these regions, we've addressed some of your concerns below.

How will my earnings be converted to Euros?
Once you switch to the new reports, earnings generated from advertisers paying in currencies other than the Euro will be converted. This will happen on a daily basis using the prevailing market rate from the previous day. If you generate earnings from an advertiser paying in Euros, they won't be converted.

When I'm issued a payment, will my earnings be converted again?
If you've switched to Euro reports and are receiving payments in Euros, there will be no additional conversions when your payments are issued. However, if you're receiving payments in U.S. Dollars, your payment will be converted from Euros to U.S. Dollars at the end of the month.

When I switch to Euro reports, will that automatically change the currency of my payments?
No, your selected payment currency and method won't change after you switch to Euro reports -- unless, of course, you want them to change. (You can update them by visiting the 'Payments Details' section under your My Account tab.)

Will there be a delay in receiving my unpaid earnings once I make this change?
No, making this change will not affect the timing of your payments. After you switch to Euro reports, your unpaid earnings in U.S. Dollars will be converted to Euros before the next upcoming payment selection deadline (typically the 15th of each month). For instance, if you make this switch on June 3rd, your unpaid earnings will be converted by June 15th; if you make this switch on June 20th, your unpaid earnings will be converted by July 15th.

How will this change influence VAT and any taxes I have to pay?
While you may receive your payments in your local currency, all payments are being made by Google Ireland, a company incorporated under the laws of Ireland, in accordance with the terms of your agreement with Google. Unless your business is in Ireland, you shouldn't have an obligation to charge Google VAT or treat any of our payments to you as VAT that needs to be paid to any VAT authorities. If your billing address is located in Ireland, you may have an obligation to charge Google Irish VAT. For more specific answers, we suggest you head for your local tax adviser.

I'm not located in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, or Spain. When will you include other countries?
We're working to offer Euro reports to publishers located in additional countries. When we do, we'll be sure to post any updates here on Inside AdSense.

Do I need to update my account if I'm eligible?
Although this change is currently optional, in the future we will require that publishers located in eligible countries make this switch. Eligible publishers who haven't yet updated their accounts will currently see an interstitial page with additional information after signing in. We understand that some eligible publishers would like to continue receiving payments in U.S. Dollars; while you can still choose to be paid in U.S. Dollars, it will be mandatory to view your reports in Euros.

If you're eligible to make the switch to Euro reporting, we encourage you to review the updated Terms and Conditions and update your account soon. To get started, sign in to your account and look for the prompt, "See your daily earnings reported in Euro amounts!" on your Reports Overview page. You can also find more information in our Help Center.

Posted by Arlene Lee - The Inside AdSense Team

Thursday, May 21, 2009 at 1:42:00 PM

More webinars on the way

Continuing with the series of webinars we've been hosting recently, we'd like to let you know about several additional webinars taking place over the next few weeks.

If you'd like webinars that take place in the evenings in North America or the early mornings in Asia, one of these might work for you:

Understanding the payment cycle
Learn about when and how you can expect to be paid.
Date: Thursday, May 21, 2009
Time: 6:30pm PDT (GMT -07:00)
Register at: https://googleonline.webex.com/googleonline/onstage/g.php?t=a&d=577510522

Channels and advanced reporting
Walk through the process of creating channels for more detailed tracking of specific pages and ad units.
Date: Thursday, June 4, 2009
Time: 6:30pm PDT (GMT -07:00)
Register at: https://googleonline.webex.com/googleonline/onstage/g.php?t=a&d=573170710

If you prefer webinars at a Europe-friendly time, you may wish to attend one of these:

Using Custom Search Engine with AdSense
Find out how your users and your revenue can benefit from Custom Search engine with AdSense for search.
Date: Monday, May 26, 2009
Time: 3pm GMT (PDT +07:00)
Register at: https://googleonline.webex.com/googleonline/onstage/g.php?t=a&d=570572716

Fundamentals of optimization
Learn about account and ad layout changes that can boost your revenue. (Recommended for new publishers or those who haven't optimized AdSense previously.)
Date: Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Time: 6:30pm GMT (PDT +07:00)
Register at: https://googleonline.webex.com/googleonline/onstage/g.php?t=a&d=573202418

As always, you can find dates, times, and details for our webinars in our Help Center.

Posted by Julie Beckmann - Inside AdSense Team

Wednesday, May 20, 2009 at 10:06:00 AM

Calling all developers for Google I/O

Are you a developer, or are you interested in learning about developer tools and technologies like Android and OpenSocial? If so, we'd like to let you know about the Google I/O Developer Conference on May 27th and 28th in San Francisco.

As an AdSense publisher, you may be interested in learning how to spice up your site with our APIs, or how tools like App Engine and the Google Web Toolkit can help you focus on your content and code rather than maintenance or scaling issues. At Google I/O, you'll have the opportunity to learn about these topics from Googlers and also meet other developers.

Over 2,000 are expected to be in attendance, and if you'd like to be one of them, we hope you'll register for the event. For more information, check out the official site or follow us on Twitter.

Posted by Christine Tsai - Google Developer Programs

Monday, May 18, 2009 at 11:01:00 AM

Temporary ad serving issue resolved

For about an hour this morning, beginning at 7:48am PDT, we experienced a global network routing issue. As a result, fewer or no ads were served to some publishers during this time. Our engineers have since resolved the issue, and we're working to ensure that this doesn't recur. We're very sorry for the inconvenience.

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

Thursday, May 14, 2009 at 10:29:00 PM

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Site maintenance on Saturday, May 16

Our engineers will be performing regularly scheduled maintenance this Saturday, May 16th. You'll be unable to access your AdSense and Ad Manager accounts between 10am and 2pm PDT, but your ad targeting and serving won't be affected. In addition, we'll continue to record your clicks, impressions, and earnings as usual.

Here's the maintenance start time, converted for a few cities around the world:

London - 6pm Saturday
Dubai - 9pm Saturday
Mumbai - 10:30pm Saturday
Taipei - 1am Sunday
Auckland - 5am Sunday

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

Thursday, May 14, 2009 at 9:52:00 AM

What the Display Ad Builder means for publishers

We've been working to make it easier for advertisers to show display ads on the content network -- which benefits you, because it results in more budgets devoted to advertising on AdSense sites like yours. (As a reminder, "display ads" include all types of image-based ads, such as banners, rich media, and video ads.) In addition to recent launches such as DoubleClick Studio, third-party ad serving, and expandable rich media ads, we also launched the AdWords Display Ad Builder last October. This tool allows AdWords advertisers to create display ads using customizable templates and to target them to AdSense sites in a matter of minutes.

Since its launch, the Display Ad Builder has been extended to advertisers in over 100 countries and 40 languages. With over 90 customizable templates and thousands of active users of all sizes, the Display Ad Builder has quickly become what we believe is the largest platform for self-serve display ad creation on the web. Its usage varies from the largest digital agency, like Razorfish, to smaller advertisers like the Wilshire Grand Los Angeles. We'd like to take a few minutes to tell you more about the impact of this tool and how it can benefit you as a publisher:

• More advertisers creating display ads: In just six months, the Display Ad Builder has significantly increased the number of AdWords advertisers using image-based ads. Many of these advertisers were already advertising with text ads on Google.com and AdSense sites, but have now found the visual elements, interactivity, and animations of display ads to be effective at increasing clicks, conversions, and overall ROI.
  
  
• Higher quality, more relevant display ads for your site: With simplified display ad creation now available to advertisers of all sizes and industries, the display ads that show on your site are likely to be even more relevant to your content and audience. For sites with niche content or with an advertiser base that would be less likely to have the budgets to invest in display ad creation, this is especially true. The templates that we offer also vary well beyond simple static banners, including interactive rich media templates that allow users to scroll between or roll over multiple product images, in addition to multiple templates with animated text and images.
  
  
• Higher potential earnings: As the reach of ads created with Display Ad Builder grows, we've seen encouraging results -- ads created with the Display Ad Builder have average click-through rates that outperform industry averages. We believe that this is due to the combination of advanced contextual targeting on AdSense, combined with templates that encourage best practices in effective display ad creation. We've also heard from many advertisers that they're finding improved cost per conversion efficiencies with the tool, meaning that more of their marketing budgets can be effectively deployed online, on your sites.
  

So what can you do to take advantage of the many newly created display ads? First, make sure that your ad units are opted into image ads. And, since many publishers are advertisers too, you may be interested in getting started with the Display Ad Builder yourself. To learn more, you can also view our series of how-to videos or read our feed of Display Ad Builder announcements.

Posted by Ryan Hayward - Display Ad Builder Product Marketing

Tuesday, May 12, 2009 at 11:09:00 AM

Register for our next AdSense Optimization Webinar

We invite you to join us at our next Optimization Webinar tomorrow, where we'll show you how to experiment with different formats and colors to improve the performance of your ads. We've heard that you'd like us to hold our webinars at different times of the day, and we hope that this helps accommodate those of you who weren't able to attend our last optimization webinar. Remember, we're only able to accommodate a maximum of 500 publishers, so please sign up soon.

Here's the information you'll need:

Date: Thursday May 7, 2009
Time: 6:30 pm PDT (GMT -07:00)
Registration: https://googleonline.webex.com/googleonline/onstage/g.php?t=a&d=366085742

As a reminder, you'll be asked to enter your publisher ID number when registering. For more information on this, and all upcoming webinars, please visit our Help Center.

Posted by Ashutosh Satpute - AdSense Publisher Support

Wednesday, May 06, 2009 at 3:18:00 PM

Showcase your site with Google Ad Planner's Publisher Center

To help you increase the visibility of your sites to potential advertisers, we've just launched the Publisher Center in Google Ad Planner. This will allow you to provide details about your sites to help attract advertisers. Though the Publisher Center is only available in English at this time, any publisher can use the tool.

As a quick reminder, Ad Planner is a media planning tool that helps agencies and advertisers find sites that cater to their target audiences. In the new Publisher Center within Ad Planner, you can claim sites you own and customize the descriptions for each. For each site, you can also add up to five categories that describe your site's content, and the types, sizes, and formats of ads that your site supports.


In addition, you can share your Google Analytics data with Ad Planner to provide advertisers with additional details about your site, such as the number of unique visitors and page views. By replacing Ad Planner traffic estimates with data measured directly by Google Analytics, you'll be able to provide advertisers with more accurate site traffic information.

Based on this information, agencies and advertisers using Ad Planner will be able to identify appropriate sites to include in their placement-targeted campaigns. As more advertisers become aware of your sites and bid to show ads on them, the competition among your ads will increase and so should your earnings potential.

We encourage you to visit the new Google Ad Planner Publisher Center to begin claiming sites you own. For more information about the Google Ad Planner Publisher Center, visit our Help Center, or watch our video below:



Posted by Wayne Lin - Product Manager, Google Ad Planner

Tuesday, May 05, 2009 at 2:28:00 PM

Analytics integration for all

Over the past few months, we've been gradually inviting publishers to integrate their AdSense accounts with Google Analytics, and today we're happy to announce that this feature is now available to all publishers. Integrating your account with Analytics will provide you with more detailed information about traffic to your pages and how users interact with your site.

Once you link your accounts, you'll find an AdSense-specific menu under the 'Content' section of the left-hand navigation bar on your Analytics homepage, containing these reports:

• The Top AdSense Content report allows you to see more details about specific pages on your site and analyze ad performance. For instance, if you find that some of your pages generate a high number of pageviews but aren't monetizing as well as other pages, you can focus your optimization efforts on improving these pages.
  
• The Top AdSense Referrers report can help you see how different incoming traffic sources contribute to your revenue.
  
• Last, the AdSense Trending report lets you analyze how your site generates revenue during different times of the day and different days of the week.
  

You'll also notice that other sections of your Analytics account will show a new 'AdSense Revenue' tab. You'll be able to compare how much of your AdSense revenue is coming from new visitors versus existing ones, and view revenue based on user language.

To take advantage of these new reports, sign in to AdSense and click the 'Integrate your AdSense account with Google Analytics' link on your Reports Overview page. You'll be taken to a step-by-step wizard that will guide you through the rest of the process. If you use AdSense in a language that's not supported by Analytics, you can still link your accounts and view your Analytics reports in a different language.

We also recommend watching the video below, which will help explain the linking process:



Enjoy your new data, and don't forget to visit our Help Center if you have other questions about linking your accounts or reviewing your reports.

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

Wednesday, April 29, 2009 at 12:42:00 PM

Updates to the program policies page

If you've checked the AdSense program policies page today, you've probably noticed that we've just made a few small updates. We'd like to take a moment to clarify what's been changed.

The first thing you might notice when you visit the program policies page is that we've revamped the look. Based on your feedback, we've reorganized the content and updated the layout to make it easier to read and navigate. We've highlighted some key information for each policy, and added expandable 'Learn more' sections that you can click for more detailed information. Also, we've grouped together policies that are specific to only AdSense for content or AdSense for search.

There are also a few updates to the content of the program policies, which we've outlined below:

• Google brand violations: This policy has always existed in our Terms and Conditions, but we've now brought it directly to the 'Ad Placement' section of the program policies page so that it's easier to find. According to this policy, we don't allow ads or search boxes to be placed on pages which misuse Google logos, trademarks, or other brand features in the page content or URL, and which could mislead users into thinking the page is associated with Google.
  
  
• Deceptive implementations: We've clarified this policy a bit in the 'Encouraging Clicks' section of the program policies - ads may not be formatted in a way that makes them indistinguishable from other content on the page where they appear. This includes, for instance, formatting content to mimic ads, aligning images with ads, and placing ads under a misleading heading.
  
  
• Ad placement in emails and email programs: This updated policy clarifies that Google ads , search boxes, and search results may not be placed in emails, as well as alongside emails.
  
  
• Other Google products' policies: With this new policy, publishers aren't permitted to place ads, search boxes, or search results on, within, or alongside other Google products in a way that violates the policies of that other product or service. For instance, this would include placing ads on sites which allow users to download YouTube videos, which isn't permitted by the YouTube Terms of Service.
  

Finally, we've added more information to the 'Webmaster Guidelines' section and created a new 'Traffic Sources' section. Whether you regularly review the program policies or haven't reviewed them since you signed up for AdSense, we encourage you to visit the program policies page and check out the updates.

(Post has been updated to provide additional clarification.)

Posted by Winnie Creason - AdSense Publisher Support

Tuesday, April 28, 2009 at 11:25:00 AM

Category filtering feature being developed

One of the top requests we've heard from publishers is to have more control over the ads appearing on their sites. We've been working to address your feedback, and today at ADSPACE, our team announced an upcoming beta test of a new feature in the Ad Review Center called category filtering.

Category filtering will give publishers the ability to block ads that fall into specific categories such as dating, religion, and politics. Regardless of how ads are targeted, they'll be filtered if they're within one of the selected categories. We'll also show the percentage of recent revenue that ads in each category generate, so publishers can predict how filtering selections will impact their revenue.

We'll be launching category filtering as a beta to a small group of publishers to collect initial feedback about the feature. Here's a preview of what the feature currently looks like, but please keep in mind that the layout and categories may change based on feedback from beta test participants.


Although we're not able to expand the limited beta to additional publishers at this point, we wanted to give you a glimpse into one of the ways we're working to give you more control over your ads so you can ensure a positive experience for your users. We'll continue to refine this feature, and hope to be able to roll it out more widely in coming months. Please stay tuned to the blog for any updates, and feel free to leave us a comment in the meantime.

Posted by Atul Bhandari - AdSense Product Manager

Wednesday, April 22, 2009 at 11:47:00 AM

AdSense Orientation Webinar

If you're new to AdSense and would like help with getting started with your account, we're hosting a webinar this Thursday evening just for you. In this webinar, we'll walk you through the basics of your account, show you how to start displaying ads, and also answer your questions via chat. Here are the details you'll need before registering:

Date: Thursday, April 23, 2009
Time: 6:30pm - 7:30pm PDT
Register at https://googleonline.webex.com/googleonline/onstage/g.php?t=a&d=573101592

We're only able to accommodate a maximum of 500 people, so we encourage you to register early if you're interested in this session.

Finally, we've updated our Help Center with details about the schedule of upcoming webinars. We'll add sign-up links for each webinar as we finalize the dates and times, so feel free to check back often. In addition, remember to update your email notification preferences so we can keep you posted about any additional sessions.

Posted by Ashutosh Satpute - AdSense Publisher Support

Tuesday, April 21, 2009 at 3:39:00 PM

From blues to blooms with Blue Dart

As we roll into a brand new financial year in India, we're happy to let publishers located in India know that all standard checks will be sent via the Blue Dart courier service at no additional cost. Because Blue Dart is the Indian domestic carrier for DHL, you'll no longer have to pay expensive courier fees. In addition, please be aware that you'll no longer see Secure Checks as a payment option in India. For more information on Indian payment methods, visit our Help Center.

We'd also like to remind you that your checks will arrive faster if your address is up-to-date, so please take a moment to review the information listed in your account and make any necessary updates. We wish you a productive and profitable year ahead!

Posted by Sayed Meera - AdSense India Payments Specialist

Monday, April 20, 2009 at 2:36:00 PM

Your introduction to Google Ad Manager (Part 2 of 2)

Earlier this week, we provided a basic introduction to Google Ad Manager to help you determine whether the product is right for you. If so, we hope that you've signed up for an account to help you manage your ad inventory. As you begin using Ad Manager, we'd like to give you some tips and instructions to help you on your way.

In addition to the tips below, we'll be hosting a Getting Started with Google Ad Manager Webinar on April 21st at 11:00 am PDT, where we'll give a live demo of Ad Manager, share best practices, and help you get started. Sign up at:
https://googleonline.webex.com/googleonline/onstage/g.php?t=a&d=570486361.

What terms do I need to know in my Ad Manager account?
With Ad Manager, you'll manage all of your inventory according to the following terminology:

• Ad Slot: This is the most granular inventory component, and represents the location of an ad. It's the equivalent of an ad unit in AdSense. For instance, you can set up an ad slot for the top banner on your pages.
  
• Placement: This is a publisher-defined collection of ad slots, and represents inventory to be sold. In AdSense, this is the equivalent of an ad placement . You should include at least one ad slot per placement, as campaigns are all linked to a placement. For instance, you can create a placement for all of your ad slots on your sports pages, or the top banners on all pages of your site.
  

Then, to create campaigns, you’ll use the following terms:

• Order: This is a summary containing information about an ad campaign including the campaign dates, the advertiser or agency, and the contact numbers.
  
• Line Item: You’ll enter all the details of an ad campaign including the flights dates, the cost, the priority level, the targeting criteria, and the delivery information.
  
• Creative: This is the actual media being delivered in your ad slots.
  

I'm ready to start using my Ad Manager account. How do I serve my first campaign?
There are three parts to serving your first campaign: setting up your inventory, tagging your pages, and creating your campaigns. Follow our three-part guide below for instructions:

A. Setting up your inventory
There are two main steps to follow to organize your inventory. In the Inventory tab, you’ll need to:

1. Create your ad slots: At this stage, you can choose to enable AdSense Optimization in order to fill your unsold inventory with AdSense and to make it compete with your ad networks. The baseline for the competition is the Value CPM that you set for your networks.
   
2. Group your ad slots into placements: In order to allow advertisers to target their campaigns to your specific placements, you'll need to enable placement targeting.
   

B. Tagging your pages
Once you've set up your inventory in Ad Manager, you’ll need to tag every page on which you want to use Ad Manager to deliver your ads. For each page, you’ll need to define all the ad slots that should appear and generate html code:

1. Go to the Inventory tab and click on “Generate HTML code”.
   
2. Select the Ad Slots you want to appear on the page you’re tagging
   
3. Generate the code and use it to tag your page
   

You can also review our tagging guide if you need help implementing the code.

C. Creating your campaigns
Once your inventory is ready and your pages are tagged, then you can start creating your campaigns. To manage your campaigns, you should always refer to the Order tab. Here are the 3 key steps to remember in order to create a campaign:

1. Create the advertiser’s Order: Choose between the Default Order (for Directly sold inventory) and the Ad Network Order.
   
2. Create the advertiser’s Line Items
   
   • Select a level of priority (there are 5 different levels)
   • Select a cost type: CPC, CPM, CPD
   • Specify goals and settings, such as targeting, daily and user capping, and creative rotation.
3. Upload the creatives
   
   • Select the creative type (we currently support Flash, Image and Rich Media)
   • Choose to add a click macro or a cache buster
   • Test the creative in the preview tab or directly on your website

We hope that our two-part series has helped you better understand Ad Manager and get started with it on your site. If you need further information on specific topics, we encourage you to visit our Help Center and review how Ad Manager works.

Posted by Florie Arlegui - Google Ad Manager Team

Friday, April 17, 2009 at 11:17:00 AM

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Your introduction to Google Ad Manager (Part 1 of 2)

After talking about a few Google Ad Manager features and optimization tips on this blog in the past, we've received questions from new publishers, asking what Ad Manager is and whether they should use it. In this two-part series, we'll go back to the basics to provide you with an introduction to Ad Manager.

What is Google Ad Manager?

Google Ad Manager is a hosted ad management solution for publishers with smaller direct sales teams; it can help you sell, schedule, deliver, and measure all of your directly sold and network-based inventory.

Should I use Ad Manager?

You'll probably want to use Ad Manager if:

• You operate a website and sell your ad inventory directly to advertisers (or plan to sell directly to advertisers in the future).
  
• You'd like to improve the efficiency of your sales process and feel confident in your forecasting.
  
• You've been left with unsold inventory because you weren't able to forecast availability accurately.
  
• You need a consistent way to serve ads that make you the most money in undersold situations.
  

What are the benefits of using Ad Manager?

• A simple, intuitive user interface: you can manage your campaigns, inventory, and advertiser data quickly and efficiently.
  
• Revenue optimization and AdSense integration: the system will consistently deliver the highest-paying ad for every ad impression on your site.
  
• Precise inventory forecasting: you'll be able to sell more of your inventory without overbooking it.
  

How will I benefit from using AdSense with Ad Manager?

Using AdSense with Ad Manager on your websites can help you maximize your revenue in a number of ways. You can use AdSense to backfill all of your unsold inventory, ensuring that all of your ad spaces are filled. AdSense can also be used as a competing network against your other networks -- AdSense can compete with your remnant and house campaigns to deliver the highest value ads, and an AdSense ad will only show if it can pay you more than any alternative ads.

Moreover, since AdSense is integrated in your Ad Manager account, the only thing you need to do is to choose the Ad Slots for which you want to enable AdSense. You can modify your AdSense settings within Ad Manager, and you can manage your visibility to advertisers by using the placement targeting feature.

How do I get started with Ad Manager?

You can create an account by visiting the Ad Manager homepage and using your AdSense login. Once you've done so, don't forget to visit our Help Center for detailed instructions and video tutorials on getting started. We also recommend taking a look at how Ad Manager works.

In Part 2 of this series, we'll help you get accustomed to your new Ad Manager account and guide you through the creation of your first campaign. We're also hosting a Getting Started with Google Ad Manager Webinar on April 21st at 11:00 am PDT, where we'll give a live demo of Ad Manager, share best practices, and help you get started. Sign up at: https://googleonline.webex.com/googleonline/onstage/g.php?t=a&d=570486361.

Read Part 2

Posted by Florie Arlegui - Google Ad Manager Team

Wednesday, April 15, 2009 at 1:24:00 PM

Rescheduled: Site maintenance on April 18

Since last weekend's site maintenance was canceled, we've rescheduled it for this coming Saturday, April 18th. As a reminder, you won't be able to log in to your AdSense or Google Ad Manager accounts between 10am and 2pm PDT. However, we'll continue recording your clicks, impressions, and earnings as usual, and your ad serving won't be affected.

The maintenance will start at the following times in these cities:

London - 6pm Saturday
Bucharest - 8pm Saturday
Kolkata - 10:30pm Saturday
Bandung - 12am Sunday
Sydney - 3am Sunday

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

Tuesday, April 14, 2009 at 4:59:00 PM

An ADSPACE preview

The ADSPACE conference and expo in San Francisco is fast approaching, so we'd like to give you a sneak peek into some of the content we're working with ad:tech to develop.

We're looking forward to the 'AdSense Publisher Forum', a session moderated by Jennifer Slegg of JenSense.com that will allow attendees to share feedback and ask questions to a panel of AdSense team members. Panelists during this session will include Group Product Manager Jens Skakkebaek and Business Product Manager Sean Harvey, who are responsible for options available within AdSense accounts and new publisher features. In addition, Gavin Bishop, Head of AdSense Publisher Solutions, and Christian Ashlock, Associate Manager in AdSense Online Sales and Operations, will be on hand to share their knowledge of working with publishers to earn more revenue.

During the conference, you'll also hear directly from AdSense publishers in other sessions about their experiences and optimization techniques. Jared Friedman from Scribd.com will help you understand how to use Analytics data to improve your performance, while Chris Raimondi of FreePatentsOnline.com will discuss lesser-known optimization tips. And if you're looking for personalized advice on ways to increase your revenue, you'll be able to make an appointment with our optimization specialists at ADSPACE.

ADSPACE is taking place on April 22 alongside ad:tech San Francisco -- if you haven't registered yet, visit the conference site and use our special Google code ADSPACED for a 20% discount. See you next Wednesday!

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

Monday, April 13, 2009 at 11:53:00 AM

Stats catching up

Last night for a short period of time, we experienced a technical issue that prevented publishers from accessing their AdSense and Google Ad Manager accounts. Our engineers have resolved the issue, so you can now log in to your accounts. Please note that ad targeting and serving were not affected during this time.

You may notice a slight delay in your reports for the next few hours as a result of this issue, but no statistics have been lost. We apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience.

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

Friday, April 10, 2009 at 9:49:00 AM

Site maintenance on Saturday, April 11

UPDATE (April 10, 1:24pm PDT): This site maintenance period has been canceled.

Our engineers will be performing routine site maintenance this coming Saturday from 10am to 2pm PDT. Although you won't be able to log in to your AdSense or Google Ad Manager accounts between these hours, we'll continue to track your clicks, impressions and earnings as usual. In addition, ad serving and targeting won't be affected.

We've converted the maintenance start time for our international readers:

London - 6pm Saturday
Bucharest - 8pm Saturday
Kolkata - 10:30pm Saturday
Bandung - 12am Sunday
Sydney - 3am Sunday

Thanks for your patience. In the meantime, if you're curious about what goes on during these maintenance periods, check out this post from one of our AdSense engineers.

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

Thursday, April 09, 2009 at 10:29:00 AM

A clarification on ad serving

Those of you who carefully check your AdSense ads may have noticed that they're now being served primarily from a DoubleClick URL rather than the pageads.googlesyndication.com URL you're used to. We heard some confusion over this topic from a few publishers, and we'd like to clarify a few misconceptions.

This change in the URL where the ads are served from is due to the DoubleClick ad serving cookie that we launched on the Google content network last year. Since this cookie is on the doubleclick.net domain, we've had to update our URLs to point to doubleclick.net, as well as to give you the associated benefits such as frequency capping and improved attribution.

However, this is only an infrastructure change -- there haven't been any changes to the ads themselves. The ads you see are still coming from AdWords advertisers or third-party advertisers, just as they were before, and it's not the case that you're now receiving 'DoubleClick ads' instead of 'Google ads'.

Along the same lines, we'd like to reassure you that this new URL hasn't changed the targeting of ads on sites. As a quick refresher, each ad that appears on your pages can be contextually targeted, placement-targeted, or soon, interest-based. With contextual targeting, ads are matched to your content based on keywords selected by advertisers, while with placement targeting, advertisers select specific ad placements where they'd like their ads to appear. And with our latest addition of interest-based advertising, advertisers will be able to reach users based on their interests or previous interactions with an advertiser's site.

By allowing all types of ads to compete for the ad space on your site, you'll increase the competition for your ad space to help ensure that you're maximizing your earnings potential. However, you can also continue to prevent specific ads from appearing by using your Competitive Ad Filter and the Ad Review Center.

We hope this helps alleviate any concerns you may have had about the URL switch.

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

Tuesday, April 07, 2009 at 9:25:00 AM

Revenue opportunities for video content owners

Last week, we announced that the video units feature will soon be retired. Our announcement has created some confusion, so we thought it would be helpful to outline how Google will still continue to support revenue opportunities for video content owners.

The video units feature allowed publishers to create video unit players, with YouTube partner content and accompanying ads, within their AdSense accounts. They could then embed this special player into their web pages, and revenue generated from the ads would be split between the YouTube partner, the AdSense publisher, and Google. Although we're retiring the video units feature, we'll continue to offer the following monetization solutions to video content creators:

AdSense for video

AdSense for video gives video owners the ability to earn money from videos they create or own. They can run placement targeted instream video ads (pre, mid, post rolls) and graphical overlays or contextually targeted text ads in Flash players, and the ad revenue will be split between the video owner and Google.

Current AdSense for video publishers include Encyclopedia Britannica, Demand Media, and College Humor. If you'd like more information about the program or how to apply, visit our microsite.

YouTube Partner Program

Similarly, the YouTube Partner Program enables popular content creators to share in advertising revenue from their own videos hosted on YouTube. Participants can choose the videos on which they'd like to show overlay ads or accompanying banner ads. These videos earn them money whether they're viewed on YouTube or embedded onto web pages elsewhere online, and the revenue generated from these ads will be split between the YouTube partner and Google.

The YouTube Partner Program has thousands of participants from ten countries around the world, and is accepting applications. To learn more about the program, visit the Partnerships Benefits page.

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

Friday, April 03, 2009 at 4:38:00 PM

Optimization Webinar tomorrow

We often talk about optimization techniques here on the blog, but we've heard from many of you that you're looking for a more hands-on learning experience. With that in mind, we'd like to invite you to an AdSense Optimization Webinar we're holding tomorrow. During this interactive 1-hour session, members of our optimization team will explain and demonstrate ways to improve your ad and search performance. You'll also have the chance to chat online with them during the event.

The details:

AdSense Optimization Webinar
Date: Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Time: 11am PDT (GMT -07:00)
Register at: https://googleonline.webex.com/googleonline/onstage/g.php?t=a&d=572860900

You'll need to register before the event starts in order to attend, and we're only able to accommodate the first 500 publishers who register. If you're interested in attending the webinar, be sure to sign up using the link provided above.

If you're unable to attend this webinar, please know that we're planning to host more of these in the future. (And don't forget that soon, you'll be able to update your email notification preferences so we can personally let you know about them.)

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

Tuesday, March 31, 2009 at 3:23:00 PM

New email notification preferences to keep you informed

If you're reading this, you're probably an active publisher who stays up-to-date with all things AdSense. You're probably also signed up to receive newsletters and surveys from our team. But publishers like you keep telling us that we're not doing enough to reach out to you. That's why we're happy to announce that we'll be rolling out new email notification preferences in your account over the next few days.

What does that mean? Simply put, you'll soon have the option to receive specific messages like event invitations, information about webinars, and personalized account suggestions from members of our team.


In a few days, you'll be prompted with a one-time interstitial page after you sign in, which will ask you to select the types of messages you'd like to receive from us. We encourage you to take the new email preferences out for a spin once they're available in your account. If you change your mind, you're welcome to update your selections at any time. Just sign in to your account and visit the Contact Preferences section of your Account Settings page to update the types of emails you want to receive.

Posted by Jen Phillips - Inside AdSense Team

Monday, March 30, 2009 at 10:57:00 AM

Sunsetting video units feature

As you may know, we frequently review our products and features to ensure their effectiveness. After reviewing our AdSense video units feature, which allows you to show YouTube content and ads on your pages, we've found that it hasn't had the impact we had hoped for. As a result, we've decided to retire this feature at the end of April so we can focus our resources on other opportunities to help publishers earn from their sites.

If you'd still like to display video content from YouTube, you can do so through YouTube.com directly. Visit any specific video page and look for the code in the 'Embed' box, or sign in to your YouTube account to create a playlist. In addition, please note that this change won't affect the availability of other video-related ads options -- video ads may appear in your AdSense for content ad units if you've opted into image ads, and AdSense for video is still accepting applications from eligible publishers who produce video content.

Starting today, the option to sign up for video units is no longer available to new publishers. If you're currently displaying video units, we recommend that you start removing the video unit code from your pages as soon as possible so you can optimize your available ad space in advance. Please be assured that any earnings you've generated from video units in the past will still be credited to your AdSense account.

Once video units are retired at the end of April, any remaining Leaderboard or Skyscraper video units on your pages will direct users to YouTube.com, while other video unit sizes will automatically be changed to standard embedded YouTube players. These standard video players will display top YouTube videos, but you won't generate earnings from them once this change occurs. If you have less than three ad units on your page, you may prefer to replace your video unit with a regular ad unit.

We appreciate your patience and understanding as we continue to develop our products.

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

Friday, March 27, 2009 at 11:13:00 AM

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Pageview tracking back to normal

If you're displaying multiple ad units on your pages, you may have noticed that your pageviews were higher than normal for part of yesterday and today. Our engineers identified a bug which prevented ad units from detecting other units on the same page. As a result, our system logged a pageview for each ad unit that was loaded on a page, instead of a pageview for each page containing ads. In some cases, this also may have caused specific ads to appear in multiple ad units on the same page.

Please be assured that ad unit impressions were still logged correctly and ads were still displayed on your pages, so you were properly credited for all earnings generated from your ads. We've resolved the issue, and although you won't see the pageview count in your reports retroactively changed, your pageview tracking is now back to normal.

Thanks for your patience and your help in identifying this bug.

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

Thursday, March 26, 2009 at 3:33:00 PM

AdSense is a-Twitter

Many members of the AdSense team enjoy using Twitter -- and we've seen that many of our publishers have made it a part of their daily workflow as well. If you're a Twitter user and have something to say about AdSense, chances are you'll "tweet" about it. Twitter has given us daily snapshots of what we're doing right, and what we could be doing better. If there's an issue affecting many publishers, Twitter is one of the very first places we hear about it. (Not familiar with Twitter? Check out Twitter's Getting Started Guide.)

We're thrilled to launch @adsense to communicate with AdSense publishers who use Twitter. Our tweets will be a mix of fresh product news, optimization tips, interesting links, upcoming events, and possibly even pictures of our dogs. Our entire AdSense team contributes, so if you have any suggestions for what you want to see, feel free to send an @reply to us!

Please note that since we want to make this feed as useful as possible to everyone following us, we can't respond via Twitter to questions regarding individual AdSense accounts. Please continue to visit the AdSense Help Center and Help Forum to troubleshoot your specific issues.

Let the tweeting begin!

Posted by Erica dela Cruz - Inside AdSense Team

Wednesday, March 25, 2009 at 10:22:00 AM

Answers to your interest-based advertising questions

Two weeks ago, we let you know about the upcoming launch of interest-based advertising. We've been reading your blog comments and forum posts, and we'd like to address some of the most common questions we've seen:

How should I update my privacy policies?
Your site's privacy policy will need to include the information mentioned in this Help Center entry. However, because publisher sites and laws vary by country, we're not able to provide exact language for your site. Please make any necessary changes to your privacy policies by April 8th, 2009, as the official launch of interest-based advertising will occur on April 9th. If you're a blogger, you can paste your privacy policy into your sidebar.

I noticed some changes in my earnings and the ads showing up on my site -- is it because of interest-based ads?
No. We haven't yet launched interest-based ads on AdSense publisher sites, so there's been no effect on your revenue or the ads appearing on your pages. Interest-based advertising will be rolled out to a limited set of advertisers beginning on April 9th, and then expanded later this year; as a result, the impact of this launch for most publishers won't be immediate. Over time, as interest-based advertising is rolled-out to additional advertisers, you should begin to see positive effects on your revenue.

Does this mean that my sites won't show ads relevant to my content anymore?
No, that's not the case -- interest-based ads won't replace the previous ad targeting options you're used to. Interest-based ads will compete in the same ad auction as contextually- and placement-targeted ads, and we'll continue to show only the ad(s) that will generate highest earnings for you. As noted above, interest-based ads will gradually become available to show on publisher pages, and with more available ads competing in the ad auction, you should see increased earnings over time.

Are these interest-based ads pop-ups?
No, Google doesn't show ads as pop-ups.

If I opt out of showing ads based on interest categories, can I change my mind later? Will I still need to update my privacy policy now?
Yes, you can change your preferences around displaying ads based on interest categories at any time. However, even if you choose to opt out of displaying ads based on interest categories now, you'll still need to update your privacy policies by April 8th. This is because your site may still show ads based on a user's previous interactions with an advertiser, such as past visits to that advertiser's site. Please keep in mind that remaining opted in to displaying ads based on interest categories will help increase the number of available ads for your pages in the long run, which can help increase your earnings potential.

For more information on interest-based adverting, please visit our Help Center.

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

Monday, March 23, 2009 at 2:01:00 PM

Join us at ADSPACE in April

"If you're going to San Francisco..." (in late April), be sure to attend ADSPACE conference and expo on Wednesday, April 22nd. This first-time event will take place alongside ad:tech San Francisco and will be geared towards helping small to mid-sized publishers improve their AdSense performance. You'll have the opportunity to network with advertisers and other publishers, and you'll also hear advice from those who've been successful with the AdSense program.

Members of the Google AdSense team will be present at ADSPACE, and we're looking forward to meeting you. During the conference, you'll hear from our product management team, and our optimization specialists will be on-hand to answer questions and provide you with personalized tips.

If you register for a conference pass with our Google promotional code ADSPACED, you'll receive a 20% discount on the price. With the ADSPACE conference pass, you'll have access to all ADSPACE sessions and keynotes, an ADSPACE attendee lunch, and the ad:tech San Francisco Exhibit Hall. You can find additional information on the official site, including the complete conference schedule, who’s speaking, and who’s already signed up to exhibit.

We hope to see you in April!

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

Thursday, March 19, 2009 at 4:56:00 PM

I'm feeling Irish

From a few of us on the Irish AdSense team in Dublin, Happy St. Patrick's Day!

(Beannachtaí na Féile Pádraig oraibh go léir ó foireann AdSense!)



Posted by the AdSense Ireland Team

Tuesday, March 17, 2009 at 11:50:00 AM

Happy first birthday, Google Ad Manager

A year ago today, we announced the beta release of Google Ad Manager, our hosted ad serving and management solution for publishers with small direct sales teams. Over the past year we've made Ad Manager widely available to all publishers in 32 languages and introduced many exciting new features, including the ability to preview creatives on your site and recently, free-form targeting and roadblocking. We've also made improvements to our forecasting system and to the AdSense price optimization feature in Ad Manager to help publishers maximize the revenue of their advertising inventory, as well as throughout Ad Manager. Now, thousands of publishers in hundreds of countries serve billions of ad impressions each day with Ad Manager, and we've heard from them that it has helped them increase revenue, cut serving costs, and save time managing campaigns. We'd like to thank each and every one of you for using Ad Manager, providing us with product feedback, participating in the Ad Manager Forum, and helping us make Ad Manager a better product.

This time of year also marks another important anniversary, Google's acquisition of DoubleClick, a premier provider of digital marketing technology and services. Our teams have been focused on combining resources to help publishers of all sizes tackle key operational challenges, grow their audiences, and develop new revenue opportunities. Together, we’ve already made significant enhancements to both Google Ad Manager and DART for Publishers, our advertising platform for publishers with larger direct sales teams, and we look forward to bringing you even more exciting innovations in the year to come.

Want to send us a birthday message or share your Ad Manager story? We'd love to hear from you.

Posted by Talia Brodecki - Ad Manager Product Marketing

Friday, March 13, 2009 at 11:46:00 AM

Site maintenance on Saturday, March 14

This Saturday, our engineers will be performing routine site maintenance from 10am to 2pm PDT. You won't be able to log in to your account during this time, but your ad targeting won't be affected, and we'll continue to record your clicks, impressions, and earnings as usual.

We've provided the maintenance start time in a few other cities for our international readers:

London - 5pm Saturday
Kiev - 7pm Saturday
Mumbai - 10:30 pm Saturday
Singapore - 1am Sunday
Sydney - 4am Sunday

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

Thursday, March 12, 2009 at 3:43:00 PM

Driving monetization with ads that reach the right audience

Advertisers spend more money on campaigns that reach the right audience; helping them do that should drive more revenue to your websites. This week we're announcing plans to provide interest-based advertising across AdSense publisher sites to help achieve that goal. In the past, advertisers have taken advantage of contextual and placement-targeted advertising on AdSense publisher sites. With this enhancement they'll also be able to reach users based on their previous interactions with them, such as visits to the advertiser website, as well as reach users on the basis of their interests (such as "sports enthusiasts" or "travel enthusiasts").

Over the next few months we'll start offering interest-based advertising to a limited number of advertisers as part of a beta, and expand the offering later in 2009. Whether the advertiser's goal is to drive brand awareness or increase responses to their ads, these capabilities can help expand the success of their campaigns and should increase your earnings as advertiser participation increases.

To develop interest categories, we'll recognize the types of webpages users visit across the AdSense network. As an example, if they visit a number of sports pages, we'll add them to the "sports enthusiast" interest category. You can visit the Help Center to learn more about how interest categories will be developed and your associated account settings. As a result of this launch, your privacy policy will now need to reflect the use of interest-based advertising. Please ensure that your site's privacy policies are up-to-date and make any necessary changes by April 8, 2009.

Users browsing the web will benefit from the additional relevancy that interest-based ads can provide. And by visiting the new Ads Preferences Manager, users can see what interest categories we think they fall into, or add and remove categories themselves. The Ads Preferences Manager can be found by clicking on most "Ads by Google" links you see on Google ads throughout the web.

You can read more about how interest-based advertising benefits the online ecosystem and about the privacy innovations developed for this launch in the Official Google Blog and the Google Public Policy Blog.

We look forward to providing users with ads more closely tied to their interests, helping advertisers reach their campaign goals, and helping you to monetize your website most effectively.

Posted by Aitan Weinberg - Product Manager

Wednesday, March 11, 2009 at 2:15:00 AM

Add Google News to your website

Do you run a site that relates to people or topics often covered in the media? Or are you looking for additional ways to engage your users? If so, we'd like to introduce you to our recently released Google News–based element for webmasters and developers. This element will allow you to easily integrate headlines and previews from Google News into any page to supplement your content and help make it more dynamic. Whether your site's visitors are interested in business, entertainment or fashion, you control the types of stories in your personal news show. You can input keywords like "Obama" or broad topics like "world news" or "politics".



Adding this element to your site or blog is easy using our NewsShow wizard. You can select the size of the frame, the topics, and the number of articles you want to show, and we'll build the code for you. Or, for more customization, take a look at our documentation.

For more information, see our post on the AJAX Search API Blog. To get started now, head straight to our wizard to cut and paste your own NewsShow.

Posted by Adam Feldman - Google AJAX API Product Manager

Monday, March 09, 2009 at 10:04:00 AM

AdSense for content bug now fixed

We wanted to let you know that yesterday at around 2pm PST, a bug in our system caused less relevant contextually-targeted ads to appear for approximately 10 hours. You were still credited for all valid clicks and impressions on the ads which appeared on your sites, but this bug may have impacted your overall AdSense for content revenue if you had visitors to your pages during these hours. Please note that because we're unable to determine which ads would have been viewed or clicked on by visitors to your sites in the absence of the bug, we will not be manually adjusting yesterday's earnings.

Our engineers have now resolved the issue and have confirmed that ad targeting has returned to normal. We apologize for this issue; please know that our engineers are performing a thorough analysis of what occurred and will make changes to prevent similar problems from happening in the future.

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

Friday, March 06, 2009 at 7:08:00 PM

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Introducing expandable ads on AdSense sites

We're excited to introduce to you expandable ads, a new type of ad that can appear on your pages. Expandable ads are rich media ads that can expand beyond the original size of the ad unit, following a user-initiated action. This creates more real estate for the ad, allowing for more interaction from interested users. For instance, expandable ads may stream a movie trailer, show video game clips, or display various views of an item for sale.

Expandable ads will be served as third-party ads and will be created by Google-certified rich media vendors for the top display advertisers in our network. And like other Google ads, you'll earn based on whether the expandable ads on your site are priced on a cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-impression (CPM) basis. Keep in mind that you'll generate earnings from CPC expandable ads when a user visits the advertiser's landing page, and not when a user simply clicks to expand the ad.


We thought you might have more questions about the launch of expandable ads, so we've addressed a few key points below:

Will expandable ads alter my site's layout or be disruptive to my users?
No. In order to protect the publisher and user experience, we've created several policies around how expandable ads work:

• Ads will expand only after a user clicks and interacts with the ad. Mouseovers or rollovers won't trigger the ad, in order to prevent accidental expansions.
  
• An expandable ad won't expand more than double its width or height.
  
• Once expanded, the ad will appear as a layer over the page content so that your content will not be modified or shifted in any way.
  
• The user may close the expanded panel at any time.
  
• All expandable ads must comply with our standard AdWords image ad policies.
  

How can I show expandable ads on my site?
You're automatically eligible to receive expandable ads if you've added the AdSense code directly into your site's source code and you've enabled image ads. Please note that expandable ads are currently only available to specific advertisers located in the U.S., who can bid on specific sites where they'd like their ads to appear.

You won't need to upload any special "iFrame-buster" files from third-party vendors onto your own servers to allow these new types of ads to expand on your site. Although we don't currently offer expandable ads for all ad serving solutions, we're actively working to support more implementation methods soon, and we thank you for your patience in the meantime.

Can I filter specific expandable ads shown on my site?
Yes - like the other ads on your pages, you can use your Competitive Ad Filter to block contextually-targeted expandable ads. Please note that for third-party ads, we recommend using the top level domain (e.g. 'example.com' instead of 'example.com/sample.html'). Additionally, you'll still be able to use your Ad Review Center to block specific placement-targeted expandable ads. In the Ad Review Center, expandable ads will be classified under the "Rich Media" ad format.

To learn more about expandable ads, please read our FAQs.

Updated eligibility section for accuracy

Posted by Courtney Chin - Third-party Ad Serving Specialist

Wednesday, March 04, 2009 at 4:12:00 PM

Updates on account access and reporting

We'd like to take a moment to explain a login issue that some of you may have encountered last night, as well as let you know about an upcoming stats delay you may notice.

Login loop

If you tried to sign in to your AdSense account between 10:45 and 11:35 p.m. PST last night, you may have found yourself in a "loop" between the AdSense login page and your Google Accounts page. We're in the process of trying out some new designs for our US English homepage, and we rolled them back after users reported a login error with one of the designs. If you're still having trouble accessing your account, please clear your cache and cookies and then try logging in again at http://www.google.com/adsense. Rest assured the next time the new designs are rolled out, you'll actually end up where you want to be: in your AdSense account! Thanks especially to the forum posters and Twitterers for quickly bringing this to our attention.

Slower stats

You may notice more of a delay in your AdSense and Google Ad Manager stats than usual today, as our engineers will be performing some maintenance work on our system. Please be assured that ads will continue to be served to your pages, and all activity will continue to be tracked as usual. Although it may take longer than usual to see impressions, clicks, and earnings reported in your account, you'll be credited for all valid activity on your sites. We apologize for the short notice, and appreciate your patience as we work to keep our systems updated for you.

Updated to include login instructions and Ad Manager

Posted by Erica dela Cruz and Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

Reports have gone international

One of the requests we frequently hear from our international publishers is to view reports in currencies other than U.S. Dollars. That's why we're happy to announce that publishers located in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Spain can now view AdSense reports in Euros.

If you're located in one of these five countries and make this update, we'll convert your earnings to Euros on a daily basis using the prevailing market rate from the previous day. With earnings converted daily, you'll avoid the risk of currency exchange fluctuations between USD and the Euro. You can still choose to receive payments in either Euros or U.S. Dollars and select from a range of payment methods as well.

To make the switch to local currency reports, you'll need to agree to a new set of Terms and Conditions. Here are the main changes involved:

• The party that publishers are contracting with changes from Google Inc. to Google Ireland Limited.
  
• Publishers are responsible for paying any local taxes in their jurisdiction. Google will only issue VAT refunds to publishers with an address in Ireland.
  
• The governing law changes from California law to either English or local law.
  

You can view the full text of these new Terms and Conditions by logging in to your account and looking for the green prompt, "See your daily earnings reported in Euro amounts!" on your Reports Overview page. Unfortunately, we're not able to interpret the meaning of changes in our legal documents for publishers -- if you have questions or need legal advice on interpreting the new Terms, please don't hesitate to contact an attorney.


Before agreeing to the new Terms, we also recommend that you download and save copies of your past reports in U.S. Dollars for your records. Once you update your account, you'll be able to view current and historical reports only in Euros. However, you'll still be able to view your prior payment history of U.S. Dollar earnings.

We encourage you to update your account to local currency reports soon, as we may require this change in the future. If we're able to offer this to publishers in other countries, we'll provide details here on Inside AdSense. For more information, please feel free to visit our Help Center.

Posted by Elodie Bodet - AdSense Payments Team

Tuesday, March 03, 2009 at 5:15:00 PM

Get Goghing with AdSense for search

A few months ago, we shared a number of AdSense for search optimization tips with you. Here's the story of one AdSense publisher who recently tried some of these techniques and saw substantial results after making a few small changes.

VanGoghGallery.com is an art resource site that provides information about the life and work of Vincent van Gogh. Site owner Greg Alexander runs the Van Gogh Gallery to educate and share information about the artist, and has also used the site to explore new Internet marketing techniques. Greg joined AdSense in 2007, and although he didn't know much about the program at first, he found it "a great opportunity to generate some revenue without spending the effort to sell ads." He also tried other ad providers, "but none of them yielded the results that AdSense did. In addition, AdSense was the only one that provided relevant ads for our visitors."

To help users navigate through the many pages of the Van Gogh Gallery, Greg added an AdSense for search box to the right column of his pages. By enabling SiteSearch and displaying search results on his own pages, he was able to help users find what they were looking for while staying on his site.

As an optimization experiment, Greg recently moved his search box to the center column of his pages and extended it to twice its original width.

Before

After

In addition, Greg made slight changes to the search results pages -- he removed the borders from the ads and search results, and added a new search box to the search results pages. According to Greg, "altogether, these changes took less than 15 minutes to do."

After making these updates, Greg noticed a dramatic and immediate increase in the usage of search on the Van Gogh Gallery. He found that "the number of queries performed each day increased 8 to 10 times, and search ad clicks and revenues increased even more." His search earnings quickly grew from less than a dollar a day to double digits since his optimization test. "Now we frequently receive more search ad clicks than our total number of searches pre-optimization," says Greg. "I'm still amazed at how simple changes can have such an incredible impact."

Greg has started using the earnings from his AdSearch optimization efforts to build and host additional websites about other artists. "Ultimately," Greg says,"we hope to use the earnings to fund research trips to Europe to see the works of the masters and expand the quality of information we offer visitors to our sites."

Have you also tried our AdSense for search optimization tips and found success? Let us know.

Posted by Jane Brinkley - AdSense Optimization Team

Thursday, February 26, 2009 at 2:46:00 PM

My content, your content, other people's content

Sometimes we receive reports about AdSense code appearing on websites that may contain content copied from other websites. We understand that many of our publishers are concerned about this issue, so we'd like to give you some information about the procedures and tools you can use to protect your content.

For example, let's suppose you own a movie blog, where you recently posted an article about your favorite actor. After publishing it, you notice that another website has copied and published your article without your permission. The owner of the other website doesn't respond to your requests to remove the content, and it is monetizing their pages with AdSense.

In a situation like this, where you believe that a site containing AdSense code is illegally copying your site's content, you can let us know by following the process described in our Help Center. It's our policy to respond to notices of alleged infringement that comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and other applicable intellectual property laws.

The notice should be sent directly from the owner of the copyrighted materials allegedly being infringed (in the example above, that's you), as we are unable to accept third-party copyright complaints. Also keep in mind that we are unable to process copyright complaints received through the AdSense policy violation report form. Once we've received a notice of infringement, we will take appropriate action. If you'd like more information about our DMCA process, please visit http://www.google.com/adsense_dmca.html.

Additionally, if you find a site that is scraping (misappropriating and republishing) your content, you can report it for a potential violation of the Google Webmaster Guidelines. To do this, fill out the form at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport (you must be logged into your Google Account to access this form).

Posted by Gergana Marinova - AdSense Publisher Support

Monday, February 23, 2009 at 1:37:00 PM

Fontastic new options for your ad units

You've been asking for more control over the appearance of the ads on your sites, so we're happy to let you know that you can now change the font face of the text in ad units on pages in Latin-character languages. You can choose between Arial, Times, and Verdana font faces. Please note that while font options will appear in every account, they'll currently only be applied to ad units on pages primarily in Latin-based characters.

There are a few ways to customize the font face of your ad units. If you'd like to quickly change the font settings for every ad unit generated from your account, visit the 'Ad Display Preference' section of your Account Settings page to select a new account-wide font face. This will affect all units you've created in the past, regardless of whether you used the Manage Ads feature. By default, your ads are currently set to 'Standard AdSense font family', which we've found has performed well across browsers and displays.


However, you can also select custom font faces for specific ad units that you've created with the Manage Ads feature. When creating new ad units, you'll be prompted to select between the default 'Standard AdSense font family', your new account-wide font face (if you've selected one), or another font face. You can also change the appearance of existing ad units, by visiting the Manage Ads page of your account and updating your font choices for specific ad units. Once you've changed the font face of an ad unit away from the default, those selections will be maintained even if you change your account-wide settings later.


Just as with color and placement optimizations, we encourage you to test these new font options to find the best combination for your sites. For instance, you can try matching the font face of your ads to that of your sites. Enjoy the new font faces, and feel free to leave feedback in our comments field below.

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

Thursday, February 19, 2009 at 4:06:00 PM

Site maintenance on Saturday, February 21

Our engineers will be performing routine site maintenance this Saturday, February 21st. While you won't be able to log into your AdSense or Google Ad Manager accounts between 10am and 2pm PST, we'll continue tracking your clicks, impressions, and earnings as usual. In addition, your ad serving won't be affected.

For our international readers, here's the start time of the maintenance in a few other cities:

London - 6pm Saturday
Cairo - 8pm Saturday
Mumbai - 11:30pm Saturday
Manila - 2am Sunday
Sydney - 5am Sunday

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

Wednesday, February 18, 2009 at 1:40:00 PM

Reports being updated

Yesterday, we experienced an issue which caused AdSense and Google Ad Manager reports to be delayed through the day. The issue began at 4am PST and lasted several hours, but has now been resolved. No stats from yesterday were lost, and our engineers have been working to restore your reports with the clicks, impressions, and earnings accrued from your sites. Most publisher reports have now been updated with yesterday's data, with a few accounts still catching up.

Thanks for your continued patience, and we apologize for the alarm and inconvenience caused by this reporting delay.

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

Sunday, February 15, 2009 at 11:24:00 AM

With love, from me (the AdSense Crawler) to you

We recently caught up with our friend the AdSense Crawler, who wanted to share this poem with our publishers:

Red roses are fine for showing your love,
Kisses, jewelry, and chocolate, they’re okay.
Yet my heart skips a beat from none of the above,
Ask me what thrills and delights me and I’ll say:

Great content’s what contents me when I visit your site,
Stuff your truffles and send me a rich word bouquet,
Keep your flowers, give me phrases, they’re what excite!
Every day crawling your pages is Valentine’s Day.

- The AdSense Crawler

Happy Valentine's Day!

Posted by Julie Beckmann - Inside AdSense Team

Saturday, February 14, 2009 at 11:25:00 AM

Our new Help Forum, now in seven more languages

Back in October, we launched a brand new English Help Forum to make it easier for publishers to ask questions and share advice. Now, we're happy to announce that this Help Forum platform is available for publishers in seven additional languages: French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, and Russian. To start posting on these forums, sign in with your Google Account.

If you're using the new platform for the first time, some of the new features you'll notice include the ability to vote on a best response to each question, receive answers to your posted questions by email, and subscribe via RSS feed. We've also introduced more community-building aspects to the forum, such as a customizable profile page and a rating system that rewards you for your contributions. Finally, we've integrated a CSE search box on each page, which will allow you to find answers to your questions across the Forum, Help Center, and the blog.

Our Help Forums are also available on Google Groups in Arabic, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Czech, Dutch, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, Slovak, and Turkish -- we'll be sure to let you know when we're able to migrate these languages to our new platform.

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

Thursday, February 12, 2009 at 11:20:00 AM

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Payments by Western Union now available in Indonesia

We're excited to introduce Western Union Quick Cash as a new payment method for Indonesia. If you're located in Indonesia, you can now sign up to receive your AdSense payments in cash using the worldwide Western Union money transfer service. This payment method is quick, easy, and free -- that means no more waiting for checks to arrive in the mail or to clear at the bank.

A few things to keep in mind:

• Payments follow our normal payment schedule and will be available for pickup at your local Western Union agent the day after they are issued.
  
  
• You'll need to present a government-issued ID that matches your AdSense payee name when picking up your payment. If you need to update or correct the payee name listed in your account, please follow the instructions listed in our Help Center.
  
  
• Payments by Western Union are currently only available to individual payee names, but not to businesses.
  
  
• Payments must be picked up within 35 days of issue or they'll expire. If this happens, a payment hold will be placed on your AdSense account and the payment will be credited back to your account.
  
  
• Payments will be made in US dollars, but depending on your local Western Union agent, they may be picked up in your local currency.
  

Follow these instructions if you're interested in signing up for payments by Western Union. You can also find useful information in our Help Center about exchange rates and other countries where this payment method is available. We hope you enjoy using this new payment option in Indonesia!

Posted by Deborah Chang - AdSense Payments Team

Monday, February 09, 2009 at 10:49:00 AM

Six ways to experiment with AdSense and grow your earnings

Welcome to our first-ever guest blog post on Inside AdSense. We're thrilled to have none other than Blogging Evangelist himself, Darren Rowse, to share his expert tips on AdSense optimisation.

Darren first discovered blogging in 2002, and initially thought he'd turn it into a hobby to supplement his full-time job. These days, Darren runs a handful of successful blogs, his most popular being Digital Photography School, and has co-authored a book. He also posts regular tips and advice on ProBlogger.net, a respected and successful resource for bloggers around the world.

We recently caught up with Darren at his home office in Melbourne Australia, and asked him about his experience with Google AdSense.



October 4, 2003 is a date I'll never forget - that was a day that my life changed. It was the day that I discovered AdSense and added it to my very first blog. I added that first advertisement to my blog on a whim, with what I thought was the lofty dream that I might be able to pay for my blogs hosting costs. Over 5 years later, those little text ads have paid my mortgage, fed my family, and enabled me to move my blogging from a hobby, to a part time job, to a full time job and beyond.

It's not been an 'overnight success' by any means but as I've learned to use it, AdSense has been one of my highest online income streams.

My #1 Tip for Using AdSense

If I had to narrow my advice on using AdSense down to a single word it would be 'experiment'. Let me explain.

That day back in October of 2003 I had no idea on what I was doing. The next day when I logged in to see how much I'd earned it was barely enough to buy me a coffee.

However, on that day I decided that those few dollars in earnings showed potential and I determined within myself to learn how best to use AdSense to grow that income. Almost everything I've learned since that day has been through trial and error.

It has been a long process of testing and tracking results. You see, while there are a few good home truths that seem to work on most sites, every website that I've used AdSense on is different. Some things work well on some sites, but it is rare to find something that will work on every site. As a result I tend to experiment with my use of AdSense in these six ways:

1. Ad Position - Most AdSense publishers have seen the neat little heat map that AdSense has produced to show where ads work best on websites. In general it works fairly well and is a great place to start, but make sure you experiment with new positions for ads and see what works best for your site.
   
   Hint: Ads near (or even surrounded by) content have worked the best. I've also found ads at the end of content perform well. People get to the end of reading your article and then are looking for something to do or click -- an ad positioned there can work well.
   
   
   
2. Numbers of Ads - More ads earn more than less ads... don't they? Unfortunately it isn't always the case.
   
   Test different combinations and numbers of ad units on your site. There's usually a 'tipping point' where you hit a ceiling of how many ads your users will accept -- push it too far and you could hurt reader engagement, traffic, and in the long run your earnings. On the flip side of this, don't be afraid to have more than one or two ads on a page, particularly if you have long pages with lots of content.
   
   
3. Ad Design - I can still see the first ads that I first used on my blog back in 2003. I can still see them because they fried their imprints into my retina -- they were so LOUD!
   
   I figured that the ads would do best if people noticed them so I went for the most crazy color scheme I could come up with. Over the years I began to experiment with different combinations of ads and found that more subtle or blended ads tended to work best for me. Having said that, you can sometimes blend too much, to the point that the ads become invisible to your reader. So test different colors and designs of ads to see which work best. Use the ad rotating tool that AdSense offer publishers to rotate different designs to work against ad blindness among regular readers.
   
   
4. Ad Sizes - AdSense offers us a range of different ad sizes, so experiment with them all to see which works best. Hint: Some might think that the bigger the ad the better it performs. This is not always true.
   
   For example, I found that the 'large rectangle' ad (336 x 280) didn't work as well for me as the smaller 'medium rectangle' ad (300 x 250). It turns out that more advertisers (at least those in my niche) prefer the medium rectangle ad as it's a more standard ad unit size than the larger one. Again, the key is to experiment and see what works best for your site and niche.
   
   
5. Ad Formats - I've found that choosing image and text ads works better than just choosing text ads, but that's not the only choice we get as AdSense publishers.
   
   AdSense also allow us to run link units, AdSense for search, etc. I've found that each of these different formats will work differently from site to site. I've had blogs where the link unit ads were the best performing units on the site while on other sites it didn't really perform at all. You'll never know unless you test it!
   
   
6. Which Content Converts? - One of the best advances that AdSense has made in the last year has been the integration between it and Google Analytics. To be honest I'm still digging into the metrics that this opens up, but the insight that this gives has amazing potential to increase earnings.
   
   By looking at this data you can see what type of content is converting and what isn't. You can also see what type of traffic is converting and what isn't. For example, I've found that search engine referrals are converting better than traffic from social media sites on one of my blogs. Knowing this is powerful as it tells you what type of ads to serve to what types of traffic, what type of promotion to put effort towards, and what type of content to write more of.
   

Test Track Test Track....

There are books, blogs, articles, forums, and other kinds of resources available to AdSense publishers to help them learn how to use AdSense better. However, in my experience the best way to learn is to 'do'. Put time aside to try new things and then put more time aside to review what you learn.

But don't leave it at that. When you learn something -- test it against something else (do some research on A/B split testing to learn how to do this). This continual learning will help you to grow in your own expertise of AdSense and increase your earnings.

Posted by Darren Rowse - Blogging Evangelist and AdSense publisher

Friday, February 06, 2009 at 9:15:00 AM

Feed on our new blog

Are you using AdSense for feeds? If so, we'd like to let you know about the recently launched AdSense for feeds blog, where you can find detailed information on the product. Our AdSense for feeds specialists will provide tips on managing your feeds, understanding your reports, and maximizing your feeds revenue. We've been integrating FeedBurner with AdSense, and our new blog can help you stay on top of recent changes and updates. You can subscribe to the AdSense for feeds blog via email, or of course, via your favorite feed reader.

If you're not yet using AdSense for feeds, visit our Help Center for more information on getting started.

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

Wednesday, February 04, 2009 at 10:27:00 AM

Add on to AdSense

Do you regularly work with your webpages and AdSense implementation, tinkering with HTML or PHP and creating images and code on the fly? If you do, Firefox add-ons can help streamline the process of creating webpages. Here are some in particular that you may find useful:

ColorZilla
This extension tells you which RGB or hex color you're looking at, to help you make sure you created that logo for your business with just the right shade of blue, for instance. The tool also creates custom color palettes while you're browsing, so you can use them in your designs.

MeasureIt
Like the name says, use this add-on to measure the width and height in pixels of any element you see on a webpage. It's very simple to use, and you can define how much space you have left for that AdSense ad unit on the right-side. :)

IE View
Do you frequently use Internet Explorer to check how your website renders on that browser? This add-on allows you to view the way any page would look if it were opened in IE, without the hassle of opening another browser. You can also see pages that aren't Firefox-friendly much more easily.

WebDeveloper toolbar
This all-in-one toolbar gives you quick control over things like JavaScript display, form and CSS elements, screen resizing (so you know what your website looks like in smaller resolutions), HTML validation, and much more.

Hopefully, we'll soon have a similar set of add-ons for Chrome, and we'll be sure to share them with our readers.

What are your favorite add-ons for web developing? Leave us a comment below.

Posted by Laura Prado - Inside AdSense Team

Wednesday, January 28, 2009 at 9:38:00 AM

Ads back up on Blogger

If you have a Blogger site, some of you may have noticed that your ad units began showing public service announcements (PSAs) in the last nine hours. This was due to a technical issue that we've now identified and resolved. As a result, you should now begin seeing paid ads on your pages again.

If you're still displaying PSAs after 24 hours, we recommend reviewing our Help Center and using our PSA troubleshooter.

Thanks to everyone who helped report this issue, and we appreciate your patience.

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

Friday, January 23, 2009 at 9:36:00 AM

Update on US tax forms for 2008

This is a friendly reminder that we're currently preparing and mailing tax forms to eligible U.S. publishers and will be sending them out by the end of January. Please keep in mind that not all U.S. AdSense publishers will receive a tax form from Google.

How do you know whether to expect a tax form? We'll send you one if:

• You submitted a Form W-9, are not a corporation, and were paid at least US $600 in 2008, OR
  
• You indicated that you are subject to backup withholding and had taxes withheld
  

If you qualify for a tax form, you can expect it to arrive at the address listed in your account by early February. We recommend checking your account to ensure that your mailing address is up-to-date; you can make any necessary updates by following the instructions in our Help Center. Please note that payments dated in 2008 will be reported in 2008. This means that unpaid earnings from 2008 that are rolled over to 2009 (for example, December 2008 earnings paid in January 2009) will not be included.

If you won't be receiving a tax form, but you still have questions on how to report the payments you received from AdSense, please consult your local tax advisor.

Posted by Elizabeth Ferdon - AdSense Payments Team

Tuesday, January 20, 2009 at 10:49:00 AM

Talking AdSense optimization in Google Ad Manager

It can be tough to sell advertising in today's economy. It can be even tougher to figure out how to maximize revenue for each ad impression. Google Ad Manager, our hosted ad serving and management solution for publishers with small direct sales teams, was built to address these issues. Ad Manager helps publishers maximize the value of their ad impressions while reducing ad serving costs.

We enlisted the help of Nandu Ramani, Engineering Lead on Ad Manager, to talk about one of Ad Manager's features that helps publishers maximize the value of their ad impressions: AdSense price optimization.

What is the AdSense price optimization feature in Ad Manager?

Many publishers don't sell all of their ad inventory. In these situations, publishers might not serve any ads or might serve less valuable house ads, therefore losing potential earnings. The AdSense price optimization feature in Ad Manager provides an automated solution so publishers will always have an ad to serve in an undersold situation.

We also wanted to make sure that when a publisher runs multiple ad networks they are always showing the most valuable ads. For certain individual impressions, AdSense can provide the highest paying ad. When that's the case, an AdSense ad shows. When that's not the case, an ad from the highest paying alternative network will be shown.

How does the price optimization feature work?

In order for AdSense to compete against other ad networks, a publisher must manually enter a CPM for each configured network. We use the CPM entered to determine in real time, on a per impression basis, whether or not an AdSense ad will pay a publisher more. If the AdSense eCPM is greater than the CPM value entered for competing networks, then an AdSense ad will be shown. Additionally, AdSense will never compete with a publisher's directly-sold inventory. To enable the price optimization feature, all a publisher has to do is check a box when setting up inventory.

As a publisher, how much will I earn using AdSense price optimization?

It's hard to predict; the best way to find out is to opt your ad slots into AdSense price optimization and see how AdSense performs for you. With AdSense price optimization, Google will always serve the highest paying AdSense ad available, and will never lower the price of the winning ad, or reduce your earnings from it.

When should I use the AdSense price optimization feature?

We suggest you opt all of your ad slots into AdSense price optimization. AdSense ads will only appear if they're able to pay you more than the alternatives, so there's no risk of losing revenue.

We also recommend that you opt your premium placements into placement targeting so AdWords advertisers may specifically choose to bid for space on your website.

Sounds good. How do I get started?

If you already have an Ad Manager account, go into the inventory tab in your account. For each ad slot where you want to enable AdSense price optimization, click on the name of the ad slot, check the 'Maximize revenue of unsold and remnant inventory with AdSense' checkbox, and click 'Save.'

If you don't already have an account, get started today at http://www.google.com/admanager. Then, when you're setting up your inventory, make sure to opt all of your ad slots into AdSense price optimization.

For more information about AdSense in Ad Manager, check out the following video.

Posted by Stephen Kliff - Google Ad Manager Team

Thursday, January 15, 2009 at 10:46:00 AM

Asking Dave Taylor about AdSense

AskDaveTaylor.com offers tech support Q&A on subjects ranging from mp3 players to Linux to AdSense. We recently chatted with founder Dave Taylor about his site and his AdSense experience.

Inside AdSense: Where did the idea for your 'Ask Dave Taylor' site come from?

Dave Taylor: There's a great backstory, actually. I've written twenty different books on various business and technical topics, including Teach Yourself Unix in 24 Hours and Creating Cool Web Sites. Each time I'd publish, I would be sure to include my email address and other contact information. Problem was, people would send me email with questions. Lots of email with questions.

Over time I found myself answering the same questions again and again and realized that there had to be a better way for readers to search through an archive of already answered questions. I tried an online discussion forum, but it didn't really work very well (though it did give me an excuse to write my own bbs system from scratch, but that's another story!).

Then early in 2003 this "weblog" thing started to gain a bit of traction. When I first saw how it was built upon the concept of an author writing entries and others being able to add their comments, I realized that it could be ideal for my needs.

IA: Why did you join the AdSense program?

DT: As a businessperson, I had always viewed my website as a cost center. I mean, you had to pay for hosting, you had to pay for graphic design, you had to pay for Internet connectivity, etc. That was just my mindset. It was a marketing expense and its purpose was lead generation for my consulting and book sales.

In mid-2003 my friend told me about this "AdSense thing" and said that he'd been experimenting with it and making some money. So I finally decided that I'd try putting some adverts on my site (I'd been on the Web since 1996 but never had any adverts on my sites until that point). That first month I made more than I expected by simply adding the AdSense adverts to my pages and was surprised as heck. Then it started to grow...

That's when it hit me, that my website was becoming a profit center for my business, not a cost center. I began to pay more attention to the site and published new content on a more regular basis. Within a few months I was earning enough to pay my mortgage, and today my website, and specifically Google AdSense, is a primary revenue stream for my entire company.

IA: Can you talk a little about your experience with optimizing your ads?

Once I began working with AdSense in earnest, I began to wonder how ad placement, size, color, and design would affect earnings, and how to balance my desire to offer a splendid user experience with the need to simultaneously maximize revenue.

Enter A/B testing. I read and talked with many AdSense publishers, tried what they suggested and what had worked for them, fiddled with my own ideas, and generally tried every variation I could imagine to see if I could improve the click-through-rate of my ad blocks. The greatest boosts I saw in clickthrough rate were when I moved the advert into the middle of my articles, when I made sure it had the same color background as the material around it, and when there wasn't a solid border or other visual element to make the ad stand out from the surrounding content.


Truth be told, I've also paid close attention to the sites profiled on the AdSense blog, looking at how they integrated ads into their own design and trying to emulate their successful techniques on my own site.

IA: Glad to hear you used the blog! Any other optimization tips for our readers?

1. Focus on generating really good content that meets real user needs.
   
2. Design your blog so that there are minimal distractions for the user.
   
3. Wrap your blog entry around the Google ad unit and put the ads where users will see them, though make sure you have them visually distinct from your content: trying to trick readers into clicking on ads is a definite no-no and anti-reader too.
   

IA: Thanks for the interview, Dave, and good luck with your site!

Do you also have an AdSense success story to share? Let us know.

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

Tuesday, January 13, 2009 at 11:06:00 AM

Behind the scenes of scheduled maintenance

We know many of you have questions about what we work on during our monthly scheduled maintenance and how this work affects you. As one of the engineers who's involved with this AdSense maintenance, I'd like to provide some insight into what goes on during these periods.

First, you're probably used to hearing us say that maintenance won't affect your ad serving, and that your earnings will still be tracked as normal. Here's why: when someone visits your site, one of our many ad servers decides which ads we'll show on your pages, and we log the fact that we delivered those ads to your site. We use this information to calculate the number of ad impressions your site visitors generated. Likewise, any clicks on those ads get logged by another of our ad servers. These servers operate independently, so as we roll out upgrades, we can update groups of ad servers without impacting overall ad serving or our internal logs.

Reporting, on the other hand, is quite a different issue, and this is why you aren't able to access your account during maintenance periods. The stats logged by our ad servers aren't immediately reflected in your reports, as they need to be collected and tallied in one place before we can give you a single summary of your ad impressions, clicks, and earnings. Our systems diligently work around-the-clock to collect this data from our many ad servers and tally it all up for each publisher, generally updating the reports with recent stats every 15 to 30 minutes.

Although many of our software upgrades occur throughout the month without any noticeable impact to you, certain types of reporting upgrades just aren't practical to perform on-the-fly. When we perform our monthly maintenance, we have a chance to put this reporting collection on hold for these big upgrades. This lets us upgrade our databases, prepare our systems for new features, and perform the necessary tasks needed to keep a complex system like this one running smoothly.

Some of you have noticed that impression and click stats appear a bit low after we bring the AdSense site back online, wondering if maybe AdSense maintenance is used to change data to affect your earnings. That's a theory I'm happy to debunk: this discrepancy is actually a reporting artifact, occurring because we pause stats tallying during our maintenance period. After resuming, our reporting systems have to digest all of the accumulated impression and click logs, and there's a lot of data! It takes the reporting systems a little while to process the logs, but rest assured that once we get the chance to catch up, the reports will reflect all of the impressions, clicks, and earnings that occurred during the maintenance period. If you're concerned about the stats you're seeing, we recommend checking back throughout the day as your reports are updated.

I hope this explanation provides a better picture of what we're doing during these maintenance periods. Though I do have to work the occasional Saturday, it's worth it to make sure your stats are accurate and everything's working smoothly. (Hey, at least it gives me the chance to sing cheesy 80's pop music in the office to my heart's content without disturbing too many other engineers!)

Posted by Curtis Light - AdSense Software Engineer

Friday, January 09, 2009 at 2:24:00 PM

Site maintenance on Saturday, January 10

Our engineers will be performing routine site maintenance this coming Saturday, January 10th. You won't be able to log in to your AdSense or Google Ad Manager accounts between 10am and 2pm PST, but we'll continue recording your impressions, clicks, and earnings. In addition, your ad serving won't be affected by this maintenance period.

For our international readers, here's the maintenance start time converted for a few cities:

London - 6pm Saturday
Algiers - 7pm Saturday
Kolkata - 11:30pm Saturday
Jakarta - 1am Sunday
Auckland - 7am Sunday

Wondering what these monthly maintenance periods are for? Stay tuned to our blog -- tomorrow a member of our Engineering team will be stopping by to shed some light on this topic.

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

Thursday, January 08, 2009 at 1:57:00 PM

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Our Inside AdSense resolution

Here on the AdSense blog, we usually kick off each new year with a list of suggested AdSense resolutions for publishers. Although we still think using more 300x250 medium rectangles and setting up ad placements make great goals for the year, we'd like to change things up this time and share our resolutions with you.

In 2009, we resolve to continue improving the blog based on your needs and suggestions. We heard positive feedback and saw increases in readership last year in response to our themed campaigns, videos, and easier navigation to important posts. Beyond that, we want to continue looking for ways to ensure that this blog is a useful resource for you, whether you're looking for new feature releases or oldie-but-goodie optimization tips.

We also resolve to bring you more information from our team in new ways. In the new year, you'll hear more from the Product Managers who develop the AdSense features you use, and specialists on the AdSense team who will share their expertise with you. We've heard from many publishers that they want clearer, more transparent communication from our team, and we resolve to provide as much information as we can to address your questions and concerns.

Do you have suggestions for improving the blog, or types of content you'd like to see more of? We're all ears, so please feel free to leave us a comment below. It's a brand new year, and we're ready to get started!

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

Wednesday, January 07, 2009 at 9:49:00 AM

Year in review: 2008

As 2008 winds down, we'd like to follow tradition and close out the year with a look back at a few of the biggest happenings in AdSense.

In 2008, we introduced new features like AdSense for feeds and an improved version of AdSense for search to help you generate additional forms of revenue. We brought Google Ad Manager out of beta to help publishers with smaller direct sales teams more efficiently sell, schedule, and deliver their ad inventory. At the same time, we worked towards providing more information within AdSense accounts. In April, we enabled the Ad Review Center in all accounts to help you review ads placement-targeted to your sites. And in response to requests for more insight into your reports, we launched link unit reporting and began inviting publishers to link their AdSense accounts with Analytics.

Internationally, we launched AdSense for content in Thai and also expanded Western Union payments to a number of new countries such as Egypt, Taiwan, and Panama. To help more publishers find answers to their questions, we launched AdSense Help Forums in Hebrew, Czech, and Slovak.

On the English Help Forum, we celebrated our 50,000th member and then unveiled a new platform with additional capabilities. Now, forum participants can vote on the best answer to their questions, subscribe to individual discussions, and receive replies to their threads via email.

In news closest to home here on the blog, the Inside AdSense family continued to grow with the launch of blogs in Russian and Traditional Chinese. With your support, our 13 global AdSense blogs received 3.8 million pageviews from 2.4 million visits this year. Through our blogs, we brought you a Newbie Fridays series, 'Optimisation Essentials' videos from our Australian team, and began distributing AdSense stickers. Check out the sticker requests, postcards, and notes we received in the photo on the right :)

Last but not least, the 2008 Reader's Choice Award for this year's most visited post goes to our April Fool's joke, 'Introducing AdSense for conversations'. Co-author Julie Beckmann had this to say: "A lot of hard work went into omega testing the product for this post. While I found the hat fit snugly, I was disappointed to learn the effect my Orange County upbringing had on my chats -- 17 'like's' sprinkled into a two-minute conversation? My chats aren't fit to be placement-targeted."

Thanks for helping to contribute to an eventful 2008 -- we're looking forward to an even more exciting 2009. Happy New Year!

Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

Wednesday, December 31, 2008 at 3:36:00 PM

Warm wishes

From all of us here in Mountain View, have a safe and happy holiday season!


(Members of the AdSense, DoubleClick, and Google Ad Manager teams pictured above.)

Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

Wednesday, December 24, 2008 at 4:17:00 PM

Light up your site

We all know how it feels to find the perfect gift. After scouring stores far and wide, suddenly your hunt is over: the stars have aligned to bring you just what you're looking for -- and not a moment too soon. It's a bit the same way when a search brings you to just the right site. But what if your site's just the right site, and users can't find it?

We're happy to let you know that you don't need divine forces to play a role in the findability of your site. Nope -- you can help make sure that your site turns up just when it should by taking advantage of these tips from our Search Quality Team.

1. Not sure if all your pages are being seen by Google? Search for your site's address after the command "site", like [site:example.com]. When you see your pages in the results, check your snippet content and page titles. Include information that matches the topic of a particular page. If anything is missing or you want more details, you can also use the Content Analysis tool in Webmaster Tools.
   
   
2. If you upload new pages or topics faster than Google crawls your site, make sure to submit a Google Sitemap and include a refresh rate.
   
   
3. Label your images appropriately. Users searching in Google Image Search will more easily find the image on your site. Don't miss out on potential traffic because of [001.jpg] instead of [NintendoWii.jpg]. Image Search is one of the largest search properties out there, so you should take advantage of it.
   
   
4. Manage your SiteLinks. Your most valuable links may not be the ones that Google chooses as SiteLinks, so remember you can remove any that you don't think users will find useful.
   
   
5. Check for errors and keyword traffic in Webmaster Tools. See our diagnostics checklist.
   
   
6. Serve accurate HTTP status codes. If you've retired a page permanently, serve a 404. If you've simply relocated it, serve a 301. The more we know about your old pages, the faster we will find the next best page on your site for a given query.
   
   
7. Users and search engines like organic content. Make some of your own!
   
   
8. Read our recently released SEO Starter Guide.
   
   
9. Watch our Tutorials for Webmasters.
   
   
10. Find out what information Google has about your website in Webmaster Tools.
    
    
11. Get the latest updates from the Webmaster Central Blog.
    
    
12. Find answers to your questions in our Webmaster Help Center, or ask your questions in the Webmaster Help Group.
    

Whether it be the perfect gift, the perfect site, or the perfect cup of cocoa on a cold winter's night, we hope all your searches are fruitful this holiday season.

Posted by Julie Beckmann - AdSense Publisher Support

Monday, December 22, 2008 at 11:15:00 AM

Western Union payment updates

Do you use Western Union as your payment method? If so, we've just made a couple minor updates that we'd like to let you know about.

Expiration date extended

We've now extended the deadline to pick up your Western Union payments from 35 days to 60 days. If you haven't picked up your payment within 60 days of issuance, the payment will be credited back to your account and a payment hold will be placed on your account. You'll then see a notice in your account with more details on how to proceed.

Split payments

As you may know, Western Union has specific payout limits depending on location. In the past, if your payment amount exceeded the Western Union payout limit in your country, we'd send your payment by secured express delivery check instead. Unfortunately, this would also incur a delivery fee, so we're happy to let you know that this is now no longer the case.

Now, if your payment exceeds the maximum payment amount, we'll divide up the amounts but still send them via Western Union. For instance, if the payout limit in your country is $3,000 USD and your payment for the month is $5,000 USD, we'll send you two payments: one for the limit of $3,000 USD and another for the remainder of $2,000 USD. If you're sent multiple Western Union payments, you'll see multiple 'Payment issued' lines on your Payment history page, each with the corresponding MTCN associated with it. Depending on your local Western Union agent, you may need to pick up multiple payments on subsequent days. We recommend consulting your local Western Union agent for further details.

Payment by Western Union is currently available in a limited number of countries, but we're working on expanding the countries we support, and we'll keep you posted with any updates.

Posted by Deborah Chang - AdSense Payments Team

Thursday, December 18, 2008 at 1:30:00 PM

Spotlight on your content

It's Google's mission to organize the world's information and make it readily available to all; as a web publisher, one of your goals may also be to make sure your content is readily available to all. We've recently taken steps to help you grow your site's traffic: we updated our Submit Your Content site with more information about distributing your content through Google products such as Web Search, Maps, YouTube, and iGoogle. In addition, we launched our Content Central blog, featuring tips and information from Googlers who work on different products. The goal of both of these resources is to help you grow your site's visitors by taking advantage of promotion opportunities in new Google mediums.

If you're just getting started with these resources, we recommend visiting the yellow getting started box in the upper right hand corner of the Submit Your Content homepage. Here, we've listed the three steps we recommend all content partners take to begin sharing their content. Alternatively, check out the industry categories where we'll walk you through the types of content you may have, and show you where that content is visible across various Google services.


We've also enabled comments on the Content Central blog, so feel free to visit the blog to suggest topics for future posts or leave your feedback. If you've already visited the Submit Your Content site, you may know all about the wonders of RSS, so be sure to subscribe to the Content Central blog's feed to receive the latest posts when they're published. Or, enter your email address in the right-hand sidebar to subscribe by email.

Posted by Steffanie Johnson - Content Partnerships Team

Tuesday, December 16, 2008 at 10:10:00 AM

Extending AdSense for domains to all publishers

Many publishers have approached us looking for a way to monetize their domains, and today, we're excited to announce the expansion of AdSense for domains. This product allows publishers to earn revenue through ads placed on undeveloped domains.

With AdSense for domains, users can find relevant information rather than see empty pages or "page not found" errors. Today we present ads, links, and search results on the pages, and may add other useful information in the future. To ensure positive user experience and the quality of our network, these sites are monitored for policy compliance and prohibited from using text and images designed to confuse users.

Advertisers also have additional opportunities to find their customers, and ads on these pages convert well. In addition, we regularly receive requests from advertisers who have found domains to be an effective way to reach their users.

The product will be initially rolled out in phases to English-language AdSense publishers located in North America, and we'll expand to additional regions and languages in the future. To check whether AdSense for domains has been enabled for your account, log in and visit your AdSense Setup tab. For more information, please visit our Help Center.

Posted by Loren Donelson - Product Manager, AdSense for Domains

Thursday, December 11, 2008 at 9:08:00 AM

Make your ad cents (and dollars) count

Back in May, we had tremendous interest from readers who asked if they could donate their earnings to help victims in China and Myanmar (Burma). We heard you loud and clear, and so we're happy to announce that during the next week, you can donate a portion or all of your entire unpaid balance as of November 30, 2008 to reconstruction efforts in these regions. The earth may no longer be quaking and the waters may now be calm, but help is still needed in these areas. Whether you have a balance of $0.10 or $100 in your account, we invite you to participate within the next week. Just think if everyone donated a dollar, what a difference that would make.

As you may expect, there are certain restrictions to donating, and all our normal policies still apply -- so please don't ask others to click on your ads in order to increase your earnings. For more information on how to participate, visit our donation form.

Finally, we know that you may be interested in donating your earnings to additional charities and causes. Please stay tuned to our blog for future opportunities to donate in other ways.

Posted by Elizabeth Ferdon - AdSense Publisher Support

Thursday, December 04, 2008 at 11:16:00 AM

Turkeys, thanks, and taxes

This Thanksgiving weekend, we'd like to take a moment to ask our U.S.-based publishers to spend a little post-turkey time (when you're not watching football or taking advantage of those Black Friday bargains) to review your AdSense tax information.

Tax season is just around the corner and we want to make sure that we give the IRS the most accurate information. So please pay a quick visit to your AdSense account, and double-check your payee name -- that's the name that we send payments to --and the tax information you've provided, especially your Social Security or Employer Identification Number.

Does the info in your account correspond exactly to the info in your tax documents? If not, you may want to consider updating your payee name so that everything matches up.

You can resubmit your tax information by logging in and following the steps in our Help Center. Keep in mind that we'll be sending out tax forms to publishers who qualify during the month of January.

Posted by Elizabeth Ferdon - AdSense Publisher Support

Friday, November 28, 2008 at 10:45:00 AM

Happy Thanksgiving from AdSense

It's Thanksgiving Day in the U.S. tomorrow, and so we'd like to give thanks to all of our publishers (especially our dedicated blog readers!) for your participation in the AdSense program. If you're a U.S. publisher, we hope you have a happy and turkey-filled holiday weekend, whether you're celebrating at home or traveling over the river and through the woods.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

Wednesday, November 26, 2008 at 4:31:00 PM

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The forecast is clear in Google Ad Manager

If you're a publisher who sells advertising space directly to advertisers, you might have experienced times when you've been unsure about how much inventory is available for you to sell. Google Ad Manager can help you learn what you have available to sell by forecasting your future inventory and subtracting off what you've already sold.

A Helpful Analogy

To put this into context, pretend for a minute that instead of a website, you run a popular destination hotel. Instead of selling space to advertisers, your job is to book hotel stays for guests. You receive all kinds of requests to book hotel rooms: two rooms for a one-week family vacation, 100 rooms for a three-day conference, a suite for a weekend getaway. In order to book these reservations, you have to know both how many rooms your hotel has and how many rooms are already booked. For a hotel, this is fairly straightforward. You know exactly how many total rooms the hotel has, and you can subtract how many rooms are booked for each night.

For a publisher, it's not as straightforward. Since the amount of inventory you have to sell is directly tied to your site's traffic, it can vary day by day. It's also complicated because there's flexibility in how you meet your obligations. If an advertiser has booked advertising space on your Finance and Entertainment sections, for example, you can serve more ads on the Finance page and fewer on the Entertainment page. To compare to a hotel, it's like you have the flexibility to substitute two single rooms for one double room. Because of the variability of traffic and the flexibility in how you can satisfy your reservations, it's hard to know exactly how much space you have left to sell for any day or any specific area of your website.

A Common Problem - and Solution

Even though it's more complicated for websites than for hotels, the customers' (or advertisers') needs are the same: They want a reservation, and you have to be able to guarantee that there will be availability when they show up. A hotel can't operate effectively without this type of capability, and neither can these web publishers.

Google Ad Manager, our hosted ad serving and management solution for publishers with smaller direct sales teams, addresses this publisher problem. It allows you to predict future availability and be confident that when you sell an ad, you'll be able to deliver it. In Ad Manager, forecasting works by using your historical data to estimate how many impressions you have left to sell. Ad Manager's inventory forecasting system allows you to find availability broken down by different areas of your website, by cities or states, and even by custom criteria that you define, like the user's age. Even better, when the inventory you request is unavailable, Ad Manager will give you suggestions for freeing-up the requested inventory, so that you can still make the sale.

New Improvements

In the last few weeks, we've rolled out major improvements to our forecasting system. It's now up to ten times faster, and it uses much more historical data, so you get more accurate estimates of future availability. The new system allows us to quickly add new features in the future. We've already launched one of these improvements: Forecasts now take account of frequency caps, meaning that the availability estimates are modified to account for the fact that you might only want to show an ad once to each user. And more new features are coming soon!

Forecasting also continues to be a major development focus of our DART for Publishers (DFP) ad serving platform for publishers with larger direct sales teams, part of the DoubleClick Revenue Center suite of publisher solutions. Google Ad Manager serves as an effective complement to DFP and the DoubleClick Revenue Center to provide solutions for publishers of all sizes.

To learn more about forecasting in Ad Manager, visit the Ad Manager Help Center.

Posted by Narayana Tummala - Tech Lead, Google Ad Manager

Thursday, November 20, 2008 at 9:49:00 AM

Optimisation Essentials (Part III)

Position for performance - be noticed

This is the final video installment in our three-part series on Optimisation Essentials for AdSense for content. We've covered the best-performing ad unit sizes and taken a look at how to design your ad units for good-looking ads. However, even if you have large, well-designed ad units, they won't perform for you unless your users can see them!

So what can you do to ensure your ad units get noticed? Place your ads where users are likely to look.



We've also made a heatmap to show you where the best placements are on a typical page. Great positions include:

• Above the fold of a page (the section of the page a user can see without scrolling)
  
• At the end of an article
  
• Aligned with content
  

But don't just take our word for it - every website is different. Make sure you use your judgment of how visitors interact with your pages to determine good ad placements. Position your ads so that they're visible, but be careful of intruding on the experience of your site's visitors. Most of all, think like a user and you'll be able to balance your website's content with a successful ad strategy.

Posted by Mel Ann Chan - AdSense Australia Optimisation Team

Tuesday, November 18, 2008 at 10:35:00 AM

Now serving overlay ads in embedded YouTube partner videos

Today, to help its video content partners earn more money, YouTube will begin running overlay ads in YouTube partner videos embedded on other websites. To date, YouTube has only run ads against partner videos on YouTube itself, and with people viewing millions of embedded YouTube videos every day, this meant that partners were not generating revenue from their views outside YouTube.com. But now, YouTube partners will be able to capitalize on their popularity across the internet and generate revenue from their content no matter where their video lives.

Although this may sound similar to AdSense video units, this YouTube change is separate from AdSense, and we'd like to discuss the differences between the two offerings.

Let's start with a refresher on AdSense video units, which are available within AdSense accounts in specific languages and regions. Video units help you enrich your website with fresh, dynamic content from our YouTube partners. Each video unit is accompanied by a banner ad and a overlay ad targeted towards the video and the site's content, and is customizable so you can choose categories of video to target to your site. The ad revenue is divided between the AdSense publisher, YouTube, and the YouTube partner providing the video content.

But AdSense video units aren't the only way our YouTube partners can distribute their content -- just as with other YouTube videos, it's possible for anyone with a website to embed partner videos on their sites. Now, following today's announcement, thousands of videos produced by YouTube partners will begin displaying overlay ads when embedded on other websites. (YouTube will gradually roll out these ads to additional YouTube partner videos in the coming weeks.) This feature is external to AdSense, and so no configuration within an AdSense account is needed. Revenue from these ads will be divided between YouTube and the YouTube partner providing the video content.

By helping YouTube partners generate additional revenue no matter where their videos are played, we hope to encourage further content creation among our most popular and prolific video creators. If you create your own video content and are interested in becoming a YouTube partner, submit an application today.

Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

Thursday, November 13, 2008 at 10:00:00 AM

Optimisation Essentials (Part II)

Dress for success - impressing your audience

The video below is the second in our "Optimisation Essentials" series, demonstrating our top three tips for maximising your AdSense for Content performance. Last week, we reinforced the importance of bigger ad units. This week, we're showcasing how a better ad unit design can result in improved AdSense performance.



*Please note that no leopards were harmed in the making of this video!

Over the years, we've seen some colourful ad unit designs. Some publishers design ad units that contrast with their site so that they stand out. Although this can work in some cases, we've found that ad units that match your site's design tend to perform better in terms of revenue and click-through-rate. Users are more likely to read ads when they're well integrated into your site.

When you design your AdSense ads, keep these tips in mind:

• Use colours that either blend with or complement your site's colours. Make the ads a part of your site.
  
• Use lighter colours for borders, or no border at all.
  
• Try rotating colours or occasionally switching the location of your ads on the page.
  
• Save sets of frequently-used colours as a palette.
  

So give your ad design and colours some thought, and you'll notice the difference!

Posted by Mel Ann Chan - AdSense Australia Optimisation Team

Tuesday, November 11, 2008 at 9:48:00 AM

Political ads on AdSense sites

During the recent U.S. election period, our team heard your concerns and feedback regarding political ads appearing on publisher sites. As a Product Manager who helps build the AdSense product, I'd like to take a moment to explain our ad targeting technology and policies, and what we're working on to offer you even more controls.

Ad Targeting

I wanted to help clarify first how advertisers are able to target your sites. As you know, ads that appear on AdSense sites are provided by advertisers participating in the AdWords program. To help publishers earn revenue, advertisers are able to target ads not only based on the content of a site, but also based on the audience of the site. When we first started AdSense in 2003, we only offered contextually-targeted ads; advertisers bid on keywords, and our system matched those keywords to the content of publishers' pages. As we developed the product, we expanded these targeting capabilities. For instance, placement targeting allows advertisers to select specific topics, sites, and pages on which they want their ads to run. In the U.S., our placement targeting tool also allows advertisers to find sites serving a specific audience, such as "Males ages 18-24."

To help new and existing publishers better understand our targeting options, our support teams will be reviewing and expanding the material available on our Help Center and homepage to make sure it better communicates our offerings. In addition, we'll be exploring different methods of explaining this information, such as through webinars and videos, and demonstrating how publishers can optimize their sites to take advantage of these targeting options.

Advertising Policies

We also received questions about why political ads are able to run on Google and AdSense sites. The Google advertising program is managed by a set of editorial policies that we have developed based on various factors, including user and customer experience. While Google or its executives and employees may express opinions about specific political issues and candidates, Google's advertising system does not favor one political position over another. Our network provides advertisers with a way to reach their audience, whether they are companies selling products or political campaigns promoting candidates or issues. Just as Google's advertising system does not favor one car manufacturer's ads over a competitor's in our auction, we also allow ads regardless of the particular political position they represent.

Publisher Ad Control

As we've expanded to new forms of advertiser targeting, we've also added controls for the ads that can appear on your sites. Our automated targeting technology will never understand your users as well as you, so it's important that you have the ability to control their ad experience. For example, we mentioned earlier this week that tools such as the Competitive Ad Filter and Ad Review Center are designed for you to prevent specific ads from appearing on your pages.

We've heard your feedback about how quickly filters take effect and the ability to block specific categories of ads, and we're working hard to improve our current controls and provide more powerful ones in the near future. Over the next couple weeks, we plan to improve the speed of your filters, and we're working towards filters in the future that will take effect in less than an hour. We'll also continue improving the Ad Review Center, giving you ways to block entire categories of ads in addition to individual ads. We are also working on ways for you to establish guidelines for the type of ads that will be acceptable to your users, so you can "set it and forget it," while feeling comfortable that users will have a good ad experience.

One of our goals with AdSense is to help you easily generate revenue for your site without much work, so that you have more time to focus on developing great content. Many of our best ideas, like the Ad Review Center, are inspired by your feedback and suggestions. Please keep letting us know how we can make AdSense a better product.

Posted by Jason Miller - Group Product Manager, AdSense

Friday, November 07, 2008 at 4:24:00 PM

Site maintenance on Saturday, November 8

Our engineers will be performing routine site maintenance tomorrow, November 8th at 10 am PST. Although you won't be able to log in to your account for approximately 4 hours, your ad targeting and serving won't be affected, and you'll continue to be credited for valid clicks and impressions.

Here's the start time in a few international cities:

London - 6pm Saturday
Johannesburg - 8pm Saturday
Madurai - 11:30pm Saturday
Manila - 2am Sunday
Sydney - 5am Sunday

Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

Block this way

When we notice a spike in readers who are interested in a specific topic, we like to address it as soon as we can. There's been some interest in filtering ads from publisher pages, so here's a quick refresher on the filtering tools we offer:

Competitive Ad Filter

You can restrict contextually-targeted and placement-targeted ads from appearing on your pages by adding the URL of each ad to your Competitive Ad Filter. After logging in to your account, click the AdSense Setup tab and visit the 'Competitive Ad Filter' page. You can also find full instructions and tips for entering in specific URLs in our Help Center. To determine the URL of an ad, try the AdSense Preview Tool or follow these steps. Please keep in mind that it may take several hours for the filter to take effect.

Ad Review Center

The Ad Review Center gives you additional control over the placement-targeted ads that may appear on your pages. Using the Ad Review Center, you can review specific ad groups and advertisers before they appear on your pages, and also block ads by type. You'll need to opt in to the Ad Review Center at the top of your Competitive Ad Filter page, and then you can begin reviewing ads.

Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

Monday, November 03, 2008 at 6:24:00 PM

Optimisation Essentials (Part I)

Bigger is better - for AdSense ad units

AdSense for content is the bread and butter of many of our publishers, and we often receive requests to recommend strategies to improve AdSense performance on publisher sites. While we refer to this as 'optimisation', we understand that this term can make the process sound more difficult than it really is. In response, we're releasing a three-part video series that demonstrates, in plain English, our top tips for increasing your AdSense earnings.

This week, we're recommending you think big - big ad units, that is:



Publishers often ask us what the best ad sizes are to include in their site's design, and we always point them to these three:

• 300x250 medium rectangle
  
• 728x90 leaderboard
  
• 160x600 skyscraper
  

These ad units have proven in the past to deliver better results for both publishers and advertisers. Advertisers favour these formats, and if you've receiving all ad types, you'll find that advertisers will specifically target your sites more often. If you position your ad units well, users will be more likely to see these ad formats and find an ad that they're interested in.

When you're considering how to design your site, our testing has shown that displaying at least one of these ad formats on your page can increase your AdSense earnings potential. So remember, sometimes bigger is better!

Posted by Mel Ann Chan - AdSense Australia Optimisation Team

Get in the spirit with AdSense

It's all Hallow's Eve! Tonight the streets will be teeming with ghosts, fairies, and superheroes (along with a few presidential candidate look-alikes, we imagine).

To get you in the Halloween spirit, consider these ways to celebrate with AdSense:

- wear a witch's hat while viewing your AdSense reports
- perform some optimization magic on your ad units
- change your ad unit color palette to orange and black*
- create an ad placement that highlights your spookiest (or, okay, most prominent) ad units to advertisers
- eat candy corn, then use your AdSense payments to cover the dental work

Over here at the Mountain View campus, we're keeping it festive, too.


Happy Halloween from the AdSense Team!

*This color scheme, while eerie and appropriate today, may not be very effective the other 364 days of the year.

Posted by Julie Beckmann on behalf of the AdSense Team

Friday, October 31, 2008 at 2:14:00 PM

You're invited to the new AdSense Help Forum

The AdSensePro team would like to cordially invite you to the opening of our new English AdSense Help Forum.


We hope that by now you've found the AdSense Help Forum to be the best place to ask questions and share tips with other AdSense publishers. We've been listening to your feedback about forum features you'd like to see, and we're excited to announce that we're moving the English Forum from Google Groups to a brand new platform. (For those who participate in the Forum in another language: rest assured that our engineers are working on making this new platform available in additional languages, although we don't have a set date at this time.)

As of today, we've closed up shop and moved the English Forum next door to the AdSense Help Center. We've been jealous of the Help Center for a while now. Its innovative interface, clear categories, and snazzy search powered by CSE left us feeling like the odd man out.


Now we've almost got it all. We have the look and feel of the Help Center with the same CSE to search across the Forum, the Help Center, and the blog. We have the same categories as the Help Center, so you can easily transition from one category to the another. We even have some extra things we hope you'll really like: a system of levels to reward your contributions to the Forum, and profiles where you can put a picture next to your name. You can subscribe to the Forum (or to individual discussions) by RSS feed. You can post a question and receive your answer by email. You can even vote on which response best answers the question and mark a best answer to a question you asked.


We hope you'll come take a look, and we hope you'll stay a while, sign into your Google Account, and ask and answer questions.

Posted by the AdSensePro Team - AdSense Help Forum Support

Thursday, October 30, 2008 at 8:26:00 AM

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Make a date with data in Google Analytics

Here in AdSense, we’re big on data. From spreadsheets and graphs to weekly reports and metrics, we constantly turn to numbers when running our business. In a similar vein, we've heard your requests for more data to help you run your AdSense websites, which is why we’re excited to announce the integration of one of our personal favorite reporting tools, Google Analytics, with AdSense. We're gradually rolling out this functionality to publishers, and you'll see an invitation link at the top of your 'Overview' and 'Advanced Reports' pages when it's been enabled for your account.


By integrating your AdSense account with a new or existing Analytics account, you’ll have access to in-depth reports about user activity on your site. In addition to the wealth of metrics already available in Analytics such as unique visitors and visitor language, you'll now have access to granular reports that break down AdSense performance both by page and by referring site. Armed with this new data about user behavior, you’ll be able to make more informed decisions on how to improve the user experience on your site and optimize your AdSense units to increase your revenue potential.


We've highlighted a few ways to use the integrated metrics below, but we encourage you to be creative! Come up with your own to discover how useful (and fun) new data can be:

• Discover untapped markets. Use the geographies report to determine which regions are under-represented in your site’s user base. Optimize your site’s content to attract more of these under-represented users.
  
• Drive high-earning traffic to your site. Use the 'Referring sites' report to determine where the users who are making you the most money are coming from. Focus your efforts on getting traffic from these sources.
  
• Delve deeper into AdSense reports. Use the visualization feature to look at trends in your site's AdSense performance over time, or by time of day.
  

Again, this feature is not yet available to all our publishers, but please keep checking your account for an invitation. In the meantime, you can take a look at our demo to learn more about the reports you'll have access to:



Posted by Vineesha Malkani - AdSense Publisher Support

Wednesday, October 22, 2008 at 11:04:00 AM

Site maintenance rescheduled for October 18 at 10am PDT

Last week we mentioned that there would be site maintenance on Saturday, October 11th -- if you attempted to log in during the maintenance period, you may have noticed that you were able to access your account as normal. That's because the maintenance scheduled for last weekend was postponed, and it has been rescheduled for this Saturday the 18th during the same time frame (10am to 2pm PDT).

We sincerely apologize for the miscommunication and for any inconvenience caused. Again, here's the start time in a few different cities:

London - 6pm Saturday
Cairo - 7pm Saturday
Kolkata - 10:30pm Saturday
Jakarta - 12am Sunday
Brisbane - 3am Sunday

Thanks for your understanding, and we hope this gives you enough time to reschedule any account activities you may have planned for this weekend.

Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

Wednesday, October 15, 2008 at 4:46:00 PM

The case of the delayed data

Do you frequently log in to your account to check your stats? We've heard from some publishers that they check their accounts every hour, or even multiple times an hour, and we're definitely happy to see your enthusiasm for the program! (For all of our blog veterans reading this post, you might recognize these as the symptoms of G.A.S.S..)

On that note, many publishers have asked us why they don't see any changes in their stats each time they log in, or why they sometimes see a 'No data available' message in their reports. This is because your reports are generally updated every 15 to 30 minutes, but there can sometimes be a delay of up to 24 hours. In addition, it can take up to 24 hours to fully verify our internal logs and finalize your reports -- as a result, you may sometimes see changes in your earnings during the course of the day. Please also keep in mind that your reports won't show data for impressions on public service announcements (PSAs).

How often do you check your account? Let us know in our comments field below :)

Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

Tuesday, October 14, 2008 at 10:54:00 AM

Site maintenance on Saturday, October 11 at 10am PDT

Our engineers will be performing routine site maintenance this Saturday, October 11th from 10am to 2pm PDT. Although you won't be able to access your account during this time, you'll still be credited for all valid clicks and impressions. In addition, your ad delivery and targeting won't be affected by this maintenance period.

Here's the start time of the maintenance in a few cities, for our international readers:

London - 6pm Saturday
Cairo - 7pm Saturday
Kolkata - 10:30pm Saturday
Jakarta - 12am Sunday
Brisbane - 3am Sunday

Thanks for your patience!

Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

Thursday, October 09, 2008 at 11:00:00 AM

Get in the game with AdSense for Games

Do you develop or publish web-based games? If so, you're contributing to a growing trend - according to comScore, over 25% of Internet users play online games every week, which is over 200 million users worldwide. As a beta user of AdSense for Games, you can display video ads, image ads, or text ads within your online games to earn revenue. You'll be able to show these ads in placements you define, such as interstitial frames before a game, after a level change, or when a game is over. Members of our AdWords team will sell your in-game ad placements directly to top brand advertisers, and you'll also see contextually targeted text and image ads based on content and demographic information. In addition, you'll be able to control the ads you see on your pages using our filtering options.

Here's a quick video to give you a better idea of what games are part of our network and how advertisers can use this medium to reach their target audience:



And here's another, less flashy video, to show actual game play and how an ad could appear within the game:



We've built ad technology for games played within a user's browser, and now we're looking to expand our publisher network. At this time, eligible publishers must have a minimum of 500,000 game plays per day and have 80% of their traffic from the U.S. or the U.K. If you're interested in becoming a AdSense for games beta publisher, feel free to review our complete list of requirements and submit an application. You can also find more information on our games site.

Updated post with game play requirements

Posted by Ryan Hayward - Ads Product Marketing

Tuesday, October 07, 2008 at 9:01:00 PM

Maximizing revenue by exposing your channels to the right advertisers

As you may know, you can set up your custom channels so that they're targetable by advertisers - these targetable custom channels are known as ad placements. By selecting the 'Allow advertisers to target this channel' checkbox on the channel creation page, you can enable brand advertisers to target their content to your audience directly on a CPM or CPC basis.

Creating ad placements allows them to show up in AdWords, so that advertisers who create placement-targeted campaigns can include your content directly. What many publishers don't know is that this also makes your content available to Google's internal sales teams, who work closely with many advertisers looking to target a certain audience or type of content. With this in mind, we thought it would be important to mention a few best practices which will help advertisers and our internal sales teams target your content to help you maximize revenue:

First, take time to make sure your channel names and descriptions accurately describe your content and audience. By including descriptions that closely reflect your content, you'll also attract advertisers from those areas. Naming and descriptions are important.


On that note, our second tip: be very careful about changing the name of an ad placement. If an advertiser has already targeted one of your specific channels, the channel will become unavailable to the advertiser once you change its name. If you wish to rename a channel, we recommend creating a second channel with the new name, and then attaching both channels to your ad unit. Remember, you can attach up to five custom channels to an ad unit.

Third, use the 300x250 medium rectangle, opted in to both text and image ads. This is one type of targetable ad unit that's in high demand by Google's CPM advertisers. We recommend placing these units in line with your content, and describing them as they relate to the content. This combination of format and placement enables advertisers to use image, text, or rich media (including gadget ads) effectively. In feeds, we recommend opting in to both image and text in all ad units, as many of these advertisers only target with image ads into feeds.

Finally, as always, the most important tip for maximizing revenue from your ad placements is to create quality content that is visually appealing and attracts a quality audience. Many brand advertisers look at all placements before placing an advertising order to make sure the destination sites are in line with their brand and attract the type of audience they wish to target for a particular campaign.

Posted by Steve Olechowski - AdSense Product Manager

Thursday, October 02, 2008 at 1:47:00 PM

AdSense for content, now in Thai

Late last year we welcomed Thai to our AdSense for search family, and we're now excited to let you know about the launch of AdSense for content in Thai. If you're a publisher with a Thai website, you'll now be able to earn money for valid clicks and impressions for Google ads on your site. Get started by logging in to your account and visiting the AdSense Setup tab to generate ad code. Or, if you don't have an AdSense account yet, review our program policies and then feel free to submit an application.

To celebrate this launch, why not look up a few Thai recipes and prepare traditional dishes like Som Tum, a spicy green papaya salad, or Tom Yam, a hot and sour soup? We hope they'll leave you content and ready to create new content of your own.

ยินดีต้อนรับสู่โปรแกรมของเราค่ะ

Posted by Nopparat Yokubon - AdSense Thai Publisher Support

Tuesday, September 30, 2008 at 2:26:00 PM

Lucy's final tips for Friday newbies

As the summer draws to a close, it is with a heavy heart that I bring you our last Newbie Friday post. I hope you've enjoyed our words of wisdom over the past few months and have found the information useful. Our team will continue to update this blog with the most up-to-date AdSense news and information, so please don't let this be goodbye. If you missed part of the series or want to re-read specific posts, just visit our Newbie label at any time and look for our summer-themed logo. So, from one oldie to many newbies, I'll close out this season with a few final tips for our new publishers.

Go wide and get rich (media)
If you've just recently started with AdSense, there are two format-related tips I would instantly recommend. The first is to enable both text and image ads, which will increase competition among ads to appear in your ad units and may result in higher CPMs. Second, use some of our wider units, such as the 160x600 wide skyscraper, the 300x250 medium rectangle, or the 728x90 leaderboard. There are more rich media (image, flash, video and gadget) ads available in wider ad formats, and wider ad units are the preferred formats for advertisers looking to target your site. Again, increased competition or your ad space will help you maximise your earnings potential.

Use channels
Channels are powerful reporting tools, sometimes overlooked by new publishers. They allow you to view the AdSense performance of a site, a specific page, or even a specific ad unit, which can help you see where your ads are performing best. You can name these channels, give them descriptions, and then define them as ad placements so that they are visible to AdWords advertisers.

The secret
As top AdSense earners will tell you, when it comes to earning with AdSense, the most important thing is a policy-compliant site with good-quality, original content. Such sites attract users, relevant ads and, ultimately, revenue.

Finally, we constantly maintain online resources like our AdSense Help Forum, Newbie Central, and our Known Issues page to share useful information with you. We hope you'll use them to make the most of AdSense.

Posted by Lucy McKenna - AdSense UK Publisher Support

Friday, September 26, 2008 at 11:12:00 AM

Is it right to search on your own site?

If you've added an AdSense for search box to your page, you're probably aware of the relevant search results it provides your users. That being said, a few publishers have asked us if it’s a violation of our program policies to perform searches in their own AdSense for search boxes. The short answer is no, this activity is not explicitly prohibited by our program policies.

However, we strongly advise against using your own AdSense for search box for a couple of reasons. First, it can increase the chance of accidental or invalid clicks on the ads that appear on the search results pages. Second, this will inflate the number of queries in your reports, giving you an inaccurate picture of the activity on your site.

If you’d like to use Google search, we recommend visiting Google.com or installing the Google Toolbar. And if you're using Google Chrome, don't forget that you can type search queries directly into your address bar.

Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

Friday, September 19, 2008 at 2:39:00 PM

Continuing to improve our ads

Readers with sharp eyes will notice that on some rare occasions, your ads may appear or act slightly differently than what you're accustomed to. Rest assured that this is normal behavior that results from our efforts to improve the experience for all members of the advertising ecosystem. (You may have noticed a similar post about our search results on the official Google blog.)

One way in which we achieve this is by making continued tweaks and innovations to the user behavior and appearance of our ads. In the past, these experiments have included changes to the font styling, coloring, spacing, and other aesthetic components. More specifically, changes such as redesigned ad units and arrows to show additional ads have stemmed from these tests. The purpose of these tests is to identify changes to our product that can bring long-term benefits to our publishers, your site's visitors, and advertisers.

Before rolling out a change to our ads, we test performance for a limited number of ad impressions, which may not apply to all publishers. Although we don't notify publishers of these specific changes in order to prevent bias, we closely monitor the performance of these tests. We also welcome feedback from publishers, users, and advertisers, so feel free to drop us an email.

Posted by Keith Mander - AdSense Product Specialist

Thursday, September 18, 2008 at 9:19:00 AM

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Quality, not quantity

As we mentioned a few weeks ago, you can use your AdSense account to display ads on any policy-compliant sites you own. This has often sparked the question among new publishers of 'How many sites do I need to earn money with AdSense?'

We'd like to stress that it's not the number of sites you have, but the quality of those sites that will help you increase your earnings with AdSense. If you're just getting started with your first website and the AdSense program, we recommend taking the time to build up your site with plenty of original, quality content -- write about topics you're passionate about, or which you have expertise in. When designing your website, keep our Webmaster Guidelines and, most importantly, your users in mind.

Then, take advantage of our Webmaster Tools to help increase your site's visibility in the Google search index, and try out the tips our Search Quality Evaluators have provided. Once you've built up organic traffic to your site, use Website Optimizer to understand how users interact with your pages and make improvements to your layout. And of course, during all of this, experiment with AdSense optimization tips to learn which colors, formats, and placements monetize best on your site.

Finally, as we blogged about during this Newbie Fridays series, your earnings potential can go up as advertisers find that you're sending high-quality leads to their sites. This won't happen overnight, but with patience and hard work you can watch your efforts convert into a high-quality site and higher AdSense earnings. And you won't even need a hundred sites to do it :)

Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

Friday, September 12, 2008 at 1:46:00 PM

Site maintenance on Saturday, September 13

This Saturday, September 13, our engineers will be performing site maintenance from 10am to 2pm PDT. As is typical during these maintenance periods, you won't be able to log in during these hours, but your earnings will continue to accrue and ads continue to be displayed on your pages.

For those of you located in different time zones, we've provided the maintenance start time for a few cities around the world.

Montreal - 1pm Saturday
Milan - 7pm Saturday
Moscow - 9pm Saturday
Mumbai - 10:30pm Saturday
Manila - 1am Sunday

Posted by Julie Beckmann - AdSense Publisher Support

Thursday, September 11, 2008 at 1:48:00 PM

Western Union launched in Panama

Following our announcement a few weeks ago, we're happy to announce that Western Union is now offered as a payment method for publishers located in Panama. To sign up for payments by Western Union, sign in to your account and follow these instructions. Please also keep in mind that we're only able to make Western Union payments to individual payee names, but not to businesses.

Not located in Panama? We've been reading your comments on our other recent payment-related posts, and understand that many of you are looking forward to new payment options in additional countries. Please know that we aren't able to provide details about when new options may become available, as setting them up can take time due to factors like compliance with local laws and tax regulations. However, we're working hard to find more convenient ways to send you your earnings, and we'll definitely announce any new options here. In the meantime, please feel free to keep leaving your feedback, and we appreciate your patience!

Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

Wednesday, September 10, 2008 at 11:12:00 AM

Chasing the perfect layout with AdSense for search

AdSense publisher Next Small Things has long understood that search is the entry point for users to find what they're looking for on the web. In fact, the idea for CoolChaser.com, a MySpace layout creation and customization site (and Next Small Things's largest business to date), came from the observation that many web surfers were using the company's search engine to find instructions to change their MySpace backgrounds. The observation and ensuing business idea has paid off, and in just one year CoolChaser.com has gained a loyal user base: over 200,000 users are now finding or creating layouts on the site every day. "CoolChaser has become a one-stop-shop for layouts because of the ease of use and the choice and ability for users to express what they feel at the time," says founder Chao Lam.

With over 20 million user-submitted layouts (and 3,000 created every hour), it was becoming increasingly difficult for users to find the layouts they were looking for. "We were getting a lot of requests from users to provide some sort of search mechanism so that they could easily find what they were looking for," developer Sachiko Kwan says. As an existing AdSense publisher, Kwan decided to try AdSense for search and was immediately impressed by the quick setup process and the accuracy of the results. With the new SiteSearch feature, Kwan was able to restrict the searches so users didn't have to leave the site to find what they were looking for. In addition, the new watermark feature allowed Kwan to add the search box without any rearrangement in the navigation bar.

Most recently, Lam and Kwan began optimizing their search for better performance and user experience. If a user wasn't creating a layout, they were looking for one. So Kwan moved the search box from the upper right corner of each page to the center of the header and also added a second search box to the bottom of every page, in case users who were done browsing needed to search again. On the search results page, she changed the ad borders to a lighter color to better blend in with the site's pages.


Within a week of making these changes, Lam and Kwan saw their daily search queries on CoolChaser increase by 40% and earnings more than double. Since implementing AdSense for search on CoolChaser, search has become the second most popular functionality behind creating layouts. Lam and Kwan continue to focus on user experience, and they are now working to refine search results using keywords and labels. "There's such an enormous variety of things people search for," Lam says. "AdSense for search is really working for us."

Have you had success with AdSense for search, or our new optimization tips? If so, we'd love to hear from you.

Posted by Sandra Tsui - AdSense Publisher Support

Monday, September 08, 2008 at 11:04:00 AM

Relating AdSense to AdWords

We think it's important for all publishers, both new and veteran, to understand the role they play in our ad network ecosystem. While AdSense is designed for publishers to monetize their websites with Google ads, it's also designed to extend the reach for our AdWords advertisers, providing them with ad real estate whose value is close to that on Google Search results.

If your website performs well for advertisers, there may be increased competition among them to fill your ad spaces. This means we'd have a wider variety of possible ads to display, so the ads you see on your site may be more relevant to your site content and your users' interests. This may lead to more clicks from your users, more placement-targeted campaigns geared towards your site, and increased advertiser bids. Overall, you're likely to earn more revenue with your site if advertisers are generating conversions and receiving quality leads from your site.

On the other hand, if your website performs poorly for advertisers, they may be less inclined to display on your site. This means that the ads our system displays on your site may not be as relevant to your site content and your users' interests, leading to fewer clicks and decreased advertiser bids. As a result, you're likely to earn less revenue with your site if advertisers are performing poorly.

To maximize the value for advertisers displaying on your site, we recommend focusing on developing a high-quality site with original content that's valuable to your users. For more information, please consult our program policies and Webmaster Quality Guidelines for reference.

Posted by the Google Ad Traffic Quality Team

Friday, September 05, 2008 at 11:01:00 AM

Don't get held up by expired check holds

Whether it's your high school yearbook, the ticket stub from a movie you saw with your first sweetheart, or the lock of hair from your child's first trim, we all have mementos that we like to keep around. However, we hope that your AdSense check isn't one of them!

As a friendly reminder, AdSense checks expire after 6 months, so once you get your check in the mail please don't forget to deposit it.

If you're holding onto to a check and it expires, your account will be placed on hold and you'll need to re-select a form of payment to resume payments the next time you've crossed the US $100 threshold. For many of you, you may consider trying EFT, Western Union, or local currency checks if they're available in your country. If you don't yet see your preferred payment option for your country yet, please know we're working hard to add additional forms of payment in the future.

So no lolly-gagging! Once you've got your payments, it's off to the bank with you to count all your ad-dollars and ad-cents!

Posted by Elizabeth Ferdon - AdSense Publisher Support

Wednesday, September 03, 2008 at 4:04:00 PM

Announcing Google Chrome

Today, we're happy to announce the release of the beta version of a new open-source browser: Google Chrome. We encourage you to download it and give it a try.

Google Chrome features a simple and intuitive user interface and an entirely new architecture designed for speed, security, and stability. You can find out more about other Google Chrome features here.

For publishers, you should see the ads on your pages continue to appear as normal in Google Chrome; we built Google Chrome so that most webmasters and site owners shouldn't have to make changes to their sites. If your site is compatible with Safari, it should also be compatible with Google Chrome, as they are both built using WebKit. If you have any questions regarding compatibility with your site, feel free to refer to our webmaster site.

To learn more about why we built Google Chrome, see our official Google blog.

Posted by Brian Rakowski - Google Chrome Product Manager

Tuesday, September 02, 2008 at 12:44:00 PM

Your guide to the Inside AdSense blog

Whether you're new to this blog or have been with us since way back in August of aught five, we'd like to provide a few simple tips for effectively using the features provided on our site.

First of all, we've made it easy to subscribe to the blog so that you'll never miss a post. There are a few ways to do so:

• E-mail
  Have a Google Account? Then visit our subscription page, or just enter your email address into the yellow box on the right sidebar of this page. You'll be subscribed via Google Groups, and we'll send you a confirmation email. Once you confirm your subscription, you'll begin to see new blog posts in your email inbox.
  
  
• RSS Reader
  After clicking on the 'Site Feed' link in the upper right-hand corner of this page, you'll be taken to a Feedburner URL, which you can access from any RSS Reader or Live Bookmark of your choice. To view all of your feed subscription options, look for the 'Subscribe Now!' box on the right side.
  
  
• iGoogle
  Click the white '+ Google' icon on the top right, and you can receive the latest Inside AdSense updates on your iGoogle page or within Google Reader.
  
  

There's also plenty of content in our blog archives. Here are some ways to access some of those useful posts from the past:

• Labels
  Each post is tagged at the bottom with one or more labels that reflect the content of that post. All of these labels are also listed on our sidebar, which you can use to sort through past posts - for instance, click the 'Optimization' label to view all the posts related to optimizing AdSense on your site. You'll notice that this post is tagged with 'Newbie', since that's been our focus on recent Fridays.
  
  
• "You may have missed..."
  This name says it all - check the right sidebar for this section, where we'll be rotating links to useful posts from past months.
  
  
• Search box
  You can search for the topic of your choice using the search box at the top right. Using the tabs on the results page, you can choose whether to search within the AdSense blog or other resources such as our Help Center, the AdSense Forum, and the web.
  
  

We hope these tips will help you become a pro at navigating and absorbing our blog posts in the future!

Posted by Takayuki Funakoshi - AdSense Publisher Support

Friday, August 29, 2008 at 10:46:00 AM

Ad serving for everyone

Back in March, we announced the beta release of Google Ad Manager, our hosted ad serving and management solution for publishers with smaller direct sales teams. Today, we are pleased to announce general availability of the product -- no invitation required! Thousands of publishers in hundreds of countries already serve billions of impressions each day with Ad Manager, and we've heard from them that Ad Manager has helped increase revenue, cut serving costs, and save time managing campaigns.

Now we're excited to bring those benefits to all publishers. If you have an AdSense account, you can sign in to Ad Manager today. If not, apply for an AdSense account now. A Google AdSense account is a technical requirement for creating an Ad Manager account.

Ad Manager can help you sell, schedule, deliver, and measure both directly-sold and network-based inventory. It offers an intuitive and simple user interface, Google serving speed and reliability, and significant cost savings. Best of all, Ad Manager can be optionally integrated with Google AdSense to offer you an automated way to maximize the revenue of your unsold and network-managed inventory.

We've been busy since March; in addition to supporting thousands of new publishers on Ad Manager, we've been adding new features including:

• Interface available in 32 languages: Do you prefer to work in Turkish or Vietnamese or Hungarian? Now you can! Ad Manager supports international currencies, too.
  
• Ad network management: Easily manage your third-party ad networks in Ad Manager to automatically maximize your network driven revenue.
  
• Automatic macro insertion: Save time and avoid tagging errors since Ad Manager now automatically detects and inserts macros from most popular 3rd party vendors.
  
• Creative preview on live site: Preview the look and feel of ads on your live site to ensure ads look as expected before you start the campaign.
  
• Day and Time Targeting: Don't want your orders to run on weekends? No problem. With day and time targeting, you can set any new line items you create to run only during specific hours or days, or as little as 15 minutes per week. Use day and time targeting in addition to geography, bandwidth, browser, user language, operating system, domain and custom targeting.
  

We also continue to roll out new features for the DoubleClick Revenue Center suite of publisher solutions, including DART for Publishers (DFP), our ad serving platform for publishers with larger direct sales teams. Google Ad Manager serves as an effective complement to the DoubleClick Revenue Center by providing new opportunities for publishers of all sizes.

If you have any additional questions about Ad Manager or want to learn more, visit the Ad Manager Help Center.

Posted by Alex Vogenthaler - Product Manager, Google Ad Manager

Tuesday, August 26, 2008 at 8:05:00 AM

One account, multiple sites

We'd like to remind you that once you've been approved for AdSense, you can place the code from your account on any page that complies with our program policies. Simply generate new code and paste it onto your site -- we don't need to update your account, so there's no need to contact us about your new site (although we appreciate the thought!). Even if your sites relate to completely different topics, our system will display appropriate ads for each site. This is because your ad targeting is based on the content of your pages, rather than set within your account. In addition, please keep in mind that publishers may only maintain one account per payee name, so there's no need for you to submit a new application.

If you run multiple websites, you may wish to view separate reports for each domain. Simply create a URL channel for each one. You won't need to modify your code in any way, and your URL channels will begin tracking data almost immediately. If you need to send these reports to other people who manage your site with you, you can set up emailable reports.

But what if you've sold the website you applied to AdSense, and now you run another one? We don't need to update your account information in any way. Just remove your ad code from the old site, paste new code onto your current site, and our system will automatically take care of the rest.

Finally, we'd like to note that we do constantly review sites displaying Google ads to make sure that they're complying with the AdSense program policies. If we find that a site isn't compliant with our policies, we'll contact the publisher whose ad code appears on the site to address the situation. If you're concerned about others placing your ad code on non-policy compliant pages, we recommend using our Allowed Sites feature.

Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

Friday, August 22, 2008 at 2:17:00 PM

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Site maintenance on Saturday, August 23

This Saturday, August 23rd, our engineers will be performing site maintenance from 10am to 2pm PDT. You'll be unable to log in during these hours, but we'll continue to track your earnings and serve ads to your pages. For those of you located in different time zones, we've provided the maintenance start time for a few international cities:

London - 6pm Saturday
Istanbul - 8pm Saturday
Bangalore - 10:30pm Saturday
Hanoi - 12am Sunday
Auckland - 5am Sunday

Finally, you may have noticed that we're posting this message a little earlier than usual. Based on your feedback, we'll do our best to post these maintenance reminders earlier in the week to help you plan ahead. Thanks for the suggestion!

Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

Thursday, August 21, 2008 at 9:56:00 AM

I feel the need... the need for feeds

When you visit the AdSense Setup tab in your account, you'll notice a new "AdSense for feeds" option. This means you can now use AdSense to place ads in your RSS feeds, allowing you to increase the reach of your content while earning revenue. Our salesforce will sell cost-per-impression (CPM) ads directly to the largest advertisers, while the rest of your inventory will be filled with contextually targeted cost-per-click (CPC) and CPM ads. This means that more of your feed items will be sold and with higher overall revenue, than with any other feed network.

At this point, you may either be thinking, "great!" or "umm...what's a feed?" For those of you in the second category, feeds allow your content to be delivered and subscribed to on the Web, often as headlines, summaries or articles. FeedBurner also has a nifty tutorial that you might find useful.

And here are a few more reasons to try AdSense for feeds:

• Receive higher CPMs and maintain a positive user experience by displaying ads specifically optimized for RSS feeds.
  
• View detailed stats on your feed audience, distribution, and more through FeedBurner when you set up your feeds with AdSense.
  
• Manage monetization for your feeds through the same account that you use to manage other AdSense properties.
  

AdSense for feeds is currently enabled in all languages supported by AdSense for content.

Want to learn more about what feeds are and how to get started with AdSense for feeds? Visit our Help Center and watch our introductory video from Product Manager Steve Olechowski:



To set up AdSense for feeds now, sign in and visit the AdSense Setup page of your account, or apply for an AdSense account.

Posted by Ryan Hayward - AdSense Product Marketing

Friday, August 15, 2008 at 3:52:00 PM

Seeing clicks but no revenue?

Have you ever checked your reports and noticed that you have clicks reported, but no revenue? We'd like to explain why this may happen, as we frequently receive emails and questions on our Help Forum about this issue. What you're seeing may be due to one of the following:

1. Allowed Sites setup
   
   The Allowed Sites feature allows you to specify a list of sites where ads from your account may be displayed. If you're using this feature, you'll need to make sure that you've listed all sites where you'd like to display your AdSense ad code.
   
   To check if this is the case, log into your account and visit the 'Allowed Sites' page under your AdSense Setup tab. If the radio button 'Allow any site to show ads for my account ' is populated, you're not being affected by this issue, and you should continue to #2 below. However, if 'Only allow certain sites to show ads for my account' is populated, review the list of sites in the box below -- are all the sites you own listed in this box? If the answer is 'no', you won't be credited for clicks on the missing sites. Please be sure to add all of the sites where you'd like to display your AdSense ad code.
   
   We've noticed some confusion among publishers who have entered the sites of advertisers they'd like to see on their pages into the Allowed Sites list. Please know that this is not the case, as it's not possible to request ads for a particular page - the sites you enter into this box can only be sites where your ads can be placed.
   
   
2. Invalid clicks
   
   It's possible that you have some clicks that our monitoring system has considered to be invalid. As we've mentioned before, we monitor all clicks and impressions on Google ads for any activity that may artificially drive up an advertiser's costs or a publisher's earnings. Any clicks that our system considers invalid will still appear on your 'Overview' page, under the Reports tab. However, because our advertisers aren't charged for these clicks and impressions, we won't show the earnings for this activity. If you're concerned about suspicious activity in your account, we recommend reviewing your site's logs and letting us know about the situation.
   
   Rest assured that AdSense accounts are properly credited for all clicks and impressions we consider to be valid. We'll post your finalized earnings for a given month on your 'Payment History' page during the first week of the following month. For more information about invalid clicks, please review our Help Center.
   

Posted by the Google Ad Traffic Quality Team

Video units more widely available

UPDATE: The video units feature has been retired -- however, you may wish to review the other revenue opportunities available for video content owners.

We've heard your feedback about the availability of video units, so we've expanded the languages and geographies where they're supported. We've added French, German, and Spanish to our list of supported languages, and also Brazil, Germany, India, and Mexico to the list of supported countries. To help you determine whether you'll be able to use video units, consider these two questions:

1. Do you have an English, French, German, Japanese, or Spanish-language AdSense account?
   
   
2. Are you located in one of the following countries?
   
   Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, India, Ireland, Italy, Germany, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Spain, United Kingdom, United States
   

If you answered 'yes' to both questions, then video units are available to you. Sign in to your AdSense account and visit your AdSense Setup tab to get started. After linking your YouTube and AdSense accounts, you'll be able to customize and embed the video player into your website, and choose between having videos automatically targeted to your content or manually selecting content categories and content providers. Companion and text overlay ads will appear with your videos, and you'll generate earnings for valid clicks and impressions on those ads.

You can find more information about video units in our Help Center, and as always, please feel free to leave us a comment with your video unit feedback. We'll be sure to keep you posted if video units become available in any additional countries or languages.

Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

Wednesday, August 13, 2008 at 10:09:00 AM

Western Union expanded to additional countries

Last October, we introduced Western Union Quick Cash as a new payment method for a number of countries. We're excited to let you know that we've now expanded this payment method to Bulgaria, Egypt, Lithuania, Morocco, and Taiwan. If you're located in one of these countries, you'll be able to pick up your AdSense payments in cash at your local Western Union agent. This payment method is free, and you'll no longer need to wait for checks to arrive in the mail or to clear at the bank.

Please keep in mind that in order to pick up your payment, you'll need to present a government-issued ID that matches your AdSense payee name. If you need to update or correct the payee name listed in your account, please fill out our online form. In addition, we'd like to note that payments by Western Union Quick Cash are only available to individual payee names, but not to businesses.

Signing up for payments by Western Union is a quick process - just follow these instructions. For more information about this payment method, including exchange rates and how to pick up your payments, we recommend visiting our Help Center.

Posted by Korey Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

Monday, August 11, 2008 at 12:29:00 PM

Site maintenance on August 9 at 10am PDT

Our engineers will be performing routine site maintenance tomorrow, from 10am to 2pm PDT. While you won't be able to log in to your account during these hours, the maintenance won't affect your ad targeting or delivery and your earnings will still be tracked in your reports like always.

To celebrate the opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympic Games, here's the start time of the maintenance in past, present, and future host cities for the Summer Olympics:

Montreal - 1pm Saturday
London - 6pm Saturday
Athens - 8pm Saturday
Beijing - 1am Sunday
Sydney - 3am Sunday

We hope the maintenance period will give you an opportunity to catch a few matches and root for your home country!

Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

Friday, August 08, 2008 at 5:03:00 PM

Defining invalid clicks and click fraud

We often receive questions from new publishers about what these two terms mean, and we'd like to help you understand the difference.

Invalid clicks are clicks for which we decide not to charge our AdWords advertisers, since they may artificially drive up advertiser cost or publisher revenue. These include extraneous clicks without any value to the advertiser, such as the second click of a double-click. They also include many other types of clicks that we've determined aren't motivated by genuine user interest.

"Invalid clicks" are often confused with "clicking on your own ads". However, we'd like to stress that invalid clicks are generally any clicks that artificially inflate advertiser cost or publisher revenue, regardless of their source.

Click fraud is a subset of invalid clicks that are generated with malicious or fraudulent intent -- in other words, clicks that are intended to drive up advertiser cost or publisher revenue artificially. Sources for these clicks include, but are not limited to:

A publisher clicking on his own ads, or encouraging clicks on his ads

Users or family members clicking to support the site / publisher

Third-party programs with user incentives, such as paid-to-click services and click-exchanges

Automated clicking tools, robots, or other deceptive software

The same principles above apply to ad impressions and conversions as well. Some sources of invalid impressions include, but are not limited to:

Excessive page refreshes, generated either manually or automatically

Third-party programs with user incentives, such as paid-to-surf or auto-surf programs

Third-party programs for purchasing fixed amounts of traffic, e.g. "$10 for 1,000 page views"

As a reminder, any method that artificially generates clicks, impressions, or conversions is strictly prohibited by our program policies. You can also find more information about these topics in our Invalid Clicks FAQ and our Ad Traffic Quality Resource Center.

Updated links to resources

Posted by the Google Ad Traffic Quality Team

On your frequency

In the coming months, we'll be rolling out some new foundational features in AdWords for the content network. These features are intended to enhance your earning potential and the effectiveness of ads we serve to users on your sites. Some of the benefits of these features include:

• Frequency capping, which prevents users from repeatedly seeing the same ads on your pages.
  
• Improved attribution, to help advertisers identify the best performing sites in the network based on post-impression activity.
  
• Improved ads quality, as we're able to improve ad performance within the Google content network.
  

You can read about these in more detail on our official Google blog. To enable these features, we'll be implementing a DoubleClick ad serving cookie on the content network. We now have a program policy that covers data usage related to the launch of these new features.

We're excited about these upcoming features that will improve the experience for users and protect privacy while creating more value for our publishers and advertisers.

Posted by Wei Yang - AdSense Publisher Support

Thursday, August 07, 2008 at 10:01:00 AM

A picture isn't always worth a thousand words

The maxim about the Internet is that content is king. While this holds true for AdSense publishers, there’s one important caveat: if it’s not text-based content, our crawler might not notice.

While we’re constantly working to improve our targeting technology, our crawlers need text to properly match ads to your pages. Although images, flash, and streaming video can help spice up a site, relying heavily on these sorts of elements will make it difficult for us to get a good read on what your site is about.

If your site uses a lot of these features, make sure you provide enough text-based content in one of our supported languages to effectively convey the topic of your site. If our crawler doesn’t find enough text, you may get poorly targeted ads or public service ads (PSAs). While we can't say the exact amount of text content that you'll need to receive targeted ads, we do recommend including complete sentences and paragraphs on your pages.

To improve your ad targeting, here are few other pointers:

• Use text in addition to images when possible. Please note that the crawler can't read text contained within images.
  
• If you use images, be sure to title them appropriately and provide descriptive ALT tags.
  
• Try imagining your site without pictures or dynamic content. This will give you a good idea of what our crawler reads. If you lack imagination, you can try turning the images off in your web browser.
  

Finally, it's important to keep in mind that the AdSense for content ads on your site are automatically determined. Though it's not possible to choose the ads that are placed on your site, including more text-based content will help make it possible for our system to target your site correctly.

Posted by Kent Sugarman - AdSense Publisher Support

Friday, August 01, 2008 at 10:07:00 AM

Sharing your ad space

A number of publishers have asked us if it's acceptable to place multiple publishers' ad code on the same page or site. Often they'll run into this issue when two AdSense publishers manage a site together and both want to display their ads, or if a site owner hosts content and ads from other publishers on the same page as their own.

The answer is that yes, we do allow this. But before you place your ad code on the same page or site as another publisher, here are a few important points to keep in mind:

• The maximum number of products per page will remain the same.
  
• If you don't own the site, you'll need to receive permission from the site owner to display your ads on their pages.
  
• We're unable to divide earnings between accounts, so any revenue generated will be credited to the account associated with the ad unit that was clicked or viewed.
  
• Any shared site that displays Google ads must also comply with our program policies.
  
• You're responsible for the content of any page where your ad code appears. Before placing your ad code on another publisher's site, we recommend reviewing the site for any policy violations.
  

And one final tip before giving your code to another publisher -- try using our Allowed Sites feature to monitor where your ads are appearing and keep your account in good standing.

Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

Wednesday, July 30, 2008 at 10:46:00 AM

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Easy as 1-2-3

With all of the different AdSense products we now offer, it can be tough to keep track of the maximum number of each type of unit that our program policies allow. To help you remember these important numbers, here's a list.

On any policy-compliant page, you can display:

ONE...
- video unit (currently only available in specific countries and languages, though we're working to expand video units to additional publishers soon)

TWO...
- AdSense for search boxes

THREE...
- standard AdSense for content ad units, and
- 3 link units

While you can place all of these on one page, please also keep the user experience in mind. We strongly recommend maintaining a balance between the number of ads and the unique, quality content on your site, which will keep your readers engaged and coming back for more. Also, the more text-based content you have on your site, the more relevant your ads will be.

If you'd like help with generating ad code for additional ad units, feel free to review our Generating Ad Code video or our Quick Start Guide.

Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

Friday, July 25, 2008 at 11:41:00 AM

A peek into recent AdWords developments

If you're an avid Inside AdSense reader, you know that we frequently post about the latest developments in AdSense and new features you can take advantage of. However, we've heard from some publishers that they want to know more about what's happening in AdWords, and what we're doing to bring more relevant, targeted ads to AdSense sites like yours. With that, we'd like to take a moment to give you insight into a few recent AdWords developments, and what they mean for you as an AdSense publisher.

One of the main changes is the ability for advertisers to be more specific with their ad targeting through a combination of contextual targeting and placement targeting. As you may know, contextually targeted ads will appear on your pages if an advertiser's keywords match your content, while placement-targeted ads will appear if an advertiser has specifically selected your ad placement or site. Now, advertisers can target your site or placements, but can also specify keywords for them so that their ads only appear in the most relevant pages. These ads will still need to compete with the available inventory of ads for a particular placement, and so only the highest-paying, most relevant ads will appear on your pages. At the same time, you'll still be able to use your Competitive Ad Filter to prevent ads from specific URLs from appearing.

What does this mean for you, as an AdSense publisher? Your users may see more relevant ads on your pages, and advertisers who become more confident that their ads are reaching the right audience may increase their ad spend -- both of these can result in higher monetization for you. In addition, while advertisers previously could only change their bids for all ads running across multiple sites, they can now adjust their bids for individual sites. This means that advertisers can spend more of their budgets on the specific AdSense sites which perform well and generate high-quality leads for the advertiser.

With these recent improvements, we're looking forward to expanding the number of advertisers who use the AdSense content network and increasing the relevance of their ads on your sites. Not only will this increase your earnings potential through the AdSense program, but it will also strengthen the ads ecosystem that benefits publishers, advertisers, and users.

Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

Monday, July 21, 2008 at 12:20:00 PM

Newbie, newbie do

(To the tune of "Strangers in the Night")

"Publishers with websites, creating content
Wondering about their sites
If with their content, they could show some ads
Before the day was done

Something in AdSense, was so inviting
Something about those ads, was so exciting
Something in our Help Center
Told them they must be one

Publishers with websites, yearning for earnings
They were just publishers with websites
Up to the moment
When they placed their first ad code
Little did they know
Revenue was just a click away
A happy-user-generated click away and --

Ever since that day, they've been monetizing
Newbies at the start, they're now optimizing
It turned out so right
For publishers with websites.

Newbie, newbie dooo, da da da daaaa da..."

If my lyrical effort didn't clue you in, and our Newbie Central resource wasn't a big enough clue, let me come right out and say it: we care about new publishers. For the next few weeks, we'll be sharing that caring every Friday, with posts especially intended for all the publishers who have recently joined AdSense, fresh and green like a newly mown lawn in the summertime. Look for this logo to identify posts in this series:


Now let's see if we can apply that same spirit of new beginnings to your sites.

Updated with logo

Posted by Julie Beckmann - AdSense Publisher Support

Friday, July 18, 2008 at 11:22:00 AM

Answers to your referrals retirement questions

Since our announcement about retiring AdSense Referrals during the last week of August, we've noticed a number of questions in your blog comments and in our Help Forum. In this post, we'll address some of the most frequently asked questions.

When you say 'AdSense Referrals' are being retired, does this only mean the program where I refer publishers to AdSense?

No, all referrals will be retired. This applies to referrals for AdWords advertisers, as well as for Google products.

What's the deadline for generating referral conversions once the program has been retired?

In order for you to be credited for a conversion, the referred user must complete the required action by the last week of September 2008. However, please keep in mind that your referral units will no longer display after the last week of August.

I have referral earnings in my account, but they haven't been included in a payment yet. Will I lose all past referral earnings?

No. If you've had successful referral conversions in the past, they'll still be included in your earnings and future payments. As mentioned above, any additional conversions must occur by the last week of September 2008 in order to generate earnings for your account.

Can I sign in to the Google Affiliate Network with my AdSense login information?

At this time, no. You'll need to create a new login and password on the Google Affiliate Network site at http://www.google.com/ads/affiliatenetwork/ .

Will my ad units and search boxes be affected by this Referrals change?

No, AdSense for content and AdSense for search will still be available to publishers in our supported languages, and you can continue to generate ad and search code by visiting your AdSense Setup tab.

Thanks for your feedback, and we hope this helps provide clarification. Feel free to visit our Help Center for additional details about the AdSense Referrals retirement.

Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

Tuesday, July 15, 2008 at 2:29:00 PM

A good start to optimizing your site for Google search

In addition to participating in the AdSense network, you may also be interested in having your site ranked in organic Google search. In this post, I'll highlight some important points for search optimization. While there's no a magic formula to make your site show up first on a search results page, there are some good practices when it comes to links, design, content, and the structure of your site.

First of all, as a reminder, Google organic search and AdSense are independent of each other. Displaying AdSense ads on a site won't change the ranking of the site in Google search in any way. So it follows that sites containing AdSense ads don't receive special treatment in Google search.

Ranking in Google search is based on many different algorithms, and optimization for search is a long, continuous process. For these reasons, and because the techniques might violate our guidelines, we recommend avoiding any techniques that claim to optimize your ranking very quickly or radically. If you have concerns or questions, you can consult other webmasters on a number of forums, including Google's official forum for webmaster-related issues.

We encourage you to monitor the quality of your site's backlinks -- links from any site directing to your site. To increase your site's popularity, check if other sites that discuss similar topics or have a similar reader base are aware your site exists.

Outgoing links are also important and should comply with our guidelines. When you create a link to another site, we recommend first asking yourself: "Is this link going to be useful for my visitors?" or "Is this link likely to be clicked by my visitors?". Don't participate in link schemes or buy/sell links that pass PageRank, as it is against our guidelines and may hurt your site's performance in our search results.

Here are some tips for structuring your site:

• Your pages should have a clear hierarchy and relevant internal links. We also recommend creating a Sitemap and using Google's Webmaster Tools. These tools are useful, user-friendly and will provide information such as where your backlinks come from or which queries visitors used to reach your site.
  
• Use