Your opinion matters to us! So we’ve put together a short survey so you can tell us how we're doing, and what you'd like to see more of on the Inside Adsense blog. We hope you'll take the time to let us know what's on your mind -- click to give us your feedback.

If you’re keen on letting us know how you feel about our product and support, remember that you can opt-in to receive invitations to test new features, surveys about Google AdSense, and heads up about opportunities to provide feedback about your experiences by email. To do so, log-in to Google AdSense and visit the settings page under the 'My Account' tab, edit your 'Email Preference' by checking the box next to 'Google market research,' and click 'Save Changes.'

We look forward hearing from you!

This summer and fall, the AdSense team is coming to visit you! In an effort to work more closely with our publishers, we’ve launched the AdSense in Your City program. As part of the program, members of the AdSense team will be traveling to five cities this summer to hear directly from you, as well as to share best practices, top optimization tips, and new products.

Last month, we kicked off our first AdSense in Your City event in Mountain View, California. Sixty publishers came to Google to learn how to make more money with AdSense, to meet members of the AdSense team, and to get to know each other.

Today we’re heading to Santa Monica, and later this summer we’ll be visiting Chicago, New York, and Boston. While attendance is very limited due to space constraints, we have a few more spots in some cities. If you’d like to request an invitation to an event, please sign up here. Though invitations will be sent on a first-come, first-served basis, we’ll do our best to include as many of you as possible. We'll also be sure to make sessions available online early this fall.

Throughout the summer, look for updates on the blog from the AdSense team who will be traveling to these cities. We’ll also be tweeting live from the events (follow us at http://twitter.com/AdSense) and posting videos and publisher interviews.

And this is just the beginning. We’d like to expand this program to be able to travel to more cities around the United States and to meet with more of you face to face. Are you a publisher in Austin? Seattle? Orlando? Leave us a comment and let us know if we should bring AdSense in Your City to your city next!

In the next part of our video series, Alton, our Optimization specialist, shares with us his experience working with publishers, his favorite meal at Google, and some recommendations on summer reading.

For more videos, please visit our YouTube channel.

In the last video of this series, Evanne, a member of the Partner Development team, talks about her favorite Google perk, her obsession with music, and an important tip she’d like to share with all of you.

We hope you’ve enjoyed learning more about what goes on behind the scenes in AdSense. If you have feedback on this series, or ideas for future series, we’d love to hear them so please leave us a comment!

Over the last two years, the AdSense team has offered the powerful Google Custom Search Engine (CSE) product as an improvement over the original AdSense for search. After some recent improvements, we're now ready to retire the older version of AdSense for search. If the Google logo on your search results page reads "Powered by Google" instead of the newer "Google Custom Search" then you haven't yet upgraded to the newer version. The new AdSense for search with CSE is available in your account, and we encourage you to make the switch by updating your code as soon as possible.

AdSense for search with CSE gives you more control over your search results without changing how you earn money showing AdSense for search ads. For example, with the new version, you'll have access to advanced features like refinements and promotions. Our team has developed a number of updates and improvements during the past few months, and you can access more advanced features at www.google.com/cse.

Your existing AdSense for search box will continue to work normally for a few more months, and we'll be sure to update you when we retire this version. To take advantage of the benefits offered by the new version of AdSense for search and ensure you don't miss any revenue during the transition, we encourage you to update your code now. You'll just need to regenerate your AdSense for search code by signing in to your account and following these instructions:

1. Visit your "AdSense Setup" tab and select "AdSense for Search."
2. Select the sites you'd like your users to be able to search across (Learn More).
3. Customize the look and feel of your search engine results.
4. Update the code on your website.

For more information about AdSense for search with CSE, please visit our Help Center.

You may have noticed a few posts from me recently, so I wanted to introduce myself to all of you, our fantastic publishers and Inside AdSense blog readers. I've spent the last few years in AdWords (for those of you who are also advertisers, you may remember my name from posts to the Inside AdWords blog) and am very excited to join the AdSense team!

I’m really looking forward to meeting some of you in person at our AdSense in Your City events and engaging with you through our other social media channels. If you don’t already, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, and leave us some comments so we know what you'd like to hear more about. We want to make sure that you’re getting the information you need, and will do our best to provide you with whatever content you find most interesting and useful. To start things off, we're giving the blog a little makeover so it's easier to read and navigate. You should notice the new background soon, and we'd love to hear what you think!

For any technical or account questions, check out the Help Forum, where you can interact with AdSense employees, Top Contributors (expert AdSense users vetted by the AdSense team), and a vibrant community of online publishers ready and willing to answer your toughest questions.

No matter which channel you choose, we look forward to interacting with you. See you in cyberspace!

We're excited to announce a revamped design of three of our AdSense for content ad units! After analyzing publisher site layouts and reviewing requests around the world, we decided to make our formats more space-efficient and visually pleasing by changing the layout of the text. We spent a lot of time experimenting with different possibilities, and we're starting with changes to the following ad units:

• Leaderboard (728x90): the title, description, and URL are now arranged in rows instead of columns (except in the case when only one ad is showing)
• Medium and large rectangles (300x250, 336x280): the URL is now in the same line as the title

In certain cases, you'll also see a few minor adjustments to the font size. For example, the font size for the leaderboard with four ads is much more readable. Please note that these changes will roll out over the next few weeks.


During testing, the redesigned ads performed extremely well. We'll continue to experiment and innovate on our formats to help you monetize your content, and we encourage you to submit ideas in the comments below.

Posted by Amy Wu - AdSense Product Manager

Update: We've been listening to your feedback and monitoring the performance of the new ad layouts closely as we continue our gradual rollout. After much consideration, we've decided to return to a 3 line layout in the medium rectangle (300x250) so the URLs have more space. Thanks for your input thus far, and we'll continue to investigate ways to improve the performance of your ad units.

We wanted to give you all a heads up about a new Google blog that is focused on helping small businesses grow. Check out their first post below and visit googlesmb.blogspot.com to follow their future posts and updates. -ed.

Most every business, including ours, starts small. These days, technology is giving businesses even more ways to grow bigger... faster.

In our recent Small Business series on the Official Google Blog, a handful of real-life entrepreneurs have shared their experiences building companies from scratch and embracing Internet tools that have taken their businesses to the next level. We’ve received fantastic feedback about these posts, and realized that there’s a healthy appetite among small- and medium-sized business owners who want to know all about the latest web tools and tricks. Fortunately, we have lots more to share with you, too!

That’s why we’re introducing the Google Small Business Blog, a central hub that brings together all the information about our products, features and projects of specific interest to the small business community. Rather than having to sleuth around in many different locations for details about templates for creating video ads on YouTube, tips for your employees using Gmail or how to respond to the business reviews on your Place Page, you can find all of this helpful information right here in one place.

Of course, we’ll continue to post relevant news about individual services such as AdWords, Apps, Google Places and YouTube on their respective “home” blogs, but feel free to visit or subscribe to the Google Small Business Blog to get everything relating to your small business needs. We’re starting small today, but who knows what tomorrow will have in store!

Last week I was given the opportunity to attend the Boston AdSense In Your City event. Though Boston technically isn’t my city (I’m a New Yorker by birth) I can see why so many of our fabulous publishers call it home.

Despite our varied interests (ranging from hot sauce to sheepdogs, ab workouts to online video games), every single person in that room was connected by their intense passion for their site’s subject, experience with AdSense, and desire to learn more.

We covered a lot in a single afternoon, and the Googlers learned a lot about your needs and concerns. Whether it was a feature request for the new user interface, a question about what Analytics report to check to help maximize ROI, a clarification about how to leverage DoubleClick for Publishers Small Business, or an optimization tip for the group, I was thrilled to see such lively discussion and engaged participation.

My favorite part of the day was getting some one-on-one time with a few publishers during the cocktail reception and individual optimization sessions. Regardless of site content or amount of product experience, everyone I spoke to shared a similar story: the money earned from AdSense has allowed them to spend more time doing the things they love. Some had more time to build great content for their users, others to quit their day job and blog about their favorite hobby. I was lucky enough to speak to two publishers who shared that AdSense not only allowed them to spend more time with their families, but even to put their kids through college.

Though Boston was the last stop of the AdSense In Your City roadshows, we hope to come visit more of you in the coming months. We’ve looked at all of the comments left so far, and will be sure to ask all of you before we decide where to go next. Make sure you’re opted in to receive special offers via email so we can invite you to events like this, and hopefully AdSense will get to see you in your city very soon!

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

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

London - 6pm Saturday
Alexandria - 7pm Saturday
Hyderabad - 10:30pm Saturday
Jakarta - 12am Sunday
Perth - 1am Sunday

To learn more about what goes on during these maintenance periods, check out this Inside AdSense post.

In an effort to expand the availability of sensitive category blocking (also known as category filtering) worldwide, we’re happy to announce that sensitive category blocking has now officially launched in Japanese, Chinese, Polish, and Portuguese. As you might know, this feature is also available in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, and Arabic with testing being done for Russian.

With sensitive category blocking, you can prevent ads from up to 11 specific categories from appearing on your pages. Ads in these categories will be blocked if they're in any of the supported languages, regardless of how they've been targeted to your pages.

If you’d like to set up sensitive category blocking, please sign in to your AdSense account and visit the Ad Review Center, located under the 'AdSense Setup' tab. Once you click 'change,' you'll be able to view the full list of categories you can block. In addition, to help you understand the impact of applying these filters, we'll show you the percentage of revenue and ad impressions you've been receiving from each category in the last 30 days.

For more information about sensitive category blocking, we encourage you to visit our Help Center.

Attention all Bloggers! We know many of you use AdSense to monetize your blog, and we wanted to be sure you didn't miss out on the invitation to Blogger's 11th Birthday party. Using Meetup Everywhere, you can find a party in your area that will be filled with local bloggers like you. We hope you’ll take advantage of this great opportunity to swap stories about your readers, learn about some new sites, share tips about earning with AdSense, and get to know other passionate bloggers. Details are highlighted below, but check out the official Blogger post for more information.

• What: Blogger’s 11th birthday celebration!
• How: Sign up for a Meetup near you or get one going in your town.
• Where: Anywhere you are.
• Who: Everyone! You never know who might show up.
• When: Any time on Tuesday, August 31, 2010
• RSVP: http://www.meetup.com/bloggerfiesta/

Have you checked your AdSense email preferences lately? If not, you may be missing out on important information and special offers without realizing. Take a minute to log in and update your email preferences under the ‘My Account’ tab.

Want to be invited to upcoming events like AdSense In Your City? Make sure you check the box next to Special Offers when you edit your email preferences so you can stay up-to-date with giveaways and other special programs in your area.

Want tips from the AdSense team for how to earn more with your AdSense account? Check Customized help and performance suggestions and/or Newsletters so we can offer personalized guidance to improve performance and maximize your revenue.

Want to help us improve AdSense by testing out features like the new AdSense interface? Check Google Market Research and you’ll be able to share your valuable feedback with us through surveys and beta tests.

Want promotions and key updates for other Google products that can help you grow your AdSense business? Check Information about other Google products and services which may be of interest to you so we can send you news and coupons based on your potential needs.

We want to help you earn more with tips and promotions, invite you to in-person events, and gather your feedback so we can continue to improve AdSense. So log in, update your preferences, and take advantage of the opportunities coming your way from the AdSense team!

Members of the AdSense team from all over the world say hello from Mountain View, CA!

To keep you updated with the latest industry news, insights, and best practices, we’d like to let you know about an upcoming educational opportunity held in partnership with the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB).

On September 14, 2010, the Google AdSense team will be co-hosting a webinar with the IAB Long Tail Alliance to cover “What You Need to Know about AdSense.” Members from the AdSense team will cover tips and best practices to help you maximize your AdSense revenue.

Click here to register for the webinar.

If you’d like access to future IAB Long Tail Alliance seminars and events, you can become an IAB Long Tail Alliance member. Membership provides you with access to an ongoing series of web seminars, resources, and events that are all specifically designed for small and growing publishers. Register using the promotional code GOOGLELTA to receive $100 off the price of a membership.

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

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

London - 6pm Saturday
Alexandria - 8pm Saturday
Hyderabad - 10:30pm Saturday
Jakarta - 12am Sunday
Perth - 1am Sunday

To learn more about what goes on during these maintenance periods, check out this Inside AdSense post.

If you’ve ever had a question about your AdSense account, you’ve likely visited our Help forum, a virtual meeting place where a community of publishers, advertisers, AdSense experts, and Google employees convene to discuss all things AdSense.

If you browse through the discussions, you’ll notice replies from Google employees and non-Google contributors who are passionate AdSense publishers and experts. We rely on all of you to keep the conversations lively, providing each other with information that ensures the forum is a fantastic place for you to interact, troubleshoot, and learn from one another.

You’ll also notice some posts from our Top Contributors. Top Contributors are the rock star volunteers of the forum who regularly help their fellow forum members by answering questions and providing product expertise. We trust our Top Contributors to give you top quality advice; in fact, the Top Contributors teach us new things almost every day! From optimizations to tuna fishing, they know a lot, and we’re working on ways to introduce some of them to you in the coming weeks.

In the meantime, we encourage you take a look through the current forum discussions and join the conversation!

Many publishers are very good at recommending just the right stuff for their users. We love seeing influential publishers in all genres — from foodies to techies to moms to shopping experts — delight users by giving them access to products and services that they believe in. When these trusted publishers recommend a book, a gadget, or a new perfume, their audiences are very likely to follow.

Have you ever wondered if your users buy the products you recommend? Have you wished you could be rewarded for driving sales and conversions? You can. With Google Affiliate Network, publishers can access cost-per-action (CPA) or affiliate ads. This means that you can start working with advertisers who will pay you a performance fee for driving a sale or other conversion. Many AdSense publishers have already started using Google Affiliate Network to complement their AdSense ads and earn additional revenue.

Here’s how to get started:

1. Sign up for a Google Affiliate Network account with your AdSense Publisher ID.
2. As soon as you're approved for Google Affiliate Network, sign in and apply for advertiser programs.
3. Follow the instructions to start displaying cost-per-action ads.

Check out our Beginner’s Guide to help you through the process of becoming a successful affiliate publisher and continue reading for the answers to our frequently asked questions.

How are Google Affiliate Network ads different from the ads I serve through Google AdSense?
Affiliate programs are not ad units or campaigns; they are ongoing programs that allow advertisers to reward publishers (or “affiliate partners”) for driving sales or conversions. While your AdSense ads are automatically targeted, you will select which Google Affiliate Network advertiser programs to join and then choose which affiliate ads to add to your site.

Can I promote my Google Affiliate Network ads?
You may promote Google Affiliate Network ads on your site. If you endorse the product that you are referring, feel free to let your users know. By adding your personal review of the products you refer, you can help your users make more informed choices.

Note that you may not promote or call attention to AdSense ads in the same way. Learn more about important differences between CPC and CPA ads that explain the reasoning behind these separate policies.

What kinds of advertisers are in the Google Affiliate Network?
We have a diverse range of advertisers who run successful affiliate programs through our network. Just a few examples include Target, Barnes and Noble.com, Blue Nile, Verizon Wireless, Aéropostale, and Wedding Channel Store (The Knot).

Is this available for publishers outside the United States?
Yes, publishers in all countries supported by AdSense are eligible. However, the majority of advertisers in the Google Affiliate Network are currently focused on the US market.

How do I get paid?
If you've earned at least the minimum commission, you'll receive consolidated payments through your Google AdSense account.

Last year, we took a big step forward in improving customization of the look and feel of results by providing plug-n-play themes in the Custom Search Element. This enabled you to choose from among a palette of predefined styles. You can find a style that matches your website and start using search, or further customize the style if you like.

We’re taking themes one step further. Each theme now has ads displayed with a look and feel that match the overall style used for the search results.

The result is harmony between search results and ads, which we think makes for a great user experience. The following screenshots show search results and ads for three different themes: espresso, minimalist and green sky.



We hope you agree that your visitors will enjoy themed ads. As always, be sure to send us your feedback.

As we mentioned in our post last week, we’re working on ways to introduce you to our Top Contributors to the help forum. A Top Contributor (TC) for over a year, Gracey tells us about why she became a TC, shares some of her experiences as an AdSense publisher, and provides some tips for all of you. We hope you enjoy getting to know her, and continue to visit the help forum with any questions you may have!

What does it mean to be a Top Contributor (TC), and what do you like about it?
Being a TC gives me the ability to call on an AdSense Pro to help out someone who really needs help; for me, that's one of the main reasons I accepted the invitation. The other thing I really enjoy about being a TC is the ability to call on other TCs for help when a situation has me stumped. All of the TCs are good people, each with different areas of expertise. I believe in 'paying it forward' or the old adage 'what goes around, comes around,' so in helping others, I believe that someday when I need help, there will be someone there to help me.
What it doesn't mean is that I'm any smarter than the next publisher -- most of what I know came from the AdSense Help Center and from my own experiences, and these are things any publisher or volunteer in the help forum can learn. I like that being a TC, I learn something new every day. Helping others to resolve issues often means searching for answers I don't already have.
Being a TC also doesn't mean that any of my sites are exempt from being disabled. Just like any other publisher, my sites must meet quality standards and follow all the AdSense program policies and Webmaster Guidelines.

Are you a Google employee?
No, I'm not employed by Google in any capacity. I'm simply a publisher -- one who ran into her own problems a while back and came to the help forum for guidance. I stuck around the forum because I started learning things that I didn't know before.

What is your experience like as a publisher?
I've been an AdSense publisher since 2005. I have about 13 blogs and 3 websites, with AdSense ads displayed on only two of my blogs and one of my websites. I’m careful to only use AdSense on sites I feel would be acceptable to AdWords advertisers. It's important to me to maintain the quality of my sites, and at this point in time my schedule is busy enough that I can only reasonably maintain 3 or 4 of my sites on a regular basis. One of my sites (without AdSense ads on it because it's about AdSense and Blogger) has been helpful for many new publishers.

What's the most important piece of advice you can give a new publisher to help them make the most of AdSense?
I think the most important thing new publishers can do for themselves is read. Read everything available in the Help Center that relates to the products you are going to use, and do that before putting ads all over your website.
One other thing I'd tell a new publisher is to ask for clarification in the help forum when he or she doesn’t understand the meaning of a policy. AdSense provides a great deal of information to help publishers, but many of them run full tilt to the ad code and never look back at the policies and guidelines.

How can publishers best utilize AdSense for content?
AdSense for content requires some work and diligence. Rather than just grabbing ad codes and plastering them wherever you can on a site, take the time to set up test ads on your site pages. Setting up a different ad size, format, or color combination on various pages throughout your site can help you discover the ones that may be the most effective for you. Use custom channels for each ad on each page during this simple test and give it some time. After a month or so, when you view the reports for each of these ads you should have a good idea of what ad formats and colors work best on your site.

"Why do I earn more money from some ads and less from others? Why do my AdSense for content earnings vary from day to day, or week to week?"

If you’ve asked yourself questions like these before, you’re not alone -- we often hear from publishers that they’re unsure of how earnings are calculated and why their earnings fluctuate. As part of our efforts to be more transparent with publishers, we’re kicking off a two-part series to help explain these topics. With the help of Hal Varian, the Chief Economist here at Google, we’ll show you how ads are targeted to your pages, priced by the ad auction, and translated into the earnings you receive.

Today, Hal will introduce you to the ad auction for AdSense for content ads, and explain both what it’s for and how it works. Like a traditional auction, advertisers bid in our ad auction to show ads on your pages. The number and price of ads in the auction changes from moment to moment, based on how much advertisers are willing to spend and how they've set up their ad campaigns -- this is why we call our auction ‘dynamic,’ as these factors can then affect how much you earn.

If you’re ready to learn more about the ad auction and how specific prices are calculated, watch the video below and visit our Help Center.




So what can you do as a publisher to ensure you’re maximizing your earnings? Here are some tried-and-true tips to increase the amount of competition among advertisers in the ad auction for your pages.

• Keep creating high-quality sites full of original content to attract more advertisers, and use Google Analytics to see which content is generating revenue.
• Try adding popular advertiser formats such as the 300x250 medium rectangle to your pages.
• Turn your channels into targetable ad placements to help advertisers identify and target premium locations on your pages.
• Experiment to find the optimal locations for your ads, while making sure that your layouts won't generate accidental clicks.
• Help advertisers find your sites by claiming them in Ad Planner. You can add descriptions and categories that describe your content, which will help increase the visibility of your ad units to interested advertisers.

To understand changes in your earnings, we also recommend reviewing our two-part blog series, 'Diagnosing Revenue Fluctuations.'

That’s it for today. In Part II of our series, we’ll discuss how smart pricing affects advertiser bids in the ad auction, and clear up some myths about how it works.

Did you know that a simple change like enabling both text and image ads can boost your eCPM and revenue? Or that a 300x250 medium rectangle typically performs much better in terms of revenue than a 250x250 square? Or that widening an AdSense search box can double the number of queries performed on your site, leading to higher earnings? If you didn’t, don’t sweat it -- the AdSense team and I have come up with a list of six top optimization tips and best practices that can help you earn more quickly.

Many of our publishers’ sites and accounts aren’t fully optimized for AdSense, which means that they’re not earning as much as they potentially could. In these AdSense optimization videos, we walk you through some of the top optimization techniques and explain why they’re helpful in boosting your eCPM and revenue. Incorporating these techniques into your website and AdSense ad layout can help you monetize your traffic like never before!

In the six-part video series, we talk about how to:

1. Upgrade to high-performing units
2. Monetize more content
3. Optimize search box placement
4. Opt-in to text and image ads
5. Use link units
6. Opt-in to placement targeting

Even if you consider yourself an AdSense expert, you’ll probably learn a few new and exciting tips from this series. Take a look at the 'Upgrade to high-performing units' video below, check out all six videos on the official AdSense YouTube channel, and visit our optimization essentials center for more information.

Last week, in the first half of our series designed to help you better understand your earnings, we introduced you to the ad auction for AdSense for content. To recap, eligible ads compete to appear on your pages; our ad auction determines which ads show, and how much you can potentially earn from them.

Now, let’s talk about smart pricing, a tool designed to help advertisers bid efficiently and effectively on many publishers’ ad auctions at once. Our Chief Economist, Hal Varian, explains the purpose of smart pricing, how it plays a role in the ad auction, and how it benefits the entire advertising ecosystem of publishers, advertisers, and users.

Although we aren’t able to provide detailed explanations of our algorithms, we’d like to address a common misconception and show that smart pricing isn’t intended to be a ‘punishment’ for publishers. It’s designed to increase advertiser confidence in AdSense sites by helping them set more accurate bids that reflect the business results they’re looking for. This then allows advertisers to increase their maximum bids, which ultimately helps publishers earn more in the long run.

We’ll let Hal explain the concept of smart pricing in more detail:




Finally, we’d like to take a moment to address some of the questions we’ve received about the relationship between smart pricing and the AdSense for content revenue share. Smart pricing can impact which ad wins an auction for a particular content page. However, since the revenue share is fixed for all publishers, smart pricing doesn’t impact the percentage you actually earn for a valid click. Any changes to advertiser bids as a result of smart pricing will proportionately affect the amount both Google and the publisher earn.

Thanks for following our two-part earnings series. We hope you found the content useful, and that you now have a better understanding of the factors that influence your earnings.

Last year we launched sensitive category blocking in order to give you more control over the ads that appear on your sites by letting you opt out of receiving ads that fall into potentially sensitive specific categories such as dating, religion, and politics.

Today we’re excited to announce that we’re beginning to test a related new feature called general category blocking with a small group of publishers. General category blocking will allow you to block even more categories of ads from appearing on your site. We’re testing this feature with 170 more specific categories, including finance, travel, job, and automotive. This feature will allow publishers to block up to 50 ad categories from among a broad range of 170 fine grained categories. To help you understand potential changes to your earnings, we’ll provide you with the percentage of your total revenue and total impressions that fall under each category.

General category blocking will initially apply only to ads in English, regardless of the language of the site. We are working on expanding it to other languages in the future.

This feature is available in the new AdSense interface, which is currently in beta and being tested by a limited number of publishers.



Although we're not able to expand this test to additional publishers at this time, we wanted to give you a glimpse into one of the ways we're working to give you even more control over the ads that appear on your site. Over the coming months we’ll be working hard to refine this feature so that we can roll it out more broadly in the future. Please stay tuned to the blog for any updates, and feel free to leave us a comment in the meantime.

With the holiday season fast approaching, everyone is spending more online. As consumers start shopping for gifts, searching for holiday activities, and booking vacations, advertisers are putting more of their marketing dollars online to reach these potential customers. This means there is an increased demand for the ad space on your site and an opportunity for you to earn more. To help you capitalize on this trend, we recommend you take advantage of placement targeting.

Many advertisers create targeted brand campaigns at this time of year that are shown on AdSense sites in the Google Display Network. In fact, 99% of Google’s 1000 largest advertisers run campaigns on the Display Network. To ensure their brand is noticed by the right shoppers, advertisers will often use placement targeting to show their ads on websites in the Display Network that cater to their target audiences.

You can take advantage of this holiday increase in advertiser spend, and help advertisers placement target specific sections of your site using a feature called ad placements. By creating an ad placement, you’ll make sections of your site available to be targeted directly by AdWords advertisers.

Imagine a sport shoe manufacturer. To ensure his shoes get to the right consumers for the holidays, he may want to select sites within the Display Network that appeal to 25- to 34-year-old athletic males looking to purchase athletic shoes. As a publisher with a sports site, you can create ad placements for specific segments of your site so that the sport shoe manufacturer can find you based on these criteria. You can provide descriptions of your site, general demographic segment / audience information, and where the ads appear on your site. Placement targeting connects you directly to the advertisers who want to reach your readers, and are ready to spend their holiday budgets to do just that.

In the coming weeks, we’ll post more tips on how to make the most of placement targeting. In the meantime, check out the Help Center and this video to learn more about placement targeting and how you can get started. The sooner you do so, the sooner advertisers can see your ad placements and potentially include you in their holiday campaigns!

We're excited to announce the launch of Western Union Quick Cash® payments in four countries in Africa! You can now select Western Union Quick Cash payments in:

• Algeria
• Ghana
• Kenya
• Uganda

Western Union Quick Cash payments will reach you faster than checks, and they're free of charge. Payments will continue to follow our normal payment schedule and will be available for pickup in your local currency at your local Western Union agent the day after they're issued.

A couple of things to note: We can send Western Union payments only to publishers that have an individual account at this time. Also, the payee name on your account must exactly match the government-issued ID card that you'll use when picking up your payments. For more information on how to sign up for and pick up Western Union payments, please visit our Help Center.

Last week, we introduced you to placement targeting as a great way to capitalize on the increase in advertiser spend during the holiday season. This week, we’re kicking off our three-part optimization series to help you maximize your earnings by taking advantage of DoubleClick Ad Planner. Ad Planner can help you market your site, make it easier for advertisers to search for you, and improve the data that these advertisers can see.

As you may recall from last week’s post, the first step to enabling placement-targeted ads to appear on your pages is to set up your custom channels as ad placements. Ad placements are specific groups of ad units where an advertiser can choose to place their ads using placement targeting. This enables advertisers to better identify websites that reach their target audiences based on the descriptions publishers provide about their sites, describing the content of their pages or the type of users who visit them. Turning custom channels into ad placements is simple. To learn more, check out our YouTube video and visit our Help Center.

Once you’ve set up your ad placements, we encourage you to try out DoubleClick Ad Planner, a free media planning tool that helps advertisers find the sites their audiences are likely to visit and helps publishers make their sites easier to target.

In Ad Planner, you can claim the sites you own and customize their descriptions. 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. Doing this allows advertisers to easily find ad placement descriptions that match the interests of their target audiences. More targeted ads leads to a better user experience on your site and a greater opportunity to increase your earnings. For more information on how to get started, watch this brief introduction to DoubleClick Ad Planner and sign up today.

Check back next week for more ‘tis the season for placement targeting tips!

In the past, we've talked about ad placements that are prone to generate invalid clicks. In a past post, for example, Mike noted that publishers should be careful about placing ads too close to navigational controls or other clickable page elements.

It's in the best interest of the user, advertiser, and publisher to avoid implementations that lead to invalid click activity. As you can imagine, users aren't very happy if they accidentally click an ad instead of a link on your page and are directed away from your site. Advertisers also don’t want to be charged for a click that a user made accidentally (though of course we do not charge advertisers for invalid clicks that we detect). And why should publishers care? Well, if we see that most of the clicks coming from your pages are invalid, we may need to disable your account to protect our advertisers.

One type of site we wanted to talk about are Flash-based game sites. Playing games on these sites, you'll notice that ads are often placed very close to the Flash player where the game is played. Publishers may reason that they're providing maximum value to advertisers by placing their ads very close to the area where their users are focused. However, many of these Flash games are played with a mouse, and the action in the games can lead users to do a lot of rapid cursor movements and clicking. We've seen many cases where ads were placed too closely to where the action was taking place, generating many accidental clicks.

Since each game and site are unique, we can't advise publishers on an exact distance between ads and games, but we do recommend a minimum distance of 150 pixels between the Flash player and ads.

We've worked with publishers on these issues in the past and noticed that increasing the distance between Flash player and ads has had, on average, a positive long-term effect on CPCs. The reason for this is smart pricing. As you may know, the revenue you receive is based on the amount an AdWords advertiser pays for each click on their Google ad. The amount the advertiser pays varies per ad and from website to website, based on the likelihood that a click will result in a conversion for the advertiser. If we determine that clicks on a site are less likely to lead to business results for an advertiser (e.g., an online sale or registration), we reduce the price that an advertiser will pay for those clicks.

So, in short: Moving the ads further away from Flash games decreases the likelihood of accidental clicks and increases the number of clicks leading to business results for advertisers. A good deal for all involved.

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

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

London - 6pm Saturday
Alexandria - 8pm Saturday
Hyderabad - 10:30pm Saturday
Jakarta - 12am Sunday
Perth - 1am Sunday

To learn more about what goes on during these maintenance periods, check out this Inside AdSense post.

Last week, we discussed DoubleClick Ad Planner, a media planning tool to help you improve your placement targeting. Now that you’ve made your website visible to advertisers with Ad Planner and ad placements, we want to help you ensure that your ad units are also visible to advertisers and ready to be targeted. Here’s how to take advantage of advertiser spend with your ad units:

1. Implement your ad units above the fold and near your content, where users are already engaging with your site. “Above the fold” refers to the area on a page that a user can see without scrolling down.

2. Where possible, use top-performing ad sizes like the medium rectangle (300x250), large rectangle (336x280), leaderboard (728x90), and wide skyscraper (160x600).

3. Enable your ad units to show text and image ads, so that all relevant, available ad inventory is competing to appear on your site. Many advertiser campaigns are made up of image ads, so we highly recommend activating this feature to take full advantage.

Once you've made the changes, not only will your ad placements be ready for this holiday season, but they’ll also be targetable by advertisers in future ad campaigns.

To learn more about these topics, check out our YouTube videos on image ads and high performing ad units, or read more in our Help Center.

Check back next week for more ‘Tis the Season for Placement Targeting tips!

We hope you found our last post on invalid clicks useful. Today we wanted to give you more advice on this topic and talk about ads on pages containing interactive media, such as videos and games.

We understand that video content pages aren't as easy to monetize as regular text-based pages and that publishers are interested in experimenting with different ad placements, but we’d like to clarify some of our policies addressing AdSense for content ads in interactive media environments:

• We don’t allow publishers to overlay AdSense for content ads on video content.
• We don’t allow publishers to implement AdSense for content ads as in-stream video placements.
• We don’t allow publishers to implement AdSense for content ads on interstitial pages. So if a user has decided to watch a video, you may not implement ads on pages saying “your video will start in 15 seconds." We’ve also seen this placement on Flash gaming sites in the form of an ad being shown to the user while the game is loading in the background. However, even if you allow users to skip these ads or close them, this placement is not allowed.

Now for the good news: If you are interested in monetizing overlay or in-stream placements on your video content, please check out AdSense for video. Similarly, if you are interested in placing ads on interstitial pages on your Flash gaming sites, read about AdSense for games. The key difference between using these products and AdSense for content is that with AdSense for games and AdSense for video, we only show ads from a pool of advertisers who specifically target these kinds of placements and have optimized their campaigns and creatives towards them.

Think about your users and advertisers when implementing AdSense ads on your sites. Make sure that ads are separated enough from the content to prevent accidental clicks, and that ads are always recognizable as such. Remember that AdSense is an ecosystem that will continue to thrive as long as all parties remain happy within it. Users are happy to see relevant and useful ads that are not obtrusive or misleading, advertisers are happy to reach their target audience and get good returns on their investment, and you - the publisher - will be happy to have an AdSense account in good standing.

Over the past several weeks, we’ve given you tips about how to take advantage of placement targeting as advertiser spend increases during the holiday season. In this final post of our “‘Tis the season for placement targeting” series, we’ll take a step back to talk about a popular topic that's generated buzz around Google and the online advertising industry: display advertising. This is especially relevant to this series, as the goal of placement targeting is to offer premium space to advertisers so they can effectively reach their audiences. And these days, when you're talking about premium space, you're usually talking about space that's devoted to display ads.

Advertising on Google started out with four lines of text. In addition to the original text ads, you’re probably familiar with the image, video, and rich media ads we now offer. Did you know that, other than ads shown with search results, more than 40 percent of the ads that we show are now non-text ads? More and more advertisers are creating display ad campaigns as an interactive and engaging means to reach users. To take full advantage of these ads, refer to our last post on enabling ad units to show text and image ads.

Display advertising is a big area of focus for Google. We believe that the new technology we’re developing to make display advertising work better will help to grow the display advertising pie for all publishers, by orders of magnitude. We shouldn’t be asking how publishers can make another 5 or 10 percent out of display advertising in the next few years. We should be looking at how the industry can double or triple in size.

To learn more about Google’s position on display advertising and the steps we’re taking to push the thinking to the next level, read our recent blog post on the Official Google Blog.

This wraps up our “‘Tis the Season for placement targeting” series. We hope you learned a bit more about the impact of placement targeting and how you can take advantage of this feature to earn more from your online content

Starting a new program can be overwhelming. What steps should you take to get off on the right foot and make the most of your account? To help you make your way with AdSense, we're delighted to introduce the AdSense Checklist to publishers viewing our U.S. Help Center.

If your language preference is set to U.S. English and you are logged in your Google Account, you'll find the checklist in the left navigation bar of the Help Center. You can recognize it by the progress bar. The checklist is divided into five parts, offering basic recommendations, required steps, and tips to help you grow your account to its full potential.

When you check an item, you'll see the progress bar update accordingly. This will help you in several ways. If you're new to AdSense, you'll get a clear overview of what steps to follow to make the most of your account. If you’re already an experienced AdSense publisher, you'll also have the chance to revisit the basics, and further develop your use of the program.

The progress bar can help you identify quickly how many of the recommended steps you’ve completed, and the checklist will suggest which step you can take next.

We hope that this Help Center feature will be useful to you and help you grow with the AdSense program! If you have other great ideas for ways to help newbies get started with AdSense or thoughts on how to make the checklist even better, join the conversation in our forum.

After launching in four African countries earlier this month, we're excited to announce the arrival of Western Union Quick Cash® payments for Thailand!

For those of you who are not familiar with this form of payment, Western Union Quick Cash payments are free of charge and will reach you faster than checks. Payments will continue to follow our normal payment schedule and will be available for pickup in your local currency at your local Western Union agent the day after they're issued.

A couple of things to note: We can send Western Union payments only to publishers that have an individual account at this time. Also, the payee name on your account must exactly match the government-issued ID card that you'll use when picking up your payments. For more information on how to sign up for and pick up Western Union payments, please visit our Help Center.

Happy Halloween from the Google AdSense Team!

Posted by Katrina Kurnit - Inside AdSense Team

Over the summer, we traveled to five cities across the US for our AdSense in Your City program. The first round of roadshows got great reviews from attendees, so we wanted to extend the program to meet more of you and provide publishers in a different part of the country with personalized optimization tips.

On Wednesday, November 10, we’ll be in Seattle for our fall AdSense in Your City adventure. A few of our optimizers will be in town to hold 20-minute optimization sessions at a local coffee shop between 10:00 am and 4:00 pm. We’re going to keep it casual this time around, so we can provide one-on-one consultations to as many of you as possible.

We’d love to meet you, so please fill out this form if you’ll be in the Seattle area on November 10 and would like to schedule an appointment with our team. Once we get your RSVP, we'll follow up via email with additional details if there's still room. Scheduling will be done on a first-come, first-served basis, but we’ll do our best to include as many of you as space will allow.

See you in Seattle!

Next week, our friends from the DFP Small Business team will be hosting a free online seminar to introduce AdSense publishers to DFP Small Business.

For those unfamiliar with DFP Small Business, it's Google’s free hosted ad serving solution that helps website publishers manage and grow their online advertising business. If you don’t currently have an account, learn more and sign up for free today by visiting the DFP Small Business website.

The webinar will provide you with an introduction to ad serving, a live demo of DFP Small Business, and best practices for setting up your ad inventory and trafficking an ad campaign.

Title: Getting started with DFP Small Business
Host: The DFP Small Business Team
Date and Time: Wednesday November 10 at 10AM GMT

Register here.

All publishers are welcome to attend the webinar, but please note the UK friendly start time of the session.

We’re very excited to announce the launch of our newest Inside AdSense blog: Inside AdSense Polska! Like our other Inside AdSense blogs, it will provide readers with optimization tips, product announcements, and other program information to help our Polish publishers maximize their earnings and make the most out of their Google AdSense accounts.


There’s been an increase in Google AdSense interest within the rapidly developing Polish online advertising market. We’ve been supporting our Polish publishers through our Help Forum, where they can share experiences and help one another with their AdSense-related issues, and are thrilled to be taking the next step with this new information platform.

Joining English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Turkish, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese - Traditional, Chinese - Simplified, and Korean, Inside AdSense Polska is our fourteenth Inside AdSense blog worldwide. Check out the right navigation bar under the header “Related Google Blogs” for links to all of them! We hope to launch additional Inside AdSense blogs in the future so we can continue to reach even more of our global publishers.

Wherever in the world you are, we hope to see you Inside AdSense!

Last November we announced that we were starting to test a new interface with a limited group of publishers. Since then, we’ve been focused on adding new features and incorporating feedback from our testers. Today, we’re excited to announce that we’re rolling out the new AdSense interface to all publishers globally. You should now see a “Try the new AdSense interface” link appear in the upper corner of your account. Clicking the link will bring you to the new interface.

Built based on feedback we’ve heard from you, our publishers, the new interface is full of features designed to help you make more money with AdSense. We want to thank you for all the input you’ve given us, and show you some of the ways it’s reflected in the new interface.

You’ve told us that data that helps you better understand your performance is critical to growing your revenue, so we’ve made sure that the new interface gives you more insights.
You can now run even more detailed performance reports by ad type, ad size, ad unit, targeting type, and bid type for total earnings and other metrics, over custom date ranges. You’ll also find graphs of your data on the new Performance reports tab. You can quickly view impressions, clicks, and earnings all in one graph, compare text ad performance to image ad performance, compare date ranges, and easily analyze data to recognize trends.

You’ve continued to let us know that protecting your brand by having control over the ads that run on your site is extremely important, so we’ve improved our ad controls and made them easier to use.
All ad controls are now in one place, on the Allow and block ads tab. Here, you’ll be able to filter ads from specific advertisers, categories, and ad networks. In addition, you’ll notice that we’ve updated the ad review center to make it easier to review and manage ads that have been placement-targeted to your sites. You can now search for ads in the ad review center by ad type, keyword, URL, or ad network, and choose to allow or block them.

You’ve shared with us the need to manage your account more efficiently, so we’ve redesigned the interface to help you complete tasks quickly and easily.
The new interface allows you to quickly see your earnings and payment information, find relevant features, and make changes to your account. It also brings relevant help and other resources, like videos and blog posts, right into the interface, so you can get the information you need without leaving your account.

We encourage you to give the new interface a try. To learn more, check out google.com/ads/newadsense. You’ll find additional videos, including a tour of the new interface, information about new features, and a getting started guide. You can also join the conversation in our Forum to share best practices and discover what other publishers think about the new interface.

Thanks again for all your feedback. We hope you like the new interface!

UPDATED Nov. 11, 2010: All AdSense publishers now have access to the new interface, as our Engineering team was able to speed up the roll out across all accounts.