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!

"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.