AdSense: Behind the scenes - Meet Debby

Do you ever wonder who’s helping you optimize your webpages? Who works hard to ensure your payments get to you on time? Who works with our product and engineering teams to deliver the products and features that you want?

Over the next few weeks you’ll find out just that! We’re kicking off a video series where you’ll meet some of our AdSense team members. You can hear their stories, learn more about their role in AdSense, and listen to the tips they have to offer.

In the first video, Debby, a member of the AdSense Optimization team talks about her favorite websites, what she likes about working for Google, and the Google products that she recommends every publisher try.



Posted by Dia Muthana - Inside AdSense Team

An update on the AdSense Product Ideas page

A few months ago, we created a Product Ideas page for AdSense, where you could tell us what product and feature updates you’d like to see. We received over 600 ideas from publishers all around the world, with ideas ranging from ad filtering options to increased transparency, and more detailed reporting to easier account management.

Our product and engineering teams have been hard at work to bring you ideas from the wishlist. We still have more to do, but wanted to share some of the progress so far:

You asked for...More transparency about how much you’re earning from AdSense.
What we’ve delivered...The AdSense for content and AdSense for search revenue shares are now publicly shared.

You asked for...The ability to block certain categories of ads, like religion and dating.
What we’ve delivered...Category blocking (previously known as category filtering) is now available in 13 languages. You can filter up to 11 ad categories, including religion, dating, politics and weight loss.

We’ve also been developing a new version of the AdSense interface. Although the interface is currently in beta, it addresses many of the requests we saw on the Product Ideas page. Take a look at the improvements that the new interface offers:

You asked for...Make it easy to change addresses when we move from one location to a new one.
What we’ve delivered...You can make requests to change the country of your payment address directly in the new AdSense interface. (Due to legal and system constraints, some country updates will still require you to create a new account.)


You asked for...Automatic revenue tracking to quickly and easily compare performance of ads of different sizes and types.
What we’ve delivered...The new AdSense interface offers Ad units, Ad sizes, and Ad types reports in the Performance Reports tab. These detailed reports can help you understand which individual ad units, ad sizes, and ad types perform best on your site.


You asked for...The ability to view data for a custom date range, similar to Google Analytics.
What we’ve delivered...The new AdSense interface includes a date range selector just like Google Analytics. Plus, to see how your earnings have changed over time, we also have a feature that allows you to compare two date ranges. Simply select the date range you want to compare, check “Compare to other dates”, fill in the start date, and we’ll fill in the end date for you!


You asked for...More time frames for analyzing metrics. Specifically we heard the wish to “select the same period of time and say group by week or month to see the trend.”
What we’ve delivered...Reports by week and month, in addition to by day, are available in the Performance Reports page. Along with reports for “Entire account by day” you can choose from weeks and months.

If you’d like the new beta interface enabled in your account, you can make a request.

Thanks for all your ideas and votes. Your ideas and feedback help our teams determine where we should be spending our time, so keep them coming!

Posted by Becky Feren - Product Specialist

AdSense Facts & Fiction Part III: The stats pipeline

Fiction: Site maintenance periods and delays in my AdSense reports mean that data isn’t being recorded properly.

Fact: Although there can sometimes be delays in the stats pipeline, all data is still tracked accurately.

We call the process of tracking your clicks, impressions, and earnings the “stats pipeline.” The stats pipeline runs continuously, reviewing the logs of activity written by our ad serving system, aggregating them, and updating the storage system. So that we can generate these statistics quickly and reliably, without losing any information, the process of aggregating your statistics spans several data centers.

Sometimes in rare cases, the process for aggregating stats can be delayed for several hours. This can happen for a few possible reasons:

• We sometimes make updates to our datacenter to make use of the latest technologies. However, these don’t affect how your clicks are tracked or how much you earn. Depending on the time it takes for the updates to complete, you may notice that stats are delayed by several hours.
  
  
• We have scheduled database down-times, generally on Saturday mornings (Pacific Time). Since the process of aggregating your statistics depends on database data, any such downtime also leads to delay in statistics. I’d recommend reading this Inside AdSense post for more information about these downtimes.
  
  
• On rare occasions, data centers can have unforeseen problems, causing unplanned delay in updating statistics.

These downtimes only delay your statistics -- they don’t impact the actual tracking of your statistics. We make sure that all events are processed exactly once, and we have implemented a number of internally and externally audited verification procedures to ensure that this is the case. Also, events in the aggregation pipeline are processed in a way that’s not specific to a particular publisher, so all of you should get your stats updates at the same time.

When downtimes occur, we work to notify publishers in advance and as quickly as possible using this blog, the AdSense Help Forum, and our Known Issues page. We understand how important it is for you to have up-to-date statistics, and continue to work towards making sure that the delays are kept to a minimum.

Posted by Dia Muthana - Inside AdSense Team

Keep current on all things advertising

The rapid pace of change in the advertising space can be dizzying. From new ad formats to new ad systems, from startups to mergers, the marketing industry is running at a million miles an hour, and it’s often daunting to keep up with it all. We know that staying informed takes a lot of effort, and it’s critical to make good decisions about how you spend your time and resources.

That’s why we put together Google Ad News. Powered by Google News, Ad News is a simple but powerful way for anyone in the advertising industry to track current news coverage on relevant subjects such as display, search, mobile and even traditional media - all in one place. Subscribe to news feeds in the categories you care about most, or search to find coverage on topics related to your business, such as your niche industry or brand.

We invite you to check it out and share it with your colleagues. Hopefully, you’ll find lots of relevant news that’ll help you spend less time scouring the web and more time building your business.

Posted by Oliver Deighton - Business Marketing Manager

Introducing the Google Display Network

We’re always focused on improving AdSense by bringing more advertisers to your sites, giving you more control over the ads that appear on your sites, and giving you more transparency into how much revenue you’re earning. Over the past year, much of our focus has been on attracting more display advertisers and display advertising spend to your sites. We’ve added new advertisers and introduced options that help these advertisers reach your sites. At the same time, advertisers have continued to run ads on YouTube and our own properties. To make our display media offerings clearer to advertisers and agencies so that we can continue to bring more display spend to your sites, we’re creating a new umbrella name for all these properties, the Google Display Network.

The Google Display Network will comprise all of the sites where advertisers can buy ads through Google, including the over one million AdSense and DoubleClick Ad Exchange partners as well as YouTube and Google properties such as Google Finance, Gmail, Google Maps, and Blogger. As an AdSense publisher you’re already part of the Google Display Network. We’re not making any changes to how AdSense works, so no action is required on your part. If you use AdSense for search, your AdSense for search ad space won't be part of the Google Display Network. Advertisers will continue to be able to purchase ads on your search results pages in the same way they always have.

While this new name reflects our significant investment to bring more display advertising to your sites, we want to make sure you know that we are still committed to delivering relevant text ads. If you receive text ads on your sites today, rest assured that you will continue to do so. The Google Display Network offers all ad formats - text, image, rich media, and video ads - enabling advertisers to unleash their creativity and engage visitors on your websites in various ways. If you haven’t opted into receiving image ads, we encourage you to do so in order to benefit from the investments we’ve made.

We’re working hard to offer the best display advertising solutions, and we look forward to continuing to introduce new features on the Google Display Network that help advertisers reach their goals and that help our AdSense publishers earn more revenue.

Posted by Neal Mohan, Vice President of Product Management

AdSense Facts & Fiction Part II: Electronic Funds Transfer

Fiction: Google doesn’t support Electronic Funds Transfer in my country because they don’t like me!

Fact: There are many factors we have to consider when launching EFT in new countries. In the meantime, please know that we’re always working towards expanding our payment options for publishers in all regions.

Where we can provide in-country EFT depends on a number of factors. Whenever we launch Electronic Funds Transfer, our fastest payment method, in a new country, we hear a number of requests to launch it in even more countries. Don’t worry -- we hear you! We’d like to launch EFT in as many countries as possible, but there are many things that we need to take into consideration before launching it, including legal and banking restrictions.

We’re working constantly to overcome the hurdles to launch EFT in more countries, so thanks for being patient with us. We also know that you are the local experts -- if there are payment methods that we don’t offer, but would work well for you otherwise, please leave us a comment! We’d love to have good suggestions from those who know best.

Posted by Posted by Elizabeth Ferdon - AdSense Payments team

AdSense Facts & Fiction Part I: Placement targeting

Fiction: Targetable placements are difficult to set up and don’t do anything for my site

Fact: It only takes seconds to convert your custom channels into targetable placements. This simple change can help increase your visibility to advertisers, and boost your revenue.

Advertisers already take advantage of contextual targeting to have their ads appear next to your content. They also have the option to selectively target sites they know are relevant to their ads -- when you’ve created targetable placements, advertisers can dig even deeper and find the most relevant sections of your site to place their ads.

If you’re not familiar with channels, check out our Help Center for steps on how to change your custom channels into targetable placements.

When writing the description of your channel, keep in mind things an advertiser might like to know. For example:

• What kind of content does this channel reflect?
  
• Is the channel on a specific section of your site (e.g. a forum section, blog section, etc.)?
  
• Are your ads above-the-fold (ATF)? In other words, can a user see them without needing to scroll down the page?
  
• Who is your target audience (gender, interests, income level, etc)?

Your description may resemble something along the lines of: “This is a 300x250 ATF ad unit on the football section of a sports blog. My audience is 75% male, age 18-35, earning between $50,000-$80,000 per year.”

To see the impact that placement targeting has on your site, check out this YouTube video on generating reports that break out your contextual and placement targeted revenue.

You can further increase your visibility to advertisers by taking full advantage of DoubleClick AdPlanner, a media planning tool that allowed advertisers to find their audiences across the web. Take a look at our earlier blog post to find out more.

With these small changes, you make it easier for advertisers to find your site, increase your placement targeting potential, and open the door to generating more revenue.

Posted by Rishan Mohamed - Inside AdSense team