Monday, August 30, 2010

AdSense email preferences: Get the most from your account and from Google

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!

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Blogger’s 11th Birthday Party

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: www.meetup.com/bloggerfiesta

Monday, August 23, 2010

Sensitive category blocking now available for Japanese, Chinese, Polish, and Portuguese

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.

Friday, August 20, 2010

Site maintenance on Saturday, August 21

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.

Monday, August 16, 2010

Getting to know you at AdSense In Your City: Boston

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!


Thursday, August 12, 2010

Introducing the Google Small Business Blog

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!

Monday, August 9, 2010

A new look for AdSense for content ad units

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.



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.

Updated on 8/27/2010 by Amy Wu - AdSense Product Manager

Monday, August 2, 2010

Inside AdSense - Meet Katrina

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!