Year in review: 2011

A lot of great things happened this year in AdSense, so as 2011 comes to an end, we’d like to take this opportunity to reflect on some of the highlights.

New Interface
We fully transitioned to the new AdSense interface and launched a number of new features including bulk edit, multi-dimension reporting and ad styles. We also launched a video series highlighting some of the functionalities of the new interface.

Social
2011 was a big year for all things social at Google, which included many improvements for our AdSense publishers. We introduced the +1 button, first on the Google search results, then on publisher sites and display ads. Based on your feedback, we made +1 buttons faster and provided reporting options. Most recently, we launched Google+ Your Business and Google+ Pages to help you grow your audience and start conversations with the right people.

AdSense in Your City
We met many of you in person through our AdSense in Your City events in North America and other similar seminars around the world. We’re continuing the program next year so make sure to check back for more details. Also, opt in to receiving special offers so we can send you details about AdSense events.

Payments
We expanded our payment options by offering Western Union in sub-Saharan Africa, Mexico, Palestinian Territories and numerous other countries. Your passion to help Japan after the devastating earthquake truly inspired us so we offered a way for you to donate your AdSense earnings.

Policy
We listened to your feedback about wanting to know more about our policies, so we dedicated monthly posts with tips on how to keep your account in good status. For example, we provided tips on creating unique content and information about invalid clicks.

Finally, we’d like to highlight our most popular blog posts of the year, as determined by your visits. Our post on new in-ads notice label and icon received the most visits from readers, and the post that you +1’d the most was our announcement about +1 buttons being added to display ads. Make sure to keep +1ing our posts to let us know when you like them and also +1 our blog in the upper right-hand corner if you’re a fan.

Thanks for your continued partnership throughout 2011 and for your support of the Inside AdSense blog. We look forward to seeing what 2012 brings!

Posted by Jamie Firkus - Inside AdSense Team

Season’s Greetings

Happy holidays from the Google AdSense team! Wishing you a season full of laughter, love and peace.

(Sending you holiday cheer from our Japan Team)

Posted by Jamie Firkus - Inside AdSense Team

Smarter default font settings

When it comes to customizing the appearance of AdSense text ads, we’ve heard from many publishers that they aren’t always sure what combinations to pick. As a starting point, we offer a set of default options for ad colors, font size and font face, which are based on positive performance across all publisher sites.

Today, we’re announcing an exciting improvement to our default font settings, which will optimize your ad units for your unique site and users. For each ad unit that’s set to show the default font face and font size, our system will now automatically select and show the best-performing option. This best-performing option will depend on a variety of factors, including the user’s viewing environment (operating system, browser) and the ad unit itself (language, size, number of ads, etc). We’ve tested the effects of these factors on our AdSense fonts and incorporated the best combinations into our default font settings. Our aim with this update is to help improve ad performance on your site by automatically applying optimal font settings to your ad units.

Please keep in mind that this change will only affect ad units which have “AdSense default font family” and “AdSense default font size” selected. You won’t be affected if you’ve previously set your ads to a specific font face or size, but we encourage you to give our new settings a try. To change the font settings of any existing ad unit, simply edit it under the My ads tab. If you’d like to change the preferences for future ad units you’ll create, visit the Account Settings page under the Home tab, and edit the “Default ad display preferences” section.

We hope you’re as excited about this development as we are -- we’ll continue to bring you the latest in our research around text ad options.

Posted by: Stephen Yuan, AdSense Engineering

Customize your AdSense personal contact information

As you may know, we periodically send out emails with tips for increasing your earnings, updates on the latest product improvements, and information regarding your account. In your AdSense account settings you can select which type of messages you’re interested in receiving.

We understand that some publishers may prefer to receive AdSense-related messages at a different email address than the Google Account used as their AdSense login. From now on, every user on an AdSense account can specify a personal contact email, contact name and optionally a phone number. It’s important to note that this contact email doesn’t need to be associated with a Google Account, and adding it to your account won’t update your login information or change the login you use to access your AdSense account.

To customize your personal contact information, log in to your account and visit the Account settings page under the Home tab. Under Personal settings, click “edit” and enter the desired data in the contact name and contact email fields. We encourage you to also take the opportunity to review your email preferences and then save your settings. Once you make any changes, you’ll receive a verification email to the contact address to confirm that you can receive messages at this address.

If you’d like to learn more about the messages we send to publishers and how you can benefit from them, visit this blog post. We’re looking forward to keeping in touch with you!

Posted by Dan Banfield -- AdSense Engineering

New languages and categories in general category blocking feature

We know that being able to control the ads that appear on your pages is important to you, which is why we're excited to share some new enhancements to general category blocking. This feature is already available in English, French and German and from now on, publishers in Spanish-, Portuguese-, Italian-, and Japanese-speaking countries will be able to use it as well. What’s more, we’ve just added 88 new categories to the list of topics that can be blocked from your sites, including apparel, business, family and sports.

If you’re not familiar with the general category blocking feature, it gives you additional control over the ads that are shown on your sites. You have the ability to scalably block categories of ads that you might not find suitable for your audience.

You can block up to 50 categories in your account, and your choices will be applied to ads of all targeting types and formats in the seven supported languages, regardless of the language of the site where they’re showing. Before blocking a general category, please keep in mind that blocking ads can have a negative impact on your potential earnings, as it removes eligible ads from competing in the ad auction. To help you make informed decisions and understand the impact of any blocking choices on your ad performance, we show you the revenue and ad impressions for every category from the last 30 days.

We hope that these extended options help you quickly and easily control the ads on your sites, and we look forward to continuing to enhance these controls in the future.

Posted by Gavri Smith -- AdSense Engineering

The power of Search Ads, now available on your mobile site

Recently on the Official Google Blog, we talked about the momentum we’re seeing in mobile search advertising. We also announced a new mobile search ad product: Custom Search Ads for Mobile Sites. We wanted to give some more details about this new format and how you can begin using it to grow your business on mobile.

As increasing numbers of users access websites using their mobile phones, more and more desktop publishers are bringing their businesses to the mobile web. You may have seen our recent initiative, ‘GoMo’, which is designed to help publishers and businesses take their site mobile.

Currently, publishers can monetize their mobile sites using AdSense for Mobile Content. We wanted to also help mobile web publishers earn from their search traffic, and so with Custom Search Ads for Mobile Sites, we're bringing the power of search ads to the world of the mobile web.

Mobile websites that provide a search option will be able to show ads related to search queries. Users will see ads relevant to what they're searching for, and publishers will open up a new revenue stream from their mobile properties.

Many mobile websites contain custom search functions that ask users to search within a variety of specific parameters. With Custom Search Ads for Mobile Sites, these parameters are taken into account to help determine what ad is shown and deliver the most relevant ad for a user's query. For example, in the image below you can see that someone using Trulia, a real estate search engine, is searching for properties in Washington, DC, and the ads match this query.

Trulia.com implemented Custom Search Ads on their mobile site. When a user scrolls through their search results (in this case, for property in Washington, DC), they are served both search results and Custom Search Ads relevant to their query.

Moreover, mobile web publishers can customize the look and feel of the ads to complement their site’s design and layout. Some of the customization options include changing the font size, background color and gradient. Custom Search ads can also be integrated into mobile apps with the same customization features and options.

We're currently accepting applications from publishers to use Custom Search Ads for Mobile Sites. If you're a mobile publisher or app developer interested in this product, apply now on the Custom Search Ads page.

Posted by Chris Monkman, Product Manager, Mobile Ads

Set up a crawler login for increased ad relevancy on pages behind a login

This is the second post in our two-part AdSense Crawler Errors series.

Recently we discussed ways to improve ad targeting and relevancy by making sure that the AdSense crawler can view all pages that have AdSense code on them. Sometimes though, it can become problematic when a publisher has a members only site that requires the user to log in to view the site’s content. In cases like this, the AdSense ads that are located behind the login aren’t as relevant and targeted as they could be.

If you’re a publisher with content behind a login page, be sure to set up an AdSense crawler login so that your ads are as well-targeted as possible. Doing so will give the AdSense crawler the ability to scan content on these pages, resulting in more relevant, targeted ads that can potentially increase your CTRs and revenue. Please note that adding a crawler login will only help to deliver better, more relevant ads to pages with AdSense code already on them, and will not have any effect on which pages of your site Google Search will index.

To grant the AdSense crawler access, log in to your AdSense account and click on ‘Account settings.’ From there, scroll down to the ‘Access and authorization’ section and click on ‘edit logins’ next to crawler logins.

Then click on ‘Add a Login.’ You’ll be prompted to fill in pertinent information that the AdSense crawler will use to log in to your site and crawl your content.

After that, you’ll need to log in to Webmaster Tools to verify your website, if you haven’t already done so. Once verified, the crawler will be able to log in successfully and scan your content to deliver more targeted ads.

For additional information, take a look at our help center article regarding displaying ads on login-protected pages.

Posted by Andrew Boni - Inside AdSense Team

How to monetize your mobile-friendly website

In our previous blog post we talked about how to create a mobile-friendly website. Now we’d like to show you how to best monetize your mobile site with AdSense Mobile product offerings.

AdSense for Mobile Content
AdSense for mobile content allows publishers to generate earnings from their mobile web pages using targeted Google ads. Below are some key features.

• Contextual targeting ensures ads match the content of your mobile site.
• Google advertisers bid directly for your mobile inventory.
• Mobile-specific ad formats are optimized for the small screen.

For mobile websites, AdSense automatically detects the type of phone viewing your site and delivers ads to match. For example, if someone views your site through a high-end smartphone, we'll deliver mobile ads specifically designed for the device’s full HTML browser.

It’s important to note that AdSense for mobile content ad units are meant to be used in mobile websites and not mobile applications - as noted in our policies. If you’re looking for an advertising solution for your mobile application, sign up for AdMob.

Custom Search Ads for Mobile 

If you currently use Custom Search Ads for your desktop, we’re happy to let you know that publishers can now also apply to use this feature on mobile sites and apps. Custom Search Ads for Mobile are highly targeted ads that are based on user queries from a mobile website.

These ads typically monetize at a high rate and publishers are able to customize the look and feel of the ads to best integrate with the user experience on the page. The ads can be fixed to the frame or scroll along with the results.

If you're already an AdSense publisher and want to get started with ads on your mobile site, you’ll find the Mobile Content button under the ‘My Ads’ tab. If you're not a publisher yet, sign up.

Posted by Anja Kuncic, AdSense Optimization Specialist

Taking your channels to a new limit

As you know, channels in your AdSense account are powerful reporting tools. Custom channels help you track ad performance and enable advertisers to target their ads for maximum impact, while URL channels allow you to deep-dive into the performance of AdSense for content on your subdomains.

To date, you’ve been limited to a total of 200 custom and URL channels, and many of you have asked for more. That’s why today, we’re very excited to announce that we’ve raised this limit to 500 custom channels per product, and 500 URL channels for AdSense for content. You’ll see your available custom channels count clearly displayed in the custom channels table, and also highlighted in the “create new custom channel” pop-up.

This change will enable you to expand your testing, and you’ll be able to do more granular analysis of how different formats, ad styles, and ad types perform. In addition, you can use your increased allocation of custom channels to create new ad placements for advertisers to target directly. This can help increase the amount you earn from placement targeting, as advertisers will be able to review the information you’ve provided about your ad units to match their campaigns to your site and audience. As the holidays approach and advertisers look to create additional placement targeted campaigns, now is the perfect time to set up more custom channels and ad placements.

Log in to your AdSense account today and visit your My ads tab to get started.

Posted by Alex Benton -- AdSense Engineering

Top 5 things you should know about invalid clicks

During the AdSense team’s recent policy webinars, a number of publishers posted questions on our Google Moderator page about invalid click activity and the resources available to help them protect their accounts. We’ve brought in experts from the Ad Traffic Quality team to address your top questions about invalid clicks here in this post today.

As a quick introduction, our responsibility on the Ad Traffic Quality team is to monitor traffic across Google’s ad network and prevent advertisers from paying for invalid traffic. We’ve recently launched an in-depth Ad Traffic Quality Resource Center, a site designed for both advertisers and publishers to learn more about invalid clicks. This site also aggregates various resources that help you learn about invalid clicks and maintain a successful AdWords or AdSense account. Please note that the resource center is currently only in English, but will be available in all languages shortly.

Now, onto the top 5 topics that publishers most frequently ask about, and some guidance from our team:  

1. Monitoring your ad traffic 

There’s a lot that you can and should do to monitor your site’s traffic and prevent it from receiving invalid activity. You can find all of our suggestions and best practices listed in our Help Center. If at any time you’d like to report something suspicious, feel free to contact us using this form.

2. Returning earnings to our advertisers

Protecting our advertisers' interests by monitoring invalid click activity is one of the key ways we strive to keep the network a balanced ecosystem where users, publishers, and advertisers can all grow and thrive together. To protect the integrity of our advertising environment, we return earnings from disabled AdSense accounts to affected advertisers, as stated in our Disabled Account FAQ.

3. Our mechanisms catch on to trends

Google uses real-time detection and filtering systems to examine each click on an AdWords ad. We look at numerous data points for each click, including the time of the click, any duplicate clicks, and various other click patterns. Our system then analyzes these factors to isolate and filter out potentially invalid clicks before they ever reach your account reports. Our engineers are constantly improving our monitoring technology, enhancing filters, and examining a growing set of signals.

In addition to our automated click protection techniques, we have a team that uses specialized tools and techniques to examine individual instances of invalid clicks. When our system detects potentially invalid clicks, a member of this team examines the affected account to glean important information about the source of the potentially invalid clicks.

4. How we determine sabotage

Sabotage, which some publishers refer to as ‘click bombing’, is an act committed by a third party to generate invalid activity on a publisher’s ads without their knowledge or permission. Although this topic often comes up on our forums and in the questions we’ve received, we’ve found that click bombing represents only a small fraction of invalid activity. As mentioned in point #3, we’re constantly improving our detection systems to identify these patterns of sabotage and filter them as invalid. We’re committed to protecting our publishers as well as our advertisers, as our goal is to grow the network while continuing to ensure that it is safe and enjoyable for all.

5. You can contact us if you feel your account was wrongfully disabled

We want to work with you and provide you as many resources as we can to resolve issues you may have. If your account has been disabled and you feel that the decision was made in error, we have a process for appealing the decision in your account. For more information, see our Help Center.

Posted by the Ad Traffic Quality Team

Happy Thanksgiving

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day in the U.S so we’d like to take this opportunity to thank all of you for your dedicated participation in the AdSense program.

(artwork courtesy of Sofia Andrianakou)

Wishing our U.S. publishers a happy and turkey-filled Thanksgiving!

Posted by Jamie Firkus - Inside AdSense Team

Turkeys and taxes

The NBA season may be unusually absent at this time of year, but thankfully we can still count on Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and oh yes... preparation for taxes. Before falling asleep next to a warm fireplace with a belly full of savory delicacies and sugary sweets, be sure to log in to your AdSense account to double-check your address. To ensure that your AdSense account reflects your current tax standing, you may even re-submit your tax information. We’ll soon be using the information in your AdSense account to generate your tax forms for 2011, so you’ll want to make sure that the information we have is correct.

Remember, you’ll only receive a tax form 1099-MISC from us if you're a U.S. publisher and you meet either of the following requirements:

• You submitted a Form W-9, are not a corporation, and were paid at least US $600 in 2011
• You indicated that you are subject to backup withholding and had taxes withheld

Enjoy the festivities!

Posted by Sharlene Su - AdSense Payments team

AdSense crawler errors: Check your robots.txt file for improved ad targeting and relevancy

This is the first post in our two-part AdSense Crawler Errors series.

There are many ways that publishers can go about optimizing their site for AdSense; opting-in to text/image ads, upgrading to our preferred ad formats, and increasing ad coverage across a site are just a few of the more well-known ones. But did you know that there’s another straightforward optimization tip that many publishers often overlook?

A bit of context
Your site’s robots.txt file essentially acts as a gatekeeper that determines which web crawlers, web robots, and search engines have access to your site and which do not. Those that are granted permission can do things like view your pages and index your site. Those that don’t have permission are not able to view or index specific sections of your site, depending on what you’ve specified.

AdSense ads are displayed through the use of an AdSense web crawler. That crawler scans your page’s content and determines which ads to display, according to specific keywords. If our AdSense crawler is being blocked by your robots.txt file, we’re going to have a difficult time displaying relevant ads on your site. As a result, your users may see less relevant ads, which can lead to a lower CTR.

How you can help yourself
View the contents of your robots.txt file by going to [yourdomain.com]/robots.txt.  (If you have a subdomain, it likely has a robots.txt file as well, located at [sub.yourdomain.com]/robots.txt.) Be sure that the file is configured to allow our AdSense ad crawler to view your site. You can do that by simply adding the following two lines to the very top of the file:

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Disallow:

This will ensure that our AdSense ad crawler can access your site and will help display more relevant ads. As a result, you can potentially benefit from increased ad revenue. Please note that making this change will not impact your Google search rankings. Adding these two lines to your robots.txt file will only help to deliver better, more relevant ads to pages with AdSense code already on them. Pages that don’t have AdSense ad code will not be affected.

If you have URLs with any errors, you can see what they are by logging into your AdSense account and clicking on ‘Account Settings’ from the home page. From there, click on ‘View errors’ under ‘Access and Authorization.’

Stay tuned for the second post in our AdSense Crawler Errors series, where we’ll cover crawler login issues and how you can solve them.

Posted by Andrew Boni - Inside AdSense Team

New Layout for the Help Center

As AdSense has developed over years, the Help Center has also grown to help you answer your questions and learn more about AdSense. With continuous updates and articles being added regularly, however, the Help Center became increasingly difficult to navigate. Today we’re pleased to announce a redesigned Help Center, making it easier for you to access materials to answer your questions.  We’re excited to share some of the changes we have made to make the Help Center more user friendly.

With the new layout, you can quickly move through topics to answers and in the left navigation bar, you'll see all articles related to the same topic. The links along the top that show you how you've progressed through topics will help you navigate more quickly. In addition, we've reorganized help articles based on the task you're trying to accomplish. We hope that this will cut down the time it takes you to find the article you're looking for, make it much easier to find that content, and help you learn about AdSense.

In the new layout, you’ll recognize that we have four separate sections:

• Learn about AdSense contains all help articles organized by category.
• Fix an issue is for publishers that have a specific question.
• Additional resources in the right navigation bar has more useful information about AdSense.
• Get Started in the left navigation bar has basic information about AdSense and how to get started.

For security reasons, some forms require publishers to login. Thus, we recommend that you login to your account while you are visiting the Help Center, especially the “Fix an issue” section.

In the coming weeks, you may notice more design and layout changes that will make your Help Center experience even better. Combined with the new Help Center organization, we hope that these ongoing design changes will make your learning experience in the Help Center more enjoyable, efficient, and useful.

Posted by Özge Kökçü, AdSense Help Center Lead

Policy Tips - Creating unique and valuable content

We enjoyed reading all your comments from our blog post on family-safe content. Today we’d like to shed some light on how to expand your business and attract more visitors by creating sites with unique and valuable content. This topic is one of our most asked about policies from publishers, and is often misunderstood because of the varying perspectives on what is considered unique and relevant content.

Creating a useful and information-rich site is essential to the AdSense business model to generate long-term revenue growth for publishers and to maintain a quality network. Not only does this enhance the user experience so your visitors stay longer to browse and possibly click on a relevant ad, but it also helps keep your account in good standing. Webmasters who clearly and accurately describe their content provide a much better user experience, and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit in the quality guidelines.

Copying content from other sites, auto-generating content, or rewriting content from other publications and monetizing these types of pages without permission or the necessary legal rights to do so is considered a violation of our program policies. If you see an article with content that you think would be interesting to share, or that you’re particularly passionate about, don’t copy it. Instead, write your own opinion regarding the issue. We love seeing the original and valuable content you come up with and we’ve found that our most successful partners are the ones that have developed a unique voice.

Some other things to keep in mind are to structure the layout of your site as intuitively as possible and to avoid confusing implementations that may unnaturally lead users to click on your ads or artificially inflate your impressions. Our policies around unique content also do not allow filling a page with keywords that are designed only to manipulate the targeting system and have no relation to the content or audience of the page. This practice results in badly matched ads, as well as a poor user experience. By adding unique content and services to your site, users will remember the added value and be more likely to visit again.

When creating a site, make the focal point about your users, not about search engine rankings or generating more clicks on ads. At Google, we grow our business with the notion “Focus on the users, and all else will follow,” and we hope you can also grow your business with us by following the same principle. Let’s make the AdSense network a clean and balanced environment, where you, the publishers, can grow together with users and advertisers.

Posted by Arudea Mahartianto, AdSense Policy Team

Ad serving explained

As an AdSense publisher, you know that the ad revenue you’re earning from your site is important to maintaining and growing your online business. In addition to AdSense, are you also using other ad networks on your pages or selling some of your ad space directly to specific advertisers?

If so, you may have found that it can be time-consuming to determine and manage when and where your ads should show, in order for you to earn the most money possible. And if an advertiser has very specific requirements for their campaigns -- such as only appearing during a certain time of day or only to users located in a certain country -- it can be challenging to fulfill these types of requests.

That’s where an ad server like DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) Small Business can help. An ad server helps you deliver ads to your pages, allowing you to manage ads from AdSense, multiple ad networks, and directly sold ads. Watch our introductory video below to learn more:



If you’ve started using multiple ad networks or have started receiving requests from advertisers to place their ads on your site directly, DFP Small Business is a great solution. Sign up for a free account, or visit our Help Center to learn more.

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

Understanding eCPM and RPM

Recently, we’ve heard some questions about the difference between eCPM (effective cost per thousand impressions) and RPM (revenue per thousand impressions), as the older AdSense interface references eCPM and the newer version shows RPM. We’d like to clarify and let you know that the terms are referring to the same thing: both eCPM and RPM represent your estimated earnings for every 1000 impressions. To calculate this figure, divide your estimated earnings by the number of page views, impressions or queries that you received, then multiply by 1000. For example, if you earned an estimated $0.20 from 50 page views, then your page eCPM or RPM would equal ($0.20 / 50) * 1000 or $4.00.

Formula:
eCPM or RPM = (Estimated earnings / Number of page views) * 1000

To avoid confusion in the future, we’ll work to use only one term (RPM). RPM is a commonly used metric in advertising programs, and you may find it helpful for comparing revenue across different channels. You can learn a lot more about using RPM in our two part blog series (part 1 and part 2).

Posted by Jamie Firkus - Inside AdSense Team

Updates on the AdSense mobile interface and low bandwidth version

If you’ve tried out the mobile-optimized AdSense interface that we launched in March, you know that it gives you quick access to important information from your account including earnings, basic reports and some alerts, without the need for Flash. Starting today, you can access this same interface from most desktop browsers as a low bandwidth version -- this is particularly helpful if you’re using a slower internet connection. You can toggle between the the different versions by clicking the links “Classic / Low bandwidth” in the top right corner of the screen. Please note that your preferences are saved for both mobile and desktop versions. For example if you’ve accessed the low bandwidth version from your desktop, we will show you this interface first the next time you log into your account.

When you use the mobile interface or low bandwidth version and navigate to the Home tab, you’ll be able to see your estimated and finalized earnings, quick links to standard and saved reports, and account alerts. In the Reports tab, you’ll find quick reports (aggregated data for 7 days, 30 days, current month, last month) and your saved reports. In addition, you now have more insights on earnings as you can see data on Page Views, Clicks, Page CTR, CPC, Page RPM and Estimated earnings in a table underneath the earnings graph.

Stay tuned for more new features to come in the future. In the meantime, try the enhanced mobile-optimized and low bandwidth AdSense interface. As always, you can find more information in our Help Center.

Posted by William Montgomery -- AdSense Engineering

Happy Halloween from the AdSense Team

We hope you have a spooktacular day!

Posted by Jamie Firkus - Inside AdSense Team

Bringing the benefits of TrueView to our video publishers

It’s no secret that I watch a lot of video ads. It’s one of the perks (or pains!) of working in the video advertising business. And yet, I was surprised to see that my younger cousins were gathered around a laptop showing each other their favorite ads over the weekend. Maybe it runs in the family. More likely, people just love watching great content and engaging ads. Every statistic we’ve seen shows that sharing and watching online videos has become a part of everyday life, and that the gap between video ad spend and audience attention is slowly narrowing. At Google, we’re always trying to improve the experience of watching video ads. With that in mind, we’re rolling out a new ad format called TrueView to our network of video publishers.

TrueView ads, pioneered on YouTube, differ from traditional video ads in two main ways. First, they give viewers choice - for example, the ad may be skippable or present a choice of ads to watch. Second, TrueView ads are sold through a Cost Per View (CPV) basis. You may be familiar with Cost Per Click (CPC) where the advertiser pays when someone clicks on their ad; similarly with CPV ads, advertisers are charged when a viewer chooses to watch the ad.

For example, say you're about to watch an interview with the makers of a new movie on The Hollywood Reporter. A TrueView in-stream video ad will start to play and a counter will appear giving you the option, after five seconds, to skip the ad and continue watching the video.

We believe TrueView is a win for users, publishers and advertisers. Users have more control over the ads they see. Advertisers get to combine the engagement of video with the precision of online advertising. And publishers see higher returns, since advertisers value a truly engaged audience.

A small group of our AdSense for video publishers are already using TrueView ads on a portion of their video inventory, and have seen RPMs equal or better than standard pre-roll ads, while dramatically improving the user experience. TrueView video ads also help to decrease audience drop-off rates by 40% on YouTube Partner sites when compared to regular in-stream ads, which means more viewers are continuing to watch videos.

One of our partners The Hollywood Reporter has been experimenting with TrueView ads and has already seen a significant increase in viewer retention. Product Manager Reed Halstrom tells us, “We’ve seen video views increase by 21% and viewed minutes increase by 17% since we started using TrueView ads.”

If you have existing video content on your site and are interested in gaining access to TrueView video ads through AdSense for video, please leave your details by completing our online form. We’re committed to improving the overall online video viewing experience and will continue to work with our publishers and advertisers to make that happen - which should come as no surprise.

Posted by Payam Shodjai, Lead Product Manager, Video Monetization

Highlighting ad titles

As we continue to improve and launch new features, we’re always interested in hearing your ideas and feedback. Many of you have shared that you want to be able to change the title color of ads when a user moves their mouse over the title link. After a period of testing, we found that this feature resulted in higher earnings for publishers while also increasing user and advertiser value. We are pleased to announce today that we have updated all text ads with this change.

As you can imagine, there are numerous combinations of link and background color across the ad units on all publisher pages. After extensive testing, we have found that the color of the change itself can make a big difference: the wrong shade can even be detrimental to clickthrough rate (CTR). To determine the color that the title link will change to when a user places their mouse cursor over it, we’ll take your chosen title color and find a nearly complementary color on the color wheel. For example, a blue title would change to red. These colors outperformed all the others we tested.

We’ll continue to keep studying the effects of color on CTR and ad performance to bring you more enhancements in the future. Please also feel free to keep sharing your product feedback and suggestions!

Posted by Stephen Yuan, AdSense Engineering

View your earnings from Google-certified ad networks

Back in August 2009, we started to allow multiple Google-certified ad networks to compete against AdWords ads for the display ad space on your sites. We’re pleased to announce that you now have access to a new report that allows you to to view earnings by ad network.

As a refresher, the Google-certified ad networks feature is powered by DoubleClick Ad Exchange, and allows additional networks to compete in the auction to help you earn the most revenue possible. We’re confident that our vast AdWords inventory can provide the highest paying ad, but on the few occasions when it can’t, this feature simply allows more ads to be eligible to appear on your pages. This increased competition can potentially lead to higher earnings for you in the long run. Note that the auction process doesn’t change with these ad networks – our system will still always show the highest-paying ads, whether they’re from these Google-certified ad networks or the AdWords program.

With today’s new report, you’ll be able to see a breakdown of impressions, clicks, and earnings by Google-certified ad network. To view this report, log in to your account and visit the Performance reports tab. Click ‘Ad networks’ in the side navigation to see which networks served ads on your pages and how they performed. When comparing the performance of different ad networks, bear in mind that some metrics like RPM can be affected by networks targeting certain value impressions. Please note that there is no historical data prior to September 27, 2011.  

Google-certified ad networks bring you all the benefits of working with multiple networks but also with the safety, convenience and controls offered by AdSense. All third party networks are required to adhere to our standards for ad quality, speed and user privacy. In addition, you have the ability to block entire networks and control ad blocking via the Ad review center. Please do keep in mind that blocking specific networks can reduce the number of eligible ads to appear on your pages and may affect your overall earnings. Just like with AdWords ads, the more ads competing to appear on your pages, the more you can potentially earn. 

For more information about Google-certified ad networks, please visit our Help Center. 

Posted by Vincent Zanotti - AdSense Engineering

Policy webinars recap

Based on your feedback from our previous blog posts, we’ve heard you’d like to learn more about our policies. Over the past few months, the AdSense Policy team has hosted webinars with publishers from across North America, Russia, Turkey, Poland, Italy, and France. In keeping with our monthly policy tips, we’d like to take this time to recap on our recent publisher events and to summarize our findings for you.

Policies are in place for the success of publishers and advertisers. One of the common pieces of feedback we hear from AdSense publishers who are just starting out is that there’s a lot of information to read about the program. We understand that it can be challenging navigating our policies, and frustrating not being able to talk to a policy specialist directly. As a result, our policy team was available to answer your top questions during these recent webinars. In addition, the Policy team delivered a condensed overview of common policy violations to avoid and general best practices and tips to help maintain your account in good standing.

We went through a run-through of live demos and examples, which attendees told us were helpful. Many found that overall the sessions were helpful and that they gained a good understanding of our policies. Many publishers were unaware of the resources available to help you with policy notifications in our Help Center. We’ve posted your top policy questions and our answers on our Google Moderator page, which we encourage you to take a look at. If you’d like to listen to a recording of our presentation, please watch our YouTube video.

We’d like to thank all of you for your great feedback and questions. If you found the policy webinars valuable or have suggestions on which topics you’d like to hear about next, let us know by leaving a comment below. If you’re interested in attending future events like these, make sure that you’re opted in to ‘Special Offers’ in your email preferences within your AdSense account. We look forward to hosting more policy webinars in the future, and look for more policy updates from us by subscribing to the AdSense blog.

Posted by Cecelia Choi, AdSense Policy Specialist

Introducing ad styles: an enhanced feature replacing color palettes

If you’ve been following our announcements in the last few weeks, you know we’ve been committed to bringing you features that you’ve been missing from the old AdSense interface. We’re now launching another long-requested feature: ad styles. Ad styles extend and enhance all of the functionality of our old color palettes. With ad styles, you can create customized combinations of colors, fonts, and corner styles and then easily apply these to the ad units and search engines across your site.

The best part about ad styles is that when you edit an ad style in the new interface, any ad units or search engines that are using this style will automatically be updated with your changes. So if you want to test a new color for the ad units on your site to see how it performs, you can create a new ad style and apply it to some of your ad units. If it performs well you can then apply it to all of the ad units in your account or revert back to your old colors just as easily. We think this feature will save you time by eliminating the need to re-assign the colors to each ad unit individually.

To create a new ad style, visit the ‘My ads’ tab. Click ‘Ad styles’ in the navigation bar and then the ‘+New’ button. You can then assign existing ad styles to your ad units during the ad unit creation process.

Posted by Jessica Hummel - AdSense Engineering

A fresh face for link units

If you're using link units, you know that they're a great way to earn additional revenue from the smaller spaces on your site. We've made a few updates to this ad type in the past, but today, we're giving link units a well-deserved facelift. We decided that it was time to reevaluate the layout of the link unit and the landing page in order to give this ad type both a modern look and a great performance boost. Here’s an overview of what’s changing.

The link unit
We’ve heard feedback from publishers that it isn’t clear why they should choose to show four versus five terms in their link units. Most people pick one of these options by guessing the expected performance. We’ve actually found that link units with four terms almost always perform better than five. As a result, we’re reducing the number of topics in all link units to four for horizontal orientations and three for vertical orientations. If you’re currently using link units, this change will happen automatically. We’re also slightly increasing spacing between and font size of each term.

The ad page
Following the general makeover of Google pages, we’re giving link unit landing pages a fresh look as well. The color scheme, orientation, fonts, and number of ads are being updated to the following:

We’ll continue to work on improving link units and hope to share more exciting news soon! In the meantime, we recommend viewing this video to learn how to utilize link units.

Posted by William Chang - AdSense Engineering

Two more reporting enhancements to help you deep dive into your AdSense earnings

In the last weeks, we’ve continued to iterate and improve the features in the Performance reports tab to give you as many tools as possible to understand your earnings. We are especially focusing on improvements that allow you to understand the cause of revenue fluctuations and where your earnings are coming from. With these goals in mind, we’re excited to announce two new developments for all publishers:

Event history

You can now see small flags on your reporting graphs, which note actions you’ve taken that might have influenced your earnings. For instance, if you blocked a category of ads from your pages last Tuesday and then created a new leaderboard the next day, you’ll see these two actions marked in your reports as well as details of the actions shown under the graph. Try the feature out by visiting the Performance reports tab, and clicking the ‘Events’ button just below the date range selector.

Tablets earnings included in the Platform report

Back in July we launched the Platforms report so you could analyze your earnings based on the type of device your visitors used to access your site. Now, you’ll be able to view your earnings from users on tablet devices. These earnings were previously included under high-end mobile earnings but given the market trends towards mobile and tablet devices, we wanted to provide you with additional granularity in this report. If you notice a significant amount of your earnings coming from mobile and/or tablet devices, we recommend optimizing your site and ads for mobile users.

Leave us a comment and let us know what you think about these new features!

Posted by Louis Collard - AdSense Engineering

Test your knowledge with the AdSense Academy

Whether you’re new to AdSense or have been using it for years, the AdSense Academy can help you successfully run your AdSense account by following six step-by-step learning modules. The Academy provides best practices on everything from implementing your ad units to building your traffic to controlling your ads.

The AdSense Academy includes checklists, videos and quizzes that you can take at the end of each module to test your knowledge.

	Join the Academy Now!

Please feel free to provide any feedback by commenting on this post or on the AdSense Forum.

Posted by Thomas Tran - Inside AdSense Team

Prepare for the upcoming holiday season with placement targeting

With the holidays right around the corner, premium brand-name AdWords advertisers are preparing for the season by increasing their marketing budgets and scheduling targeted campaigns. You can prepare too by taking advantage of placement targeting to allow advertisers to directly target your site.

While all sites are eligible for placement targeting, there are things you can do to help increase the amount of placement targeted ads on your site. First, turn your custom channels into ad placements. Be sure to fill out a well-written title and description to help potential advertisers understand the audiences they’ll reach by bidding on your site. Some details to include in the description are your site name, vertical, ad position, ad size and site demographic.

Next, ensure you are using our most successful ad units and are placing them in optimal positions. Finally, claim your site in Ad Planner. Following these steps will help advertisers find your site to target and choose where to place their ads on a specific section or area. Placement targeted ads typically receive much higher RPMs, which results in higher earnings for you.

Creating targeted channels is easy and a great way to earn extra revenue, but it takes time for them to show up for advertisers, so act soon! Just follow the instructions in our Help Center. Once you've made the changes, not only will your ads be ready for this holiday season, but they'll also be targetable by advertisers for every premium campaign in the future.

Posted by Jamie Firkus, Inside AdSense team

Continuing the AdSense in Your City journey

The AdSense in Your City optimization team was back on the road again and recently hosted over 40 publishers in Walnut Creek, CA.  Publishers in attendance learned about top optimization tips, our DoubleClick for Publishers Small Business product and the Google +1 button. Each publisher also received a 1:1 optimization session with one of our specialists.

One publisher shared his thoughts on the experience he had:
“I traveled [for] hours to attend this event and found it well worth it. The presentation was great and the one on one session was invaluable. Also, networking with other content publishers at the event added even more value to the experience. A must attend for anyone looking to optimize their websites and increase AdSense revenue.”

If you’d like to attend an event, we’re heading to Kansas City, MO next week and there are still a few spots open. We’ll also be going to Chicago, IL and Las Vegas, NV in the coming weeks. If you’re interested in learning more about AdSense optimization and meeting our team, please fill out our interest form.

We asked publishers to share what AdSense has given them.

Thanks to all of our publishers who came to Walnut Creek. We had a great time working with you and hearing your AdSense stories.

Posted by Courtney Yamada, AdSense Optimization Team

Gold Star Partner Showcase

Over the past month, we highlighted homebuyinginstitute.com and govisitcostarica.com as the first two AdSense publishers in the Gold Star Partnership Showcase.  To recap, the showcase is an opportunity for us to publicly recognize some of our AdSense partners.

We asked publishers to submit their sites for consideration if they clearly demonstrate the following:

• Exhibit original, engaging and useful content for users
• Adhere to AdSense policies
• Test and try new ways to optimize AdSense ad placements

Today we'd like to highlight Max Levitte, founder of cheapism.com:

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Name: Max Levitte
Site: Cheapism.com
Vertical: Shopping
AdSense Partner for:  5+ years


Tell us about your site:
Called by The New York Times ‘a Consumer Reports for the cheap’, Cheapism.com is a budget-products review site, serving consumers who can only afford/wish to buy inexpensive products, but still want the best value for their money. Cheapism is the only review site that focuses exclusively on low-price products, a part of the market that is rarely reviewed by the experts.

What we do at Cheapism is research the low price products and services in various categories and then create a thorough buying guide on how to buy budget products in that category. Our editorial process involves defining the low-price range for each category, identifying must have features, summarizing key performance attributes, and then analyzing relevant reviews and recommending the best budget buys and what to avoid. We follow strict journalistic editorial guidelines when creating our content and take great pride in our articles.

What makes cheapism.com a great AdSense publisher?
We implement AdSense in a non intrusive way yet generate high eCPMs.  We also manage to generate a significant amount of our AdSense revenue from a link unit.

Why do you love AdSense?
Because it targets exactly what our visitors are looking for.
Because it saves us from having to deal with advertisers.
Because it generates most of our revenue.

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Finally, thank you again to everyone who submitted their sites for consideration!

Posted by Julia Riley, AdSense Partnerships

Meeting and collaborating with our Help Forum Top Contributors

A couple weeks ago, 32 AdSense Help Forum Top Contributors (TCs) from around the world came to our Mountain View headquarters for a two-day summit, along with almost 300 other product TCs. If you participate in our Help Forum, you've probably noticed the very visible presence of our TCs, who lead product discussions and help answer questions. During the summit, we spent a bit of time discussing opportunities for further collaboration, the development of the TC program and new ideas for Google Forum Communities.

Here are some fun facts about the AdSense TCs:

• There are 82 AdSense TCs worldwide.
• TCs posted over 100K times in the last 12 months.
• 8 of the TCs have posted more than 10K times in the Forum since they joined. We’d like to give a special mention to PeggyK of our English Help Forum, as she’s contributed an amazing 47,972 posts to date!

Thanks to all of the TCs who were able to join us -- we truly enjoyed meeting everyone face-to-face. We appreciate all of the contributions our TCs make to the AdSense community, and look forward to continued collaboration with them going forward.

Posted by Kateryna Malinovska, AdSense Team

Enhancing the new AdSense interface and retiring the older version

Over the past months, we’ve been working to improve the new AdSense interface and develop features that provide you with additional insights, control, and efficiency. Beyond the visual redesign, some of the new features only available in the new interface include multi-dimension reporting, reporting by country and platform, and search functionality in the Ad review center.

We’ve also heard your feedback on features from the older interface that you wanted to see in the newer version. In response, we’ve recently rolled out top-requested features like the ability to create scheduled reports and view channels on the Home tab.

While we’ve been investing in new features within the new interface, we’ve also been discussing our plans to move away from the older version. With that in mind, we’ll be retiring the old interface in mid-November. We’re continuing to focus on building new functionality into the new interface, and are excited about the additional improvements we plan to deliver.

If you haven’t already, we recommend switching to the new interface as soon as possible to familiarize yourself with the updated layout and new features. To do so, sign in and click the 'Try the new AdSense interface' link in the upper corner of your account. We understand that this adjustment may take some time, so you'll still be able to toggle back and forth between the two interfaces during the coming weeks. To address a common question we’ve heard, switching to the new interface won’t affect your ad targeting or earnings in any way.

In the meantime, we encourage you to watch our video tutorials, which will guide you through completing common tasks in the new interface. You can also find detailed information in our Help Center for the new interface.

Thanks for all the feedback you’ve provided about the new interface -- please do keep the suggestions coming. We appreciate your patience during this transition, and look forward to continuing to improve the new AdSense interface to meet your needs.

Posted by Allan Livingston - AdSense Product Manager

Edit and schedule saved reports in the new interface

We’re happy to let you know about a recent improvement to the new AdSense interface, developed based on your requests for additional efficiency when managing your account -- you can now edit and schedule saved reports. This feature allows you to set up custom reports that will be automatically emailed to you on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.

When viewing a report in your account, you can select the ‘Save report’ button above the graph and select your preferences. If you need to edit the report or change the scheduling settings, just click ‘Manage’ next to the Saved reports section in the navigation bar.

If you’ve been using saved reports in the old interface, please know that we’re working on a tool to help you easily import these saved reports into the new interface. We’ll be sure to let you know when it becomes available -- you’re welcome to re-create them in the meantime, but you may wish to wait for this tool.

We hope with the launch of these features, you’ll be able to better customize the way you analyze and receive information about your ad performance. Let us know what you think!

Posted by Simon Bowden and Louis Collard - AdSense Engineering

+1: Now making Display ads more relevant

Earlier today we announced several exciting new additions to Google+, including open signups.  We’d like to announce one more addition for our AdSense publishers, +1 on the Google Display Network.

Starting in October, the +1 button will begin to appear on display ads on your site. With a single click, people will now be able to endorse specific ads and make them more likely to appear to their social connections.  We believe that these recommendations could lead your readers to notice ads on your site more, leading to more clicks and higher returns for you over time.

For example, take Susan, who sees an ad for a good deal on flights.  She +1’s the ad, thinking her friends might value this deal. Now, when Susan’s friends and contacts are signed in to their Google accounts, they’ll be able to see Susan’s picture across the bottom of the ad, with a note saying she +1’d it.

The +1 button and recommendations will appear at the bottom of display ads.

Susan’s friends and contacts will also be more likely to see the ad. While the dynamics of our ad auction aren’t changing, the ad will now be included in the auction for the pages Susan’s friends visit, as we know recommendations from friends can be a strong signal of an ad’s relevance.

+1’s will be one additional signal that help determine an ad’s relevance. All eligible ads will continue to compete in the ad auction, and we’ll continue to show the ones that will generate the most revenue for you. +1 button clicks are not counted as clicks on ads. Although you won’t receive any revenue for +1 button clicks, +1’s will help AdSense to deliver more useful ads to your users, which we think will result in higher returns over time.

On mobile, the +1 button will replace the existing ‘g’ logo and recommendations will appear for several seconds, then fade out.

The +1 button will begin to appear on AdSense for content and AdSense for mobile content display ad formats--image, animated gif, and Flash ads. If you’d prefer not to allow the use of +1 features and social annotations on display ads on your pages, you can opt out starting today by signing in to your account at google.com/adsense.

Display ads become much more powerful when people can see which of their connections have chosen to endorse them, leading to a better advertising experience and higher returns for you.

If you’d like to learn more about the +1 button on display ads, please visit the AdSense Help Center.

Posted by Christian Oestlien, Product Manager