New Interface Wednesdays: Search in Ad Review Center

We've heard that there are times when an ad appears on your site that you want to block from appearing again. How can you easily block a specific ad you've seen? If the ad is placement-targeted, you can now use the new AdSense interface to quickly search for and block that specific ad and future ad groups from a given advertiser.

To search for ads in the ad review center, first navigate to the Allow & block ads tab and click into one of the pages of the ad review center -- for example ‘Allowed’ -- for which you want to view ads. Look for the find ads box in the navigation sidebar. Here, you can search for ads based on text/url, ad type, and ad networks. For ads that are awaiting review, you can also search based on when the ads will be automatically allowed.


With recent updates we’ve made, you may also notice that when doing a keyword-based search, image ads in addition to text ads will be returned if the images contain text matching your search criteria.

Try it now! Navigate to the Allow & block ads tab and click into the Ad Review Center.

Posted by Pedro Diaz & Edouard Rosseel - AdSense Engineers

Got 2 minutes? Watch our new AdSense demo videos

Change is good, but change can also be hard. This is true for everything from getting used to a new job or apartment to starting with the new AdSense interface. If you’ve been following our New Interface Wednesdays blog series, you know that there are a lot of new features and benefits to making the switch. To help ease the transition, we want to make sure that you not only know about all of these great benefits, but that you’re also able to navigate through the new tabs and are comfortable with the standard tools you’ve been using in the old interface.

To help you become more familiar with the new interface (and start using it if you haven’t already!) we’ve created a series of six videos -- each under two minutes -- to quickly demonstrate how to complete some basic actions in your account.

Today, we’re excited to present the first two videos in this series: one walking you through how to create an ad unit, and the other on setting up custom channels.

We hope these help you get comfortable with the new AdSense interface! Stay tuned for the next set of videos, which will walk you through the Performance reports tab.

Posted by Katrina Kurnit - Inside AdSense team

New Interface Wednesdays: New report available by country

Have you ever wanted to understand your AdSense performance based on where your users are? Now you can do just that with the countries report.

To report by country, simply navigate to the Performance reports tab. In the navigation sidebar, click on the "Countries" report. This report will show your site's earnings by visitor country.


Please note that the countries report won't contain historical earnings data prior to when this feature is made available in your account. You can view earlier click and impression data by countries, but historical earnings data won't be visible.

Try it now! Navigate to the Performance reports tab, and select the countries report.

Help us figure out what you need and want in your reports by sending your feedback through the ‘Report issue’ link in the upper corner of your account or joining the conversation in our forum.

Posted by Vincent Zanotti - AdSense Engineer

Submit to the Doodle 4 AdSense showcase

We’ve heard some amazing stories over the years about how AdSense has changed your businesses and your lives. Whether allowing you to retire early, send your kids to college, or quit your day job to pursue your true passion, success with AdSense looks different to everyone.

We want to celebrate AdSense and you, our amazingly creative publishers, by launching our first ever Doodle 4 AdSense showcase. What’s Doodle 4 AdSense? It’s the opportunity to create your own AdSense logo to be featured on the Inside AdSense blog, our Facebook page, and Twitter channel so publishers around the world can see what AdSense means to you. Submit your own here!

We’ll post the first round of submissions that adhere to our Terms and Conditions on May 3rd, and close the form on May 20th. Get doodling!

Posted by Katrina Kurnit - Inside AdSense team

New Interface Wednesdays: Combine and Chart Feature

These features are found in the Performance Reports tab, under Custom channels. Depending on the number of channels you’re using, you might be asked to filter the list and then click Update report button. Once your selected channels are listed below the graph, you can view the combine and chart buttons.

Let’s review the combine feature first, which can be used to easily total items in your list and allow for deeper analysis. Click a few of your channels that you want to view earnings for together, then click the Combine button. The total of these channels is now shown on the graph and you can do further analysis using the view drop-down.



In contrast, the chart feature lets you visually compare the performance of up to five items. First reset your channels report by clicking the word Custom channels above the graph. From here, select a few channels in the table and then hit the Chart button. The lines in the graph represent the statistics you have chosen. Just like with the combine feature, you can now refine your report further using the view drop-down above the table.



Try it now! Navigate to the new interface and click on the Performance Reports tab, and then click Custom Channels and Update report.

Posted by Vincent Zanotti - AdSense Engineer

Surgery Squad lifts CTR and enhances revenue with a simple optimization procedure

Surgery Squad adds a third ad unit to its pages to boost performance and AdSense earnings by 200%.

SurgerySquad.com educates patients about what takes place during surgical procedures through interactive, virtual surgery modules. Creator Eric Bort recently spoke with us to describe how he’s optimized Surgery Squad’s AdSense performance and revenue by simply adding a third ad unit to his pages.

Inside AdSense: Can you tell us a little about how Surgery Squad got started?
Eric Bort: I launched Surgery Squad in August 2010 after having spent more than a decade developing corporate training and e-learning programs. As part of these programs, I’d created some virtual surgeries which were well-received, so I decided to make a website devoted to this topic. People have lots of questions about surgeries. They want to know, “What happens to my body while I’m asleep on the operating table?” It’s a very intriguing topic from a human perspective.

IA: What role does AdSense play in your business?
EB: We’ve used AdSense on Surgery Squad since its launch, because we’ve previously seen a lot of success with AdSense on some of our other sites. AdSense is currently responsible for all of Surgery Squad’s revenue. It was really quick to set up – once our account was approved, we were up and running within 10 minutes. And with the breadth of advertisers in the network, I know that AdSense will always have high quality ads to display.

IA: Why did you decide to add another ad unit to your pages?
EB: I received an optimization tip from the AdSense team suggesting I maximize revenue by adding an additional ad unit to my pages. Initially, I was wary of overwhelming visitors with ads, because it’s very important to me to create a good user experience. But I decided to give it a try because I know how important it is to test new strategies and see what works best. So, I added a third ad unit to all my pages, toward the bottom of each page.

IA: What were the results? Would you recommend this strategy to other publishers?
EB: I was surprised to see the new ad unit performing just as well, if not better, than the other two ad units. I think it’s due to visitors who scroll down to the bottom of the page to add comments, and then find ads they want in addition to our content. Our clickthrough rate has increased substantially. It’s amazing. Our eCPM has also increased 168 percent and our overall revenue earnings have grown by more than 200 percent. With this additional revenue from AdSense, we’re able to cover our costs and sustain our business. To know these costs are covered is hugely important when you’re running a small business.

I’d recommend that other publishers consider optimizing revenue by adding new ad units. If presented in the right way, ads can enhance the user experience. But it’s really important to test and see what works best with your content, format, and user behavior. Have the patience to wait and see what works and what doesn’t.

If you want to add an additional ad unit like Surgery Squad, sign in to your account today.

Posted by Meredith Blackwell - Inside AdSense team

Great speeches, great people, great atmosphere: AdSense in Zurich

Two weeks ago, we had the pleasure of welcoming 120 of our publishers from Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, and France at an AdSense publisher event in our Google office in Zurich.

The agenda of the day included seminars and presentations about:

• Trends in the online advertising market and how to use them for your site
• Our best tips to optimize your AdSense earnings
• Using DFP Small Business to get more out of AdSense
• Website usability
• The truth about common SEO myths

We also offered attendees 1-on-1 site consultations with a Google AdSense optimization specialist and ended the day by kicking back with pizza and beer to get to know one another a little better!

It was great to meet you in person to learn more about your businesses and experience with AdSense. We were thrilled to hear positive feedback from the attendees on the event and hope to offer a similar opportunity in a city near you soon!

Interested in attending future Google AdSense events? Check your Account settings and make sure you’re opted in to our mailings so we can inform you about our upcoming events!



Posted by Marcel Puppik and Sophie Emmerich - AdSense Optimisation Specialists

Western Union now in Mexico

We constantly strive to provide more payment options to our publishers around the world so you can receive your earnings as safely and quickly as possible. As part of this effort, we're very excited to announce the arrival of Western Union Quick Cash® payments for Mexico!

For those of you who aren't familiar with this form of payment, Western Union Quick Cash payments are free and will reach you faster than checks. Payments will continue to follow our normal payment schedule and are 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.

We know that many of you are still waiting for new forms of payment and new delivery options for your country, and we’re working hard to make this possible. Stay tuned to the blog as we work to improve the payments experience for publishers around the world!

To read this article in Spanish, click here.

Posted by Julia Peppiatt - AdSense Payments team

New Interface Wednesdays: CrowdGather gets more efficient with the new AdSense interface

CrowdGather uses the new AdSense interface to efficiently track and improve performance across its large network of forums.

CrowdGather.com is a leading, publicly traded network of online forums, consisting of tens of thousands of online communities. Sanjay Sabnani, CEO of Crowdgather, recently sat down with us to share his site’s story as well as some tips on using the new AdSense interface to track and improve performance.

Inside AdSense: Tell us about the origin of your site.
Sanjay Sabnani: In 2002 I acquired my first forum, GenMay.com (short for General Mayhem), a place for off-topic humor, where gamers hang out. General Mayhem grew pretty rapidly and I started acquiring more forums, which ultimately led to the creation of CrowdGather one year later. CrowdGather now receives 5 million unique visitors a month and 90 million monthly page views across its tens of thousands of communities, including hosted forum sites Lefora and FreeForums.org.

IA: What role does AdSense play in your business?
SS: I used Google AdSense from the get-go on GenMay.com, and began using it across the entire CrowdGather network once it was established. AdSense was the first ad network I had found that I actually understood and could implement and it became a very easy way to begin to monetize. These days, AdSense is a key component for us, and we’ve worked on optimizing it across our network. We’ve found that AdSense displays the most relevant ads out of any contextual partner we’ve worked with. Since forums are very text-rich and the ads are so relevant, AdSense converts very well.

IA: I understand you’ve recently started using the new AdSense interface. What do you like about it?
SS: The new interface is like a monitoring system to ensure that all goes well across the CrowdGather network. For a network like CrowdGather comprising tens of thousands of online communities, the detailed performance reports are important tools for tracking individual site performance. We’re always looking to see if any one particular site is acting differently than the rest of the network. With the new interface, we’re able to track traffic down to that individual subdomain level which is valuable for us, since before it was all lumped together as a blanket effective CPM.

Based on the quicker feedback, we’ve been able to adjust the overall positioning and placement of the AdSense units across our network more rapidly. Before, we’d look at aggregate data for a few weeks to decide if a certain location was performing better on a certain community. Now we’re able to play around a lot more quickly, and get that feedback much quicker, in terms of testing.

IA: If you had to sum it up, what would you tell other publishers about the new interface?
SS: We can see all this data more rapidly, and get an overview of the week to see the revenue direction. The new interface has made AdSense a bigger part of our analytics routine.

If you’d like to see how the new AdSense interface can help reduce time spent managing and monitoring your account, sign in to your account and switch to the new interface (you can get there from the link in the upper corner that says “Try the new AdSense interface”). To learn more about the new reporting functionality, visit our Help Center.

Posted by Meredith Blackwell - Inside AdSense team

Donate your ad cents (and dollars) to help Japan

A few weeks ago, we posted about how you can help Japan by donating via our crisis response page. We’ve been working to enable you to directly donate your AdSense earnings, and are happy to announce that you can donate a portion or all of your entire unpaid balance as of March 31, 2011 to the Japanese Red Cross via the Tides Foundation by filling out this donation form. If you have at least $10 in your account, we invite you to donate your earnings between April 1 and April 12.

Please keep in mind that all our normal policies still apply -- so please don't ask others to click on your ads in order to increase your earnings.

Due to technical limitations, we can only provide the opportunity for you to donate your earnings directly from your AdSense account if your reporting currency is in U.S. Dollars. If your reporting currency isn't in USD, and you'd still like to donate your AdSense earnings, please use the crisis response page instead.

We know that you may be interested in donating your earnings to additional charities and causes, and we're working to enable this functionality soon for all publishers. Stay tuned to the Inside AdSense blog for future opportunities to donate in other ways!

Posted by Julia Peppiatt - AdSense Payments Specialist

This blog has been updated to remove information that is no longer current.