A look back at 2012 highlights

Time sure flies! We’re coming up on another year end and, with that, we’d like to take a step back to review our AdSense highlights of 2012.

• With your feedback in mind, we made updates to the AdSense interface including a refresh to the Ad review center and the ability to add multiple users to your account. We also introduced more reporting features, a new look to Performance reports, and enabled you to manage your account and block ads directly from your site with the new Publisher Toolbar.
• You asked for more tips to help increase your revenue, so we showed ways to improve your site by using social tools, going mobile, making user experience changes, and using DoubleClick for Publishers Small Business. Many of you reported revenue uplift (up to 400% for some!) after implementing specific changes recommended through an email or the AdSense interface. 
• We had the opportunity to connect with many of you through our AdSense in Your City events (now called Learn with Google for Publishers), and through our newly created AdSense +page. We’d love to continue these interactions, so be sure to opt in to receive special offers, and follow our AdSense +page for the latest updates and Hangouts. 
• You let us know that you value hearing from other publishers, so we highlighted publisher stories throughout the year, including Philip Martin, who became an artist with the help of AdSense. 
• We made the payments process easier by updating the look of the Payments page in the AdSense interface and by extending payment options in Southeast Asia.
• We introduced changes to ad formats to provide you more options and increase your earning potential.
• You also told us that improved communication around the AdSense policies are important to you. We reviewed policy resources, provided some tips and announced ways we can work better together.

And finally, following our annual tradition, we’re happy to reveal our most visited blog post of the year: the announcement of AdSense availability in Indonesian. Please keep +1’ing 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.

It was a busy and fulfilling year working with you, our dedicated publishers. Stay tuned for updates on future improvements. Happy New Year, and we’ll see you in 2013!

Posted by Jamie Firkus - Inside AdSense Team

Local success stories: Qué Tiempo grows by 30% by going mobile

The increase in smartphone sales and mobile traffic makes it more important every day for web publishers to build a mobile strategy for their businesses. Nevertheless, only 1 out of 10 AdSense publishers has a mobile-friendly version of their site. To encourage other publishers to go mobile, Ángel Hernández and Manuel Lebrón, owners of Qué Tiempo, shared their experience with us.

Qué Tiempo is a Spanish site that displays the weather forecast globally. Ángel and Manuel became AdSense publishers in 2007 and over the years, thanks to investing in their content, optimizing their ads and growing their traffic, they’ve been able to build a team of more than 20 employees and invest in new ventures.

Back in 2008, they could already see through Google Analytics that the traffic coming from mobile devices was growing, so they decided to develop quetiempo.es/mobile in-house.

Their mobile traffic has successfully grown by 20% over the last two years. New users are arriving to the mobile-friendly version of their site from mobile devices, while the desktop version is experiencing a 10% year over year growth. This shows that mobile traffic is additional, not substitutional, and mobile usage is complementary to desktop.

Thanks to the increase in their mobile traffic, together with a successful implementation of their ads, Qué Tiempo saw their daily earnings grow by 30%. The CTR of their mobile leaderboard 320x50 now doubles the CTR on their desktop ads. In addition, the CPC of their mobile ads is 100% higher than the CPC of the desktop site.

Most of Qué Tiempo’s efforts are now focused on improving their mobile site with features like geotargeting, which makes it possible to deliver accurate location-specific weather forecasts.  

“We encourage other publishers to build a mobile-friendly site, not only because they’ll quickly see their revenue grow thanks to the available Google AdSense mobile formats, but also because the future of your online business depends on your mobile strategy, a market with infinite possibilities.”

Posted by Alicia Escriba - Inside AdSense team

This information is current as of December 18th, 2012.

Coming soon: Learn with Google for Publishers

Two and a half years ago we started the AdSense in Your City program with the goal of meeting publishers face-to-face and providing tips to help you increase your earnings.  From Orlando, Florida to Tokyo, Japan, we’ve visited over 100 cities around the world and talked to thousands of publishers.  We asked you what you’ve liked and what could be improved.  Based on your feedback, we’ve made some changes.

We’re excited to announce that, in 2013, AdSense in Your City events will be evolving into Learn with Google for Publishers.  We understand that many of you are using Google products beyond AdSense to grow your business. Our transition to this Google-wide initiative is part of our effort to help publishers like you make the most from the Web.  Learn with Google for Publishers goes beyond just AdSense optimization tips.  We’ll also cover new topics such as site design, analytics and ad serving.  Below is our North America schedule for the next three months; our international schedule will be posted here on Inside AdSense shortly, so stay tuned!

• New York, NY - January 29, 2013 
• Los Angeles, CA - February 7, 2013
• Toronto, Canada - February 19, 2013 
• Chicago, IL - March 5, 2013

Phillip Martin is one publisher who went to a Google event this year; take a look at his inspiring story in this short video:

If you’d like to attend one of our upcoming events, fill out this form and we’ll send out event confirmation details two weeks before the event. Space is limited, so sign up quickly.
   
Be sure to check out our complementary Learn with Google webinar series.  And, if you’re as excited as we are about Learn with Google for Publishers, let us know on our AdSense +page.

Posted by Ian Cohan-Shapiro - Inside AdSense Team

Updates around usage of 300x600 ad format

Since our recent introduction of the new 300x600 ad format, we’ve been happy to see many publishers testing it out on their pages. After carefully reviewing this ad format, we’d like to let you know about an upcoming update to our policies around use of the 300x600 unit.

Because this new format is larger than all our other ad units, we want to help ensure a balance between content and ads across publisher sites. With this in mind, going forward, publishers will be permitted to place a maximum of one 300x600 ad unit on each page. If you’ve placed more than one 300x600 ad unit per page on your site, we ask that you remove any additional ad units by Jan 10, 2013. We’ll also be sending email notifications shortly to affected publishers, asking them to make this update.

Please note that the limit for AdSense for content ad units still remains at three per page, so it’ll be possible to place one 300x600 ad unit and up to two other sizes on a page. As always, it’s important to consider both the user and advertiser experiences when placing any additional ad units on your pages.

We appreciate your understanding and help as we make this update. Thanks again for all of your feedback and enthusiasm for this new ad format; we’re continuing to work on developing new sizes, and will keep you posted on any new developments. If you’d like more information about AdSense policies, please visit our Help Center.

Posted by Charles Huang, Policy Associate

Working better together: Protecting against invalid activity

Publishers are the lifeblood of the Internet, and we’re committed to helping you grow your businesses. Last year alone, we shared $6.5 billion with our AdSense publishers. We also invest immense amounts of time and millions of dollars in systems (including sophisticated algorithms and human reviews) that keep bad ads from appearing on your sites and prevent advertisers from being fraudulently charged for bad clicks. When everything is working well, advertisers trust our network and continue to invest in it, which generates revenue for you the publisher, ultimately funding the free content users love.

But we’ve also heard the stories: publishers finding their accounts suspended or even disabled for “invalid activity” without a clear understanding of why or how to fix it. We know this can be an intensely frustrating, even scary experience. So why does this happen?

While the vast majority of publishers who sign up for AdSense do so in good faith, unfortunately there are some bad actors out there.  As you can imagine, we can’t reveal all the tools we use to keep bad sites and bad traffic out of our network.  But sometimes these tools result in good publishers who become a source of invalid activity having their accounts disabled without much recourse.  We’re making some changes we think will help fix this:

• We are considering tenure more actively when responding to detected invalid activity. For example, some trusted publishers will now have their accounts suspended instead of terminated, and over time we hope to work directly with more publishers to resolve invalid traffic issues without needing to disable the account at all. (As always, we’ll continue to credit advertisers for any invalid activity.)
• We’ve given publishers tools to submit more informative appeals via a new form, which may help resolve issues more quickly.
• We’re providing more details on invalid activity’s causes. If we’ve detected a violation of our policies you’ll receive an email and a notification to your account with further information and instructions. And you can read all about the causes of invalid activity at our Ad Traffic Quality Resource Center, which is now available in most languages supported by AdSense, such as German, French, Polish and Arabic.
• Whether you’re looking for a refresher or just creating your first ad unit, you can review the do’s and don'ts of ad traffic in our expanded AdSense Academy. 
• In order to help publishers avoid common pitfalls, we’re kicking off a video series that explains why some of our policies exist and how you can make sure you’re working with them. Our first looks specifically at invalid traffic.

We want to work with our publisher partners to keep the AdSense network strong -- keeping good publishers’ accounts in good standing, while also protecting advertisers and users from fraudulent activity. This is why we’re making changes, like the ones discussed today, to provide more help when things go wrong. We’ll be making even more changes as the year goes on so look for continued updates on this blog.

Posted by Jonathan Bellack - Product Management Director

We want to hear from you. Let’s continue the conversation -- submit your questions to us about the topics discussed in this post via Google Moderator. We’ll be holding a Google Hangout in January with members of our Product Quality Operations team for the first time to address your questions. Please note that for privacy reasons, we won’t be able to respond to account-specific questions.

Enhancing text ads on the Google Display Network

Text ads have proven to be a great way to help advertisers extend their Google search campaigns to sites in the Google Display Network, enabling publishers like you to earn revenue from your content. This is why we're continuing to work on improving text ads, even as we introduce new ad formats.

One change, rolling out this week, will make the look and feel of text ads more consistent as consumers and advertisers use screens interchangeably, and distinctions between devices fade. You'll notice a new clickable arrow icon, as well as slight optimizations to font size, spacing and text layout. These enhancements are among the largest that we have made to text ads, and our experiments indicate an uplift in clicks across publishers on the Google Display Network.

These changes will happen automatically for most text ads on your pages, and the color of the arrow icon will be based on the color palette you’ve selected for your ad units. For instance, if the background of your ad units is white, the icon will be grey; for other background colors, the icons will be a different shade of the background color. Consistent with our program policies, we ask that publishers refrain from mimicking these arrows or placing similar images around their ad units. Below are some example of this new text ad format in the 200x200 and 300x250 ad unit sizes.

200x200 Ad Unit

300x250 Ad Unit

We understand text ads are important to our publishers’ business and we’ll continue to innovate on new formats. Please feel free to share your feedback and suggestions with us on our AdSense +page; we look forward to helping you find new ways to grow your online businesses.

Posted by Johan Land and Stephen Yuan

More flexible controls with site-level blocking

One of the top requests we hear from publishers who manage multiple websites is the ability to block different ads for different sites. For instance, you may want to block a category of ads from appearing on a children’s site you run, but allow those same ads to appear on a separate sports-related site you also manage. As part of our ongoing efforts to improve AdSense to meet your needs and help you earn the most possible from all of your sites, we’re happy to let you know that this level of granular blocking will be available for AdSense for content within the next days.

There are two steps to getting started with these new flexible controls, once they're enabled in your account:

1. Site management:
To allow you to take actions on a site-level basis, you’ll first need to let our system know which domains and subdomains you own. Under your ‘Home’ tab, visit the ‘Account Settings’ page and navigate to the ‘Access and authorization’ section. From here, you can create your Owned sites list which already contains domains from your existing URL channels and manually add further domains or subdomains. Or, claim a site from an automatically populated “Unclaimed” sites list, which shows all sites where your ads are receiving impressions. Note that manually entering subdomains into the list will enable you to block ads from those specific pages while still allowing the ads to appear on the top-level domain.

2. Site-level blocking:
Once you’ve set up your Owned sites list, visit your ‘Allow and block ads’ tab. You’ll notice some updates, including a new navigation bar, new horizontal tabs, and an option for site-level blocking; your Owned sites list will appear under ‘AdSense for content’ in the navigation bar. To block ads from a specific domain or subdomain, just select it from the list in the left-hand navigation and make updates. If you’d like to apply any blocking changes to all of your sites, just select ‘All my sites’ from the left navigation.

With site-level blocking, you can block by URL; if sensitive and general category blocking are available in your language, you’ll be able to apply these options as well. Please keep in mind that there’s a product-wide limit of 500 URLs that can be added to a block list. And as always, we recommend blocking ads with caution, since doing so decreases the potential revenue you can earn.

Ready to get started? Visit our Help Center for detailed instructions on how to manage sites and set up site-level blocking rules. We’d also love to hear your feedback on this new feature -- visit our AdSense +page to leave a comment and discuss your thoughts with other publishers.

Posted by Adomas Paltanavičius - AdSense Engineering

HiPenpal.com makes more than 50% of AdSense revenue through mobile

HiPenpal.com is an international penpal website that facilitates the exchange of messages between people from different countries across all ages. Since its inception in 2006, HiPenpal.com, a Korea based company, has grown its membership base to 180,000 and has gained popularity in the United States and Japan.

Today, we’re going to highlight HiPenpal.com’s mobile journey, which has resulted in more than 50% of their total AdSense revenue coming from their mobile site.

---

You’ve been a publisher with AdSense since 2006. How did you find out about AdSense and what has your experience been to date?

I got to know about AdSense when I was web-surfing through foreign websites. At that time, I managed various websites but because I did not have an ad sales team, I had a hard time with ad orders. However, with the help of AdSense, I no longer had to worry about this. I didn’t have to manage orders and still received good quality ads through AdSense which allowed me to focus on content management. The biggest advantage with AdSense, is that the ads are highly relevant to users, which has resulted in high user engagement and high earnings. All of my businesses depend on Google AdSense for revenue.  I’m very satisfied with the service and revenue that AdSense has been able to provide because it has replaced the need for an expensive sales force.

When did you first build your mobile site and how has this affected traffic and user satisfaction for HiPenpal.com?

In the 2008, I revamped HiPenpal.com and created a mobile site along with it. At that time, since most users had feature phones, the site was not actively used. However, since 2009, with the spread of smartphones, the usage of the mobile site has been steadily increasing. Currently, 40% of our total traffic is accessing our mobile site and the users are extremely satisfied with it.

What things did you consider when building the mobile site and what type of investment was needed to make this happen?

In the 2008, I didn’t know much about mobile web development, so building the initial site took about six months. I wanted to make sure that the site displayed perfectly across all mobile phones and browsers, so I focused heavily on the structure of the site. There are cases when your site displays perfectly on one type of mobile device, but is distorted on another. In order to prevent this, I used a mobile web emulator or browser plug-in to perform quality checks during the development of the mobile site. Before launch, I checked the mobile site on the actual mobile devices. I invested in several devices with different operating systems in order to perform bug fixes and improve quality.

Additionally, I tried to simplify the navigational tree structure, so that people could easily access the desired pages with a simple operation. Most importantly, I was able to attract more mobile traffic by adding mobile-specific content.

How did users respond to ads on your mobile site?

We implemented mobile ads in 2008 and then upgraded to the smartphone-specific ad unit in 2009, when it was first launched. The 300x250 medium rectangle is positioned towards the bottom of the page, so that it will not distract from content engagement. On the other hand, the 320x50 mobile banner is posted on the top of the page, so that it would attract more attention.

Because smartphone ad units are now integrated with general AdSense for content (AFC), AdSense implementation has become more convenient.

We have not received any feedback about the mobile ads on the site, which I’m guessing means that users are not being inconvenienced by this implementation. Our users are very vocal when they find that the ads are distracting to the use of the site.

How does mobile revenue compare to your overall monetization?

Mobile revenue is increasing proportionally to the growth of mobile users. Currently, 40% of of total traffic (over 50% including tablet impressions) is coming from smartphones and resulting in over 50% of total revenue.

The 300x250 medium rectangle is generating the majority of revenue today, due to its high user engagement. Initially, I hesitated in implementing this ad unit, due to its large size, but now highly recommend it to other publishers. Since December 2009, the monthly revenue has increased about 100 times.

What advice do you have for publishers who have concerns about implementing mobile ads?

I believe that publishers who have concerns about mobile ads are actually hesitating about managing a mobile web site. However, mobile is a technology that cannot be ignored, more and more users are accessing the Internet through mobile devices instead of the PC. In my opinion, ignoring mobile is the same as ignoring half of the users. Furthermore, ignoring mobile web ads is the same as throwing out half of your revenue. If you don’t want to miss out on half of your revenue opportunity, do not hesitate. I encourage you to start from today.


Posted by Junho Jung, Publisher Relations Specialist

Search for ads by image in the Ad review center

The Ad review center in your AdSense account is a powerful tool that enables you to control the ads that appear on your site. Earlier this year, we revamped the tool to provide you with even more robust controls, and today, we’re making an improvement that will help you find and review ads more efficiently. Using the technology behind Google Image Search, you’ll now be able to upload an image file from your computer to search for related image ads; you can then review and take action on the returned ads.

For example, you might want to find and block ads that contain the logo of a competitor. After you upload and search for the logo, we’ll return image ads that contain the logo and which are eligible to appear on your pages. Please note that you can upload images with a maximum file size of 2MB and a largest dimension of 1024 pixels. To try this feature, log in to your AdSense account and visit the ‘Allow and block ads’ tab.

As always, we recommend using filters sparingly, and only in cases where you’d prefer not to have the specific ad or advertiser appear on your pages. Please keep in mind that blocking ads isn’t a revenue optimization tool; it can have a negative impact on your potential revenue since it reduces the competition between ads eligible to appear on your pages.

This feature currently only returns image ads, but we’re planning to support more ad formats in the future. We’ll let you know as soon as any additional functionality becomes available -- in the meantime, feel free to share your feedback about this feature on our AdSense +page or visit our Help Center for detailed instructions.

Posted by Marcel Crasmaru -- AdSense Engineering

Larger, brand-friendly ad sizes available in AdSense: 300x600

As screens grow and web content continues to become richer, the format and capabilities of ad units continue to evolve as well. One of the top requests from publishers in the last year has been to add larger ad sizes to our network, and today we’re excited to announce that the popular 300x600 unit will soon be available in your AdSense account.

The 300x600 unit, sometimes referred to as a half page unit, provides a larger space for advertisers to get their message across and can offer users rich engagement. As mentioned in our recently released Display Business Trends, the 300x600 is one of the fastest growing sizes by impressions and is indicative of a trend where publishers are offering more visually impactful ad sizes that are preferred by brand advertisers. Because this unit is new to our network, you’ll currently see a large number of text ads in these placements. Over time we’ll continue to build a wide range of text and display ad inventory eligible to appear in this full slot as well.

As with all ad sizes, it’s important to carefully consider the placement of ad units to ensure both users and advertisers have a great experience with your site. If you’d like more information on the performance of potential placements, check out our heat map in the AdSense Help Center.

If you have feedback about the 300x600 ad unit, feel free to leave a comment on our AdSense +page and discuss your thoughts with other publishers.

Posted by Omer Gimenez Llach - AdSense UI Engineer

Social Fridays: A recap

Over the past weeks, we’ve shown you through our Social Friday series how to get up and running with a Google+ strategy for your site and online business. We hope our posts and recent Hangout On Air have helped you learn more about what’s possible with Google+, and that you now have new ideas for optimizing the performance of your +page. Below is a list of the subjects we’ve covered, in case you’d like to review them.

Help your site stand out with the +1 button
Create a Google+ page to connect with users
Use images to deliver a richer experience
Gain visibility by verifying your Google+ page
See how your content was shared on Google+
Track and measure the performance of your +page
The New York Times uses Hangouts on Air to cover breaking news
Temptalia discovers the beauty of Google+
Using Google+, Brazilian news portal Estadão merges news with discussion
Google+ proves a recipe for success for Epicurious.com

Before we draw our series to a close, we’d like to encourage you to register for our upcoming social-focused webinar entitled ‘Grow and engage your audience with Google+’. This webinar will take place Tuesday, November 13th at 12pm PT (8pm GMT), and will discuss how social media is impacting online publishers . If you’re not able to attend the webinar, the recording will be posted to this site.

Thanks for following along with Social Fridays -- we’ll continue to post Google+ updates and tips for publishers here and on our AdSense +page, so stay tuned. Have a great weekend!

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

Announcing the Learn with Google webinar series for publishers

As we’re nearing the end of 2012, we’ve all got business goals to meet. Some of you might even be prepping for your busiest season. Today we’re excited to announce the launch of the Learn with Google series to help our publishers make the most from the web.  We’ll be hosting two upcoming webinars as part of our Learn with Google program:  

Google+ for publishers: Grow and engage your audience with Google+
Tuesday, November 13, 2012 at 12:00pm PT / 3:00pm ET

Join us for a discussion on how social media is impacting online publishers and how Google thinks about social. We'll also cover how you can grow and engage your audience on the web and mobile with Google+ using Google+ pages, the +1 button, Hangouts, and Authorship.

Register Here

Navigating Google's Mobile Ads Ecosystem
Wednesday, November 28, at 12:30pm PT / 3:30pm ET

Ever wonder who the buyers are in Google's mobile ads ecosystem and how their ads reach your inventory? Join us to learn the inner workings of Google's mobile ads ecosystem, including an overview of Google demand sources and the different channels advertisers can use buy your mobile inventory.

Register Here

Visit the webinar page for more information on these two events and to register. You can also stay up-to-date on the schedule by adding the Learn with Google webinar calendar to your own Google calendar.

We look forward to hosting many more Learn with Google webinars for our publishers.

Posted by Faith Rosen, Product Marketing Manager

Updates to the application process for host partner sites

We’ll soon be updating the application process for new publishers who apply for an AdSense account via a host partner site like Blogger or Hubpages. As you may know, host partner sites allow publishers to create and monetize their content, which is hosted on the partner site rather than the publisher’s own domain. New publishers approved for AdSense accounts via a host partner site will be able to place ads on and earn from policy-compliant content they’ve created on any host partner site. If they then decide to show ads on their own domain, from today onwards they’ll need to complete an extra approval step similar to the application process at www.google.com/adsense. Please note that publishers who were approved for AdSense accounts before today won't be affected by these changes.

Here’s an example to explain the process -- let’s say Sue runs a blog using Blogger. She applies for a hosted AdSense account within Blogger, and once approved, she begins to monetize her blog. If she then launches a second blog on Blogger, she’ll be able to show ads on that second blog and earn from both sites.

Next, let’s imagine Sue decides to purchase her own domain, example.com, and wants to earn from the content she creates there. Before she can do so, she’ll need to complete a form in her account to request a site review. After submitting the form, she’ll need to generate ad code and implement it on a live page of example.com that receives traffic. The implemented ad unit will remain blank until the domain has been reviewed by the AdSense team.

If the request is approved, Sue can proceed with placing additional ad units on the site. If the request is denied, she’ll be unable to show ads on her new domain, but there’ll be no impact to her two existing blogs; she can continue to earn from them, and can also work to resolve the issues with her new domain and resubmit her site for review.

These changes will help ensure a consistent, seamless sign up experience for publishers, whichever application process they follow, while also allowing publishers and host partner sites to continue working together as they have been. We remain committed to building a high-quality network that also provides strong business results for our advertiser partners and a positive experience for users.

Posted by Sophia Lin, Product Manager

Social Fridays: Google+ proves a recipe for success for Epicurious.com

Every Friday, we’re posting Google+ tips to help publishers make the most of all of the features and resources available. Be sure to check back each week for the latest in our educational Social Fridays series!

A Condé Nast site, Epicurious.com publishes original content from its own editors and leading food authorities from around the world every day. It incorporates more than 30,000 professionally tested and created recipes from celebrity chefs, premier food journalists and renowned cookbook authors, as well as 200,000 member-submitted recipes. Epicurious launched its Google+ page only late last year, and has now grown to over 2 million followers. Achieving the impressive milestone is down to a combination of factors: installing social sharing utilities on the Epicurious site, developing content tailored specifically to both the Google+ interface and to its audience, and embracing the features that are unique to the platform.

“We started projecting growth based on similar growth with new networks,” says Jennifer Gaonach, Digital Consumer Marketing Director, Condé Nast, about their early days on the platform. “But we’ve exceeded the expected growth by many times. It’s great to see; by far it’s our largest network. It’s really taken off.”

A number of slick design features at Epicurious.com help visitors share content and easily interact with the Google+ page. There’s a social sharing sidekick on the site that floats in the left margin alongside most content, as well as a ‘Connect with Epicurious’ module featuring social networks that sits on the top of the ad rail. These social networks also appear in the Epicurious email templates.

Epicurious continues to refine its content strategy to best suit Google+ followers. “We really want to understand how we can engage these users and give them a great experience, and then when it makes sense, drive them back to Epicurious.com,” explains Jennifer. “As our audience has been growing, our editors have increased the frequency of our posts so that anyone who’s following us can know the latest article that’s being posted.” The team usually adds between three and five posts a day, and have found that visual content on Google+ performs particularly well.

Social Reports in Google Analytics reveal that users coming to Epicurious from Google+ are more engaged than visitors from other social media platforms. Google+ is in the top 10 social referrers to the Epicurious pages, and the average visit duration from Google+ is 12% longer than it is from other social media platforms. The number of pages viewed per visit from these users is among the highest of all platforms too.

What’s next? The Epicurious team plans to use Hangouts – high-quality videoconference functionality on Google+ – to create even deeper experiences for followers, including cook-alongs and exclusive chef chats.

Hungry for more? Read the full case study on Epicurious.com’s use of Google+, and feel free to leave a comment on our AdSense +page about this story.

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

Uncover trends and AdSense insights with Analytics

Knowledge is power: Insightful data on account performance and user behavior can help you optimize your AdSense implementations. By linking your AdSense account to a new or existing Analytics account, you’ll gain access to additional information that can help you identify opportunities to monetize your content more effectively.

Here are just some of the questions you’ll be able to answer when combining AdSense data with reports in Analytics:

• How are my users interacting with my site? With In-page Analytics, you’ll have access to a visual assessment of how users interact with your web pages. This can help you determine the most strategic locations in which to place ads.

• Where and why are visitors leaving my site? Identify pages with high bounce rates to determine the percentage of visitors who only see one page during a visit to your site. Users might behave in this way for a variety of reasons, but you can work to provide the best user experience possible by optimizing the content and ad implementation on these pages. 

• Which traffic sources and URLs help me earn the most? Determine which pages generate the highest AdSense revenue, and then replicate those successful implementations on other parts of your site. You can also set up custom channels for pages that perform well to create attractive placements for advertisers to specifically target. In addition, try content experiments and test different page layouts to compare the performance of key metrics.

To gain these types of insights and more, be sure to link your AdSense and Analytics accounts. Based on publisher feedback, we’ve just improved the linking process to make it more straightforward. Keep in mind that you can only link one AdSense account to one Analytics account, and that the AdSense login must be an ‘Administrator’ on the Analytics account. To get started, visit the ‘Access and Authorization’ section of the Account settings page in your AdSense account and follow the instructions. For more details, please refer to the AdSense Help Center.

To help you get started with your AdSense data in Analytics and show you some relevant information at a glance, we’ve created this easy-to-use dashboard. Select one of your profiles to import, and you’ll be able to quickly see and customize the reports which matter most to you. You can access this dashboard at any time from the relevant profile by clicking the ‘Home’ tab.

Do you have feedback about using Analytics reports or the dashboard? Feel free to leave a comment on our AdSense +page and discuss your thoughts with other publishers.

Posted by Esteban Talavera - Software Engineer, AdSense Reporting

Upcoming international AdSense in Your City workshops

This November, our international teams will be hitting the road to host more AdSense in Your City workshops around the globe. During these workshops, we’ll provide product updates, offer individual optimizations to help boost revenue, and share tips for getting started with solutions like DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) Small Business. Also, these workshops offer attendees networking opportunities and the chance to meet with local publishers.

Here are the cities we’ll be visiting in the next few weeks -- please take note of the language of the sessions:

• Week of November 5: 
• Salvador, Brazil (sessions in Portuguese)
• Fortaleza, Brazil (sessions in Portuguese)

• Week of November 12: 
• Manchester, UK (sessions in English)
• Edinburgh, Scotland (sessions in English)
• Bogotá, Colombia (sessions in Spanish)
• Budapest, Hungary (sessions in Hungarian)

• Week of November 19: 
• Montevideo, Uruguay (sessions in Spanish)
• Stockholm, Sweden (sessions in Swedish)
• Madrid, Spain (sessions in Spanish)

• Week of November 26: 
• Tokyo, Japan (sessions in Japanese)

Interested in attending one of these upcoming AdSense in Your City workshops? Please fill out our interest form. Space is limited and so we won’t be able to accommodate all requests, but we’ll let you know if we’re able to extend an invitation. We also recommend ensuring you’re opted in to receiving ‘Special Offer’ emails so we can reach you in the future.

We hope to see you at an upcoming AdSense in Your City workshop!

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

Social Fridays: Using Google+, Brazilian news portal Estadão merges news with discussion

Every Friday, we’re posting Google+ tips to help publishers make the most of all of the features and resources available. Be sure to check back each week for the latest in our educational Social Fridays series!

While the world of communications has changed quite a bit since the Brazilian newspaper O Estado de São Paulo was founded in 1875, sharing high-quality news, analysis and reporting has remained its constant goal. In order to provide information in real time, the influential paper launched the portal Estadao.com.br in March 2000. And with social media a growing priority, Estadão launched its +Estadão page on Google+ in the second half of 2011.

According to Digital Content Director Claudia Belfort, an early discovery was that Google+ offered a slightly different opportunity from other social media channels already in use by Estadão. “I realized that the comments on Google+ were more elaborate. Our followers are very interested in contributing to a discussion so we decided to invest more, always with this focus.”

Over time, Estadão has built Google+ into its content strategy as a result of the platform’s unique ability to stimulate conversation and discussion. Cláudia believes that Estadão’s audience is interested in a network that’s not just social, but also enables knowledge exchange. With this in mind, the team publishes content specifically relevant to Google+ followers, rather than replicating the same content across all of the social media outlets that Estadão uses. They’ve found that the network responds particularly well to serious themes, so posts cover topics like economics, politics and current affairs, often with an informal tone.

But it’s not only the exchange of ideas through the written word that Google+ facilitates for the newspaper. Estadão takes advantage of the visual strengths of the platform by posting full images, captivating video content and stimulating face-to-face discussion through frequent Hangouts, the free, high-quality video chat feature unique to Google+. Plenty of creative channel-specific initiatives are underway: a daily video of economic analysis, a nightly podcast summarizing the main news of the day and a weekly trailer previewing new cinema releases.

Estadão uses Google Analytics to understand visitor behavior, and it’s clear that Google+ is having a positive effect on traffic to the portal. Over a five-month period, Analytics showed that visitors to the Estadão site from the Google+ page increased 540%. At the same time, this traffic generated an uplift in page views per visit of 18%. Currently, the Estadão Google+ page has over 500,000 followers.

Want to replicate the brand’s success? Read all about it in the full case study, and feel free to share your experiences with us on our AdSense +page.

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

Mobile revenue from AdSense enables Ultimoprezzo to invest in growth

Italian site Ultimoprezzo.com provides a unique service to online consumers. It supplies information on stores and their opening hours, as well as their best prices for smartphones, TVs, tablets, laptops and other consumer electronics products.

As a supplier of free services, Ultimoprezzo needs to be savvy about its strategy for generating revenue. AdSense provides a straightforward solution.

“The Google AdSense program is the ideal way for us to monetize our publishing efforts,” explains founder and CEO Alberto Giacobone. He says Google AdSense not only provides Ultimoprezzo’s users with relevant and interesting advertising information, but also provides its advertisers cost-effective ad placements since Ultimoprezzo doesn’t need to maintain a sales network.

Globally, smartphone usage is on the rise. In Italy alone, 69% of smartphone owners never leave the house without carrying their device and 82% use their smartphone to perform research on a product or service. “Certainly, the numbers speak for themselves,” Alberto affirms. “In Italy and abroad, we are increasingly in a ‘post- PC’ era where smartphones and tablets accompany us at all times and everywhere, often even while we are doing other things.”

Very early on in Ultimoprezzo’s development, Alberto’s team perceived an opportunity in the mobile space. An internal team developed Ultimoprezzo’s mobile-optimized website, while a special agency developed applications for iOS and Android.

So has the company seen an uplift in mobile traffic? “The trend is clear,” says Alberto. “Mobile traffic is growing and is now already more than 15% of our total traffic. And this is not only down to the growing popularity of smartphones which cost less than $100; what we notice is that the users are getting better at exploiting the technological tool at their disposal more and more frequently.” With Ultimoprezzo’s non-mobile traffic volumes booming as well, by the end of 2012 Alberto estimates mobile will account for one-third of the company’s total traffic.

AdSense provides a way for Ultimoprezzo to monetize its content across devices. As new digital platforms emerge, AdSense makes new revenue streams available. “The AdSense program has allowed us to invest in the growth – both in terms of quantity and quality – of the services to our visitors, so we can keep them free always. ”

This information is current as of October 23rd, 2012.

Posted by Cristina Miscimarra - Inside AdSense Team

Social Fridays: Your Google+ questions answered, via Hangout

Every Friday, we’re posting Google+ tips to help publishers make the most of all of the features and resources available. Be sure to check back each week for the latest in our educational Social Fridays series!

We've shared quite a bit of information on using Google+ for your business in the past few weeks, and so we'd now like to pause for a moment to hear from you. After reading our Social Fridays posts, do you have specific questions about developing a Google+ strategy for your site? Are you interested in hearing more about a certain topic like using Ripples or avoiding common pitfalls?

To address your Google+-related questions and experiences, we’ll be hosting a Hangout On Air on Tuesday, October 30th at 10:00am PT with a Google+ specialist from the AdSense team. Visit our AdSense +page to RSVP to the event, and feel free to post your Google+ questions there. Anyone will be able to watch the live Hangout On Air, and if you miss it, we’ll post the recording to our YouTube channel so you can watch at a later time.

We hope to see you in our upcoming Hangout! We’ll be back next week with another Google+ publisher success story.

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

PubTalk: Voitek Klimczyk shares how AdSense saved his business and his health

You’ve met Todd Sarouhan of GoVisitCostaRica.com and Katie and Gene Hamilton of diyornot.com from our recent Google+ Hangout. You’ve also heard them and other publishers discuss tips about ad sizes and placements, additional ad units, and ad colors, all of which contributes to growing their AdSense revenue.

Watch this video to meet Voitek Klimczyk, the creator of simplyadditions.com. AdSense let him take his business online and keeps him healthy.



Tell us your AdSense story to get featured in future posts. Complete the sentence "Because of Google AdSense..." and send it to pubstories@google.com along with a photograph of what Google AdSense has given you. Be sure to include your publisher ID and main website URL. Please note we won't be able to respond to all submissions. We’re looking forward to reading your responses!

This post is part of the PubTalk series of conversations with Publishers

Posted by Julia Eckstein - Inside AdSense Team

A makeover for Performance reports

Your performance reports are the key to understanding your AdSense account activity and earnings. This is where you can get vital information about your account, quickly and easily. We’re constantly working to enhance performance reports, and so today, we’re introducing some changes that improve the usability of the reports and make them more visually compelling.

When you visit your “Performance reports” tab, you’ll notice changes like these:

• The graph area covers a wider area of the screen.
• The list of metrics has been moved from the right hand side to the top in an interactive scorecard.
• There are new buttons for day, week and month for the usual timeline graph to allow for more control over granularity when analyzing activity over longer time periods. 
• You can choose “Events” on a timeline report graph or select the “Events” report from the left navigation to see how specific account changes are related to account performance.
• There are new graph types available, such as pie or bar charts, to visualize the data you’re looking at. In addition, the “Countries” report shows you where your users are located on a world map: 

We hope you enjoy these changes -- stay tuned for more updates. For additional information visit our Help Center and feel free to leave comments and feedback on our AdSense +page.

Posted by Daniel White - Software Engineer, AdSense Reporting

Social Fridays: Temptalia discovers the beauty of Google+

Every Friday, we’re posting Google+ tips to help publishers make the most of all of the features and resources available. Be sure to check back each week for the latest in our educational Social Fridays series!

Temptalia is one of the most popular beauty and makeup review blogs on the web, responsible for delivering the latest product information, tutorials and in-depth reviews to numerous fans. Given the blog’s global following, it’s easy to imagine a huge staff working behind the scenes, but in fact founder Christine Mielke still runs the blog herself and creates the vast majority of the site’s content.

In addition to running the blog herself, Christine maintains a focus on social media for Temptalia. Christine established the +Temptalia page on Google+ not long after the platform launched, and continues to encourage fans to +1 and link to the brand’s page. On average, six new posts appear on Temptalia every day, and each of these is promoted through Google+. She says content that includes photography shines on the channel, and pretty products and colorful cosmetics tend to grab more attention than skincare.

Google Analytics is key to helping Christine understand how each social media channel contributes to the blog’s traffic. Designed to make analysis easy, Social Sources reports in Analytics automatically segment referral traffic from hundreds of social networks. By using these reports, Christine can see that Google+ is among the top 10 social referrers to Temptalia, along with other Google properties including YouTube and Blogger.

But to get further insights into the audience, Christine looks beyond the numbers and goes straight to the users themselves. “We try to listen in what our readers are asking for, what they are looking at, what they are most excited about,” she explains. This user-focused approach continues to drive Temptalia’s success. Christine’s advice to those getting started with Google+ pages is to use the channel as a valuable research tool in understanding a site’s readership.

While Temptalia may be a small operation, its impact is significant – already Temptalia has over 600,000 followers on Google+. To read more about how Christine, a lifelong beauty enthusiast, is using Google+ to maintain, build and serve her blog’s audience, read the full case study.

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

It’s your turn to talk: Don’t miss our satisfaction survey

The end of 2012 is coming closer and we’d like to thank you for another fantastic year and your continued partnership with AdSense! We’re already busy planning our objectives for next year and would like your suggestions about what could be improved.

In the next few weeks we’ll be sending out our bi-annual satisfaction survey to a sample of publishers opted in to receiving “occasional surveys”, so if you’d like to participate, make sure to update your email preferences. We’re looking forward to reading about the things you love about AdSense and the aspects which could be improved.

Your suggestions and feedback are very valuable to us. Based on feedback you’ve provided in previous surveys, our forums and at in-person events, we’ve made a number of improvements to the AdSense program and product this year. For example, we introduced user management enabling you to share your account with business partners, delivered resources to help you maintain a healthy account, and added additional blocking functionality to control the ads that appear on your sites. While these types of changes and new features do take time to build and test, please know that we incorporate your input as we continuously work to make improvements.

Keep your eyes peeled for our survey, which will be sent the week of October 23rd. We read through every comment, so don’t miss the chance to let us know your thoughts and ideas. We’re looking forward to hearing from you, and we appreciate your time.

Posted by Sahar Golestani, on behalf of the AdSense Publisher Satisfaction Team

Affiliate Ads for Blogger now in the U.K.

(Cross posted to the Google Affiliate Network blog)

We’ve blogged before about Google Affiliate Network, which helps you earn more from your site with ads that pay based on conversions. Earlier this year, we launched Google Affiliate Ads for Blogger in the U.S. The positive results and feedback we’ve received are very promising, and we’re excited to announce that this gadget is now available to Blogger users in the U.K.

Google Affiliate Ads for Blogger is a gadget that makes it easy for Blogger users to insert an affiliate ad into a blog post and earn a commission when someone clicks the link and makes a purchase on the advertiser’s site.

Watch the video below to learn more:



Here’s how to get started:

1. If you’re a Blogger user in the U.K. (or the U.S.), sign in to AdSense and go to the Earnings tab in Blogger, or sign up if you don’t already have an AdSense account.
2. When logged into your AdSense account, you may see the Google Affiliate Ads for Blogger gadget when you write a new blog post. This gadget is available to select U.K. (and U.S.) Blogger users whose blogs match available ad categories, so that’s why you may not immediately see the gadget even if you have an AdSense account.
3. Select a relevant affiliate ad from the 'Advertise Products' gadget.
4. Publish your post, and voilà! You may earn a commission when someone clicks your affiliate ad and makes a purchase.

Participating U.K. advertisers:

Advertisers including Bestbathrooms.com, Cheapsuites.co.uk, Crooked Tongues, Diamond Manufacturers, eFlorist, Hudsonreed.com, Perfume Click and The Snugg have already come on board, and more are joining every day.

For additional questions, check out the Help Center or contact The Google Affiliate Network team.

Posted by: Emily Harris - Product Marketing Manager

Your use of the Google Affiliate Ads for Blogger program is governed by the Google Affiliate Ads For Blogger Online Program Terms and Conditions. Please review the Office of Fair Trading's Q&A that discusses a blogger's obligation to disclose financial benefits you may receive for endorsing products or services. As a reminder, under your Google Affiliate Ads For Blogger Online Program Terms and Conditions, You must comply with all applicable laws relating to the disclosure of financial benefits You receive for endorsing any products or services.  For example, when you include a Blogger Affiliate Ad on Your blog, you will clearly identify, in a manner prominently displayed with editorial content on your blog such that it would be unavoidable to the average user, that the Blogger Affiliate Ad is an advertisement.

The New York Times uses Hangouts on Air to cover breaking news

Every Friday, we’re posting Google+ tips to help publishers make the most of all of the features and resources available. Be sure to check back each week for the latest in our educational Social Fridays series!

A few weeks ago, we talked about the possibilities around using Google+ Hangouts on Air to hold live broadcasts. This free feature allows you to live stream a conversation between 10 participants, directly from your Google+ page, your YouTube channel, and even your website, for a global audience to view.

The New York Times has been hosting frequent Hangouts on Air to engage with their audience, with topics ranging from foreign affairs to professional baseball to voter concerns. Since setting up the +New York Times page in November 2011, the Times has aimed to create a hub for their online readers to not only discover news, but to also participate in discussion.

Recently, the Times used Hangouts on Air to cover a breaking news story and reach a wide online audience. Just hours after the the Supreme Court’s monumental decision to uphold President Obama’s Affordable Healthcare Act, the Times became the first major media outlet to discuss the news via live web video. The Hangout video was broadcasted live on the +New York Times page as well as on the NYTimes Opinion page, allowing the discussion and analysis to be shared with a wider audience.

The Times team prepared for a smooth Hangout by securing guest participants for their live broadcast a week in advance. When the date of the decision arrived, the Times added a graphic placeholder to the NYTimes Opinion page and published a post to their +page to publicize the upcoming Hangout. Once the Hangout started, they embedded the video directly into the Opinion page and also added a homepage promotion to their site to drive awareness. After the Hangout was completed, the Times team quickly edited the video footage on YouTube and uploaded it to the front page of NYTimes.com for additional visibility.

For more information, read the full case study. If you’re ready to start broadcasting, be sure to review our tips and then get started with your own Hangout on Air. If you have any advice of your own to share about Hangouts, feel free to post them to our AdSense +page!

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

5 Principles of User Experience, Part 3

This is the final post of a three-part series highlighting five user experience principles to keep in mind when designing your site. Using these principles will help provide a great experience for users on your site. To see these principles applied to an AdSense publisher’s site, we'll host a live Google+ Hangout on October 9th at 10:30am PT with an AdSense publisher. We will be applying these very principles to help improve their site! Go to the Google AdSense G+ page on the 9th to see it live!

In our first and second posts in this series we discussed how to identify your user’s goals, the structure of your site, how to help guide users through your site and a few tips for a better experience on mobile. In this post we’ll provide our fifth and final user experience tip and lay out some strategies for converting a casual user into a loyal one.

5. Turn casual visitors into loyal users

So far we’ve discussed ways to make sure you understand what your users are looking for and how to present it to them. But you may be wondering how do you keep users coming back again and again? After all, repeat business is the lifeblood of businesses both online and offline. To get users to return, you need to do more than just answer their questions; you need to give them reasons to return to your site.

Tips:
Below are a few ways you can turn one-time visitors into repeat visitors:

• New content: First and foremost, make sure to constantly provide new, high-quality content. Next, make sure you are showcasing new content on your top landing pages.
• Related content: Show users similar content elsewhere on your site. Create a section that links users to popular content on the same subject. This will drive more engagement.
• Social: Make it easy for users to connect with you via their favorite social networks. All major social networks have widgets that you can put on your site to allow users to follow you. Once you have them make sure you push out your most popular content to drive return visits.
• Email: Make sure you have a way for users to subscribe to your email list for updates and/or a newsletter.
• User engagement: Make it easy for users to interact with your content, through forums, a rating system or recommendations.

Example:
If you have a deal site where users can search for deals, you can first prompt them to sign up to be notified via email when new offers that match their interests are added to the site. You can also showcase how many people recommend a deal so users see which deals are popular. 

We hope you enjoyed this three part series on user experience and we welcome your comments below!

Thinking about implementing some of these changes? We’d love to hear about it! Let us know what you changed in the comments section below.

Don’t forget to check out the User Experience Google+ Event Page on October 9th at 10:30am PST/1:30pm EST to join a Hangout On Air and see a real AdSense publisher put these principles in action!

Posted by David Richards - Google AdSense

Resources:Get a Google+ Page  - http://www.google.com/+/business/
Allow users to subscribe to your updates via Google+.

5 Principles of User Experience, Part 2

This is the second of a three-part series highlighting five user experience principles to keep in mind when designing your site. Using these principles will help provide a great experience for users on your site. After the next post we’ll host a live Google+ Hangout on October 9th at 10:30am PT with an AdSense publisher. We will be applying these principles to help improve their site! Visit the AdSense Google+ page on the 9th to see it live!

In our last post about user experience, we provided two tips to help you identify some goals for your site and your users.

In this post we’ll share another two tips; you’ll learn how to steer users around your site and how different use cases (desktop or mobile) require different setups.

3. Ensure that users know what action to take on your site

Users should always know what action to take next on your site. When a user lands on your page it should be very clear what they should pay attention to first, second, and so on. There should also be a clear next action for them to take whether it's clicking “buy” to make a purchase or reading a related article.

Tips:
Consider these points when creating meaningful calls to action:

• Emphasis: Give emphasis to the call to action by its size, color, contrast and/or use of white space.
• Simple: Don’t clutter your page with too many different actions. Really think about what you want your users to do and prioritize those actions in your design.
• Incentive: Give an incentive to take action. This can be seen in discounts, gifts, raffle entry or access to more content
• Proximity: Make sure your call to action is in a logical placement on the page. For example, if the page features an article, you may want to put the call to action below the article.
• Consistency: Have your call to action show throughout the site and keep its appearance consistent. 

4. Tailor your experience to your users’ situation

Your site needs to provide a great experience to users whenever and wherever they need it. It’s important to put some thought into how your users use your site differently in different situations. Be sure to consider their time constraints and whether they are on a mobile device or a computer.

Tips:
Use these tips to help you think about the use cases your users might experience:

• Situation: What situation is the user in that caused them to seek out information on your site?
• Limit features: The mobile version of your site should only include the core features of your site that will help your users find the information they’re looking for. Save the other advanced features for your desktop site where your users have a little bit more time.
• Speed: Users only have a couple of seconds so make sure your site loads lightning fast. Google’s Page Speed tool can help you optimize your load time.
• Forgiveness: Users make mistakes, especially on mobile. Let them easily undo and return to where they were, without having to use the back button.

Example:
Suppose you’re a restaurant review site. How does a mobile user’s behavior differ from that of a desktop user? First off, mobile users are probably on the move; they could even be walking down the street as they browse your site. They won’t have time to navigate through several pages of restaurants like they do on the desktop site. They expect your site to use the phone’s GPS to locate them and show them popular restaurants nearby based on their search. Your site can even optimize the review experience for mobile by showing the most popular short reviews since users don’t have time to read long reviews.

Remember, it’s all about thinking about the situation that the user is in when they reach your site and tailoring the user experience to match.

Check in tomorrow and we’ll talk about generating return visits to your site and creating customer loyalty through a great UX.

Posted by David Richards - Google AdSense

Resources:
Google Analytics Events  - http://www.google.com/analytics/
Measure the impact of design changes and monitoring the continued usage of your site will keep you updated on how your users are interacting with your site, and how their usage can shift, change or evolve over time. Google Analytics Events will help you measure these changes by measuring clicks on pre-defined elements of the page.

Site Speed Tool - https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/
Google has provided some great tools to helping improve your site speed.

How to GoMo - http://www.howtogomo.com/
Google has created a quick tool to see how your website looks on a mobile phone. It also provides some great resources to help build your mobile site.

DUDA mobile - http://gomo.dudamobile.com/
Duda Mobile is a partner with Google GoMo and allows you to create your mobile site in minutes.