Exciting new fonts in AdSense

An important element of a user’s experience on your site is how they rate its overall appearance. You’ve been asking for more customization options in our ad units so that they complement the design of your site. Today, we’re pleased to let you know that we’ve added five new font options for you to choose from when customizing your ad units.

We looked at a combination of your requests for specific fonts together with popularity and recent adoption levels on the web when deciding on which new fonts to add. Here’s the full list:

• Open Sans

• Open Sans Light

• Roboto Light

• Ubuntu Light

• Lora

You can customize your fonts directly in your account in a few quick steps. We hope you enjoy experimenting with them and would love to hear your feedback on which fonts work best on your site.

Posted by Alan Oursland - AdSense Software Engineer
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More control over advanced ad format features

We’re always looking for innovative ways to improve our ad formats, to help you earn more revenue from your content. We’ve been steadily rolling out new features to maximize the performance of your ad units, including a clickable arrow icon on our text ads, serving similar-sized display ads and most recently, the introduction of favicons to our text ads.

These enhancements are designed to improve the performance of your ads, but we know that sometimes you may prefer not to include them. Based on your requests for more control over the ways ads are served on your site, we’re happy to let you know that you can opt out of the following advanced ad format features:

• Similar-sized display ads: Showing smaller but higher performing display ads in larger ad units.
• Enhanced text ads: Displaying text ads with performance-enhancing features such as product images, favicons, or clickable arrow icons, etc. 
• Expandable ads: Displaying rich media ads that can expand beyond the original size of the ad unit, following a user-initiated action. 
• Enhanced display ads: Showing display ads with performance-enhancing features such as mouseover highlights, etc.
• Animated display ads: Showing non-static display (e.g., image) ads, such as ad creatives created using Adobe Flash or animated GIF formats.

Before opting out of any of these enhancements, remember that they have been created to improve the performance of your ad units and disabling them may have a negative impact on your revenue. It’s also important to note that all opt outs apply on an account level and not just on individual ad units.

You can opt out of any of these features in a few short steps. We hope that having more control over these features will be helpful when deciding on the look of your ads. Tell us what you think on our Google+ page.

Posted by Nick Radicevic - AdSense Product Manager

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Achievement Unlocked: monetizing online games with TrueView and AdSense

With every new plot planted and zombie zapped to bits, the online games industry is changing the way we interact with entertainment. Online games publishers work with us to grow their gaming empires across all screens, from distribution and downloads through to in-game advertising. We’ve also recognized a growing advertiser demand to reach highly engaged games audiences. So we were especially excited to announce at Europe’s Game Developer Conference: we’re launching the TrueView video ad format across our games monetization platforms.

TrueView creates a better ad experience for gamers, and higher monetization for publishers

We all know how important it is to create a gamer-friendly ad experience, which is why we’re bringing one of our most successful ad formats to games: the skippable video ad. TrueView Instream skippable video ads drive a lot of advertiser demand on YouTube, the Ad Exchange, and AdSense for video. Following on Susan Wojcicki’s beta announcement earlier this year, we’re now making TrueView video ads available to all games publishers on AdX, AdSense for games, and select mobile publishers on AdMob. During the beta, we found that in general TrueView video ads contributed to lower abandonment rates and greater monetization compared to normal instream video ads.

The rise of gamer-friendly ad formats like TrueView can drive even better monetization for games - which is great news for game publishers, but perhaps not for the zombies.

Posted by Rebecca Illowsky and Allen Huang - Product Managers, Games Monetization
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Watch the final two weeks of the AdSense 10 Challenge live

Back in June, we kicked off the AdSense 10 Challenge as a way to help publishers like you become AdSense experts and meet members of the AdSense community online.

Over the last eight weeks, we’ve covered topics ranging from optimization opportunities and Google Analytics to user experience and A/B testing. We’ve also discussed strategies and best practices with product managers, optimization specialists, and some of our most successful publishers each week.

As we wrap up the final two weeks of the Challenge, we’ll talk about mobile strategy and how to use Google+ to grow your site and engage your users. Be sure to tune in by watching the final two weeks of the AdSense 10 Challenge live from the Google+ event pages listed below:

Week	Event
Week 9 - Mobile: The Time Is Now	Topic of the Week presentation Join this page at 11:00am PDT on August 20th to live stream the broadcast Meet the AdSense Community Join this page at 11:00am PDT on August 21st to live stream the broadcast
Week 10 - Grow and Engage with Google+	Topic of the Week presentation Join this page at 11:00am PDT on August 27th to live stream the broadcast Meet the AdSense Community Join this page at 11:00am PDT on August 28th to live stream the broadcast

If you can’t watch the broadcasts live, not to worry. Recordings of each broadcast will be available in our Help Center shortly after each live event.

See you at the end of the Challenge!

Posted by Laurie Shiau - Inside AdSense team
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Stay on top of AdSense program policies with new notifications in your account

Our AdSense program policies are defined to ensure we all preserve a healthy ecosystem for users, advertisers and other publishers, and compliance with these policies is an absolute must for every publisher. We’ve heard your requests for more accessible information on policy issues and we’re happy to tell you that we are launching an additional policy notifications feature directly in your AdSense account. This will help you to quickly understand and address any potential policy issues.

Going forward, if our system detects a policy violation, you’ll receive both an email and an account notification with a link to view more details. Under the Policy violations section on the home tab, you can quickly access important information including details on each violation, the issue ID and an example of the violation on your site. The page will also include details on the action you need to take to resolve the violation.

We’ll be gradually rolling out this new feature over the coming weeks to all publisher accounts.  We hope that it helps you quickly identify and resolve any potential issues so you can focus on growing your business with AdSense. Please remember that as before, you'll need to ensure all of your sites comply with our policies. In addition to checking your account for any notifications, be sure to regularly review your sites for compliance with our policies.

Thanks for your continued feedback and suggestions on how we can continue improving AdSense for you. Please continue to share them on our AdSense +page and if you’d like more details on this new feature, visit our Help Center.

Posted by Matt Goodridge - AdSense Product Manager
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The Mobile Buyer and Seller Relationship

The mobile advertising industry continues to evolve at a rapid pace - as new technologies have created new ways for publishers to grow and engage with their audience, new ways for advertisers to reach their customers have also emerged. With new opportunities aplenty for both buyers and sellers, how have they engaged with each other to shape the mobile ads ecosystem?

Based on aggregate data from across our network, we took a look at the economics behind the mobile ads ecosystem in a study: The Mobile Buyer & Seller Relationship. The study looks at mobile advertising from both a buyer and seller perspective, focusing on the types of content that are driving the most mobile web and app traffic, where advertisers are focusing their budgets, and the intersection of the two.

Here are a few highlights from the research:

• Mobile application inventory is highly concentrated: On mobile applications, ad impressions and spend are highly concentrated around games, which account for 46% of total ad spend.
• Advertisers are embracing mobile applications: We're seeing all types of advertisers embrace advertising on mobile applications, with Media & Entertainment and Technology advertisers leading the way. These types of advertisers account for nearly half of all impressions and spend on mobile applications.
• Advertiser spending on mobile web is closely tied to relevant content: Unlike mobile applications, on mobile web, advertisers are predominantly focusing their spend on ad inventory that closely relates to their products or services.
• Spending on mobile web is evenly distributed amongst advertisers: The top five spending advertiser categories on mobile web accounted for 12-16% of total web impressions each.

Check out all of the findings by downloading the full report here.

Posted by Stephen Kliff - Product Marketing Manager
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