So long 2013 - looking back at this year’s highlights.

We’re fast approaching the end of another year and it’s time to take a look back over the last 12 months. Here’s some of our 2013 highlights:  

• We can’t talk about 2013 without remembering that AdSense turned 10 in June. To celebrate 10 years of partnerships with publishers, we took a look back and heard from some of you who have been with us since the very beginning. Over 12,000 of you also joined in by taking part in the AdSense 10 Challenge.

• We looked at ways to drive a positive experience for your users, giving our text ads a more modern and user-friendly design and announcing the launch of our brand new mobile anchor ads. 

• We launched a number of new ad formats, giving you more flexibility and supporting your multi-screen strategy. In fact, we spent a lot of time talking about your multi-screen strategy, with our recent multi-device series and our newly launched multi-screen optimization score in your scorecard.

• We were lucky enough to meet many of you at our events and hear about some of your experiences with Google as well as your future plans. Take a look at what some of our European publishers had to say.

• Lots of you gave really valuable feedback on changes and new features you’d like to see in your account - with this in mind, we introduced time zone reporting, currency reporting, and launched our new AdSense homepage.

• You told us that more communication on our AdSense program policies would be really helpful so we launched a new notifications feature in your account, and many of you also joined our Policy Refreshers Hangout On Air series. Coincidentally, our Policy Refreshers announcement was the most visited blog post of 2013.

• Lastly, we gave the Inside AdSense blog a bit of a makeover with a new, cleaner interface - we hope you like it!

We’d like to thank each of you for your continuous feedback and engagement over the past year. Please keep sharing your comments and suggestions through our AdSense +page.

We’ll be back in January - stay tuned for lots more AdSense updates plus a series on Google Analytics and an inspiring showcase of publisher success stories from around the world.

Happy Holidays from all of us here at Google AdSense! 

Posted by Suzy Headon- on behalf of the Inside AdSense Team

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Boost your multi-screen strategy with our new tools.

We’ve been talking a lot recently about why you should have a multi-screen strategy in place for your site. Today we’re happy to share some product updates to complement and strengthen your strategy, with new features for our responsive ad units and a multi-screen optimization score now available in your publisher scorecard.

New features for responsive ad units

Earlier this year, we launched responsive ad units to help you enhance the user experience on your site across devices. You’ve shared a lot of positive feedback on our responsive ad units and also made some great suggestions on new features you’d like to see. We’ve incorporated these suggestions into our next iteration of responsive ads with the following changes: 

• Ad refresh for screen orientation changes:  If your responsive page changes its layout following a screen orientation change (e.g., when a tablet or phone goes from portrait to landscape), we’ll request and load a new ad to fit the new page layout.

• Smart sizing based on the space available:  Our ad code will now automatically adapt all newly created responsive ad units to fit your page layout. All existing responsive ad units that have their width and height explicitly specified via CSS will continue to function as before. Please see our Help Center for information on switching to the smart sizing mode.

• Reporting by ad size served: To better understand the mix of ad sizes served by your responsive ad units, your ad unit reports can now be broken out by the size of the ad served. 

More information on responsive ad units can be found in our Help Center.

Multi-screen optimization score in publisher scorecard

To help you understand how well your site is optimized for the many screen sizes of your users, we’re introducing a new multi-screen category in our publisher scorecard. For example, if users need to zoom and/or scroll often, this may negatively impact their experience. Your score in the multi-screen category will measure what percentage of your pages are multi-screen optimized and compare this percentage to that of other AdSense publishers. Please note that you may not see this category in your scorecard if you have a low percentage of mobile traffic on your site.

This new score will be visible in the scorecard on your AdSense home page. Don’t forget to follow the ‘Learn more’ link displayed in the scorecard to learn how you can optimize your site for multiple screen sizes.

More information on your scorecard can be found in our Help Center.

We look forward to hearing your thoughts on these new features. Feel free to share your feedback on our AdSense +page.

Posted by Nick Radicevic - AdSense Product Manager

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Google Publisher Toolbar, now integrated with DFP Small Business

Many of you are already using the Google Publisher Toolbar to view your AdSense performance and control your ads. If you also use DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) Small Business, we’re pleased to let you know that your DFP account can now also be directly integrated with the Google Publisher Toolbar.

The Toolbar is a Chrome extension that gives you a clear overview of which ads are serving on your site and why, through an overlay for each ad showing which line item and creative was served. You can get more information by clicking on any overlay. When you sign in to the Toolbar, you’ll see complete information on each ad -- regardless of whether AdSense or DFP served the ad.

Please visit our Toolbar Help Center article for further information and support. 

Download the Toolbar and start using it with DFP Small Business today. We're continuing to improve support for DFP in the Toolbar, and are always happy to hear your feedback.

Posted by Ilia Malkovitch - DFP Product Manager

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Introducing custom ad sizes: More ad formats to fit your site

Today, we’re happy to announce the launch of 434,216 new ad unit sizes! Or in other words, we’ve just made it possible to create custom ad sizes to give you more flexibility and enable you to better design your content for your users. 

Custom sized ads behave just like their standard size counterparts, showing a text or display ad depending on which is likely to have the best performance for the impression. 

Text ads

For text ads, we’ll determine the optimal number of text ads to display for a given impression, and show the ads the same way they appear inside standard sizes. Our system predicts the value of each competing ad for every impression, based on historic performance and comparison across a variety of scenarios. For unique ad unit sizes, our system will need some time before it can optimize the number of ads shown. Please see our blog post Understanding the dynamics of the AdSense auction - Part II for more information. Here are three examples of custom-sized ad units displaying text ads:

Display ads

For display ads, our system will determine the appropriate size ad to fit into the space you select; the selected ad will not be larger than the space requested. In the example below, we’ve shown the same three custom sizes as above, but this time with display ads. Please note that the dotted border is only present to show the total size of the ad unit, but won’t actually appear on your pages.

To ensure that ads continue to deliver a positive user experience, we’ve put a few restrictions in place around maximum and minimum pixels for ad sizes. Any custom ad size that falls outside of the restrictions won’t appear on a page. As always, all of your ads must adhere to the AdSense ad placement policies. Remember that users value your content, and that they appreciate a balance of content and ads, knowing that the ads support the content creator. Forcing too many ads into the users viewable screen is not likely to tempt them back to your site.

Ready to get started with custom ad sizes? Create an ad unit in the usual way, select “Custom ad size” from the Ad size drop-down and set the desired width and height for your ad unit in the process. Copy and paste the ad code into the HTML source code of your page where you'd like the ad to appear.

You can also find more information in our Help Center. We’re excited about the possibilities of these new custom ad sizes, and appreciate your ongoing feedback as we continue to improve this offering. Please feel free to share your thoughts and suggestions about this update on our Google+ page.

Posted by Omer Gimenez Llach - AdSense Software Engineer & Johan Land - AdSense Product Manager

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Optimizing AdSense revenue using Google Analytics

The most important asset of any publisher is your audience. And the key to growing your audience is to understand it. Google Analytics helps you understand your users better and drive the right strategy to grow a loyal and engaged audience.

Recently Google Analytics launched two important new capabilities for its AdSense integration: AdSense Exits reports and AdSense Revenue as an experiment objective. They both come as a great additions to websites that use AdSense for monetization. In this post I will go over the AdSense Analytics integration and how it can be used to optimize AdSense revenue.

Integrating AdSense and Google Analytics

Before going further into the wonders of the Analytics AdSense marriage, you should first be sure that your accounts are linked properly. Here is how to do it. First follow the steps in the screenshot below after logging into Google Analytics (Admin => AdSense Linking => Link Accounts):

AdSense and Analytics Integration 

You will be sent to your AdSense account in order to confirm the linking and then you will be sent back to Google Analytics to choose which profiles should include this data. If you have any problems or additional questions, take a look at the AdSense Help Center. After the integration is complete the following metrics will be available on your Google Analytics account:

• AdSense revenue: revenue generated by AdSense ads.
• Ads clicked: the number of times AdSense ads were clicked.
• AdSense CTR (clickthrough rate): the percentage of page impressions that resulted in a click on an ad.
• AdSense eCPM: AdSense revenue per 1,000 page impressions.
• AdSense ads viewed: number of ads viewed.
• AdSense Page Impressions: the number of pageviews during which an ad was displayed.

AdSense reports on Google Analytics

Currently, there are 3 out-of-the-box AdSense reports available on Analytics: Pages, Referrers and Exits.

1. AdSense Pages

This report provides information about which pages contributed most to AdSense revenue. It will show each of the pages on the website and how well they performed in terms of AdSense. For each page in the website that contains an AdSense unit we will be able to analyze the following metrics: AdSense revenue, AdSense ads clicked, AdSense CTR, AdSense eCPM, AdSense ads viewed and AdSense page impressions.

This report provides an interesting view of which page performed best, and it can be used to optimize website content. For example, if you find that posts about celebrities generate more revenue than posts about soccer, you might consider writing more about celebrities (if your main objective is to make money on AdSense).

2. AdSense Referrers

This report provides information about the performance of domains that referred visitors who generated AdSense revenue. This information is extremely valuable; however, I suggest using a different report, since it provides more in-depth information: “All Traffic”.

The AdSense Referrers report only displays information about websites that generated AdSense revenue, it does not provide information on other types of traffic sources and campaigns. For this reason, I believe the All Traffic report presents a more complete view. To find the report, go to this page and click on the AdSense tab just above the chart.

3. AdSense Exits

The AdSense Exit report shows the number of sessions that ended due to a user clicking on an AdSense ad. This is an interesting metric as it can show which pages have a "high conversion rate", i.e., the ratio of visits to a page and those that left the website clicking on an AdSense unit through it. If your monetization is made through AdSense this report will give just that: AdSense conversion rate per page.

Optimizing AdSense revenue using Google Analytics

Below is an example of how to use the integration from my Analytics for Publishers eBook. Most websites work with templates and each template may have different AdSense placements; this means that an important analysis would be to compare performance by template (or by category) rather than by page.

In order to analyze template performance, we will need to create one segment per template. If you want to learn more about creating Segments, check this Help Center article. For example, let’s suppose your website has the following page templates:

• Analytics pages with URLs structured as example.com/analytics/...
• Testing pages with URLs structured as example.com/testing/...
• Targeting pages with URLs structured as example.com/targeting/...

In this case you would create three segments using the dimension Page, each containing its unique pattern: /analytics/ for analytics pages, /testing/ for testing pages, and /targeting/ for targeting pages. Below is an example of how the segment would look for the analytics pages:

Analyzing template performance using segments 

After creating the segments for all three templates, you will be able to choose all of them in the top-left corner of the screen (just above the chart, see bubble #1 above) to see a comparison between them. Below is a screenshot showing how such a comparison would look like:

Table comparison metrics for different visitor segments 

In the table above we are able to compare pages by all metrics available. For example, we can see that while the Analytics section has higher revenue, this is related to the number of impressions, which is also significantly higher. When we analyze further, we see that the Testing and Targeting sections have a good potential, with the same CTR but significantly higher AdSense eCPM. Based on these metrics we can understand which templates and content types are the most effective.

As mentioned above, once you find out which pages are performing well and which pages are not, you can use Content Experiments to optimize them. Here is a Content Experiments guide.

Closing thoughts

Here are a few takeaways for you to start optimizing today!

1. Understand which content type and subject generates the highest revenue and create content based on this data.
2. Understand which page templates bring the best results by using advanced segments.
3. Analyze AdSense performance to learn which segments have a good CTR; this might bring insight into which audience to target.

This post was originally posted on the Google Analytics blog. Stay tuned for an upcoming series on the Inside AdSense blog on how to grow your business with Google Analytics insights.

Posted by Daniel Waisberg, Google Analytics team
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Updates to the currency feature in performance reports

We’ve been hearing from many of our publishers around the world that you’d like to have the option to view your performance reports in currencies other than your payment currency. We’re happy to let you know that this is now possible with a new currency feature in your AdSense account. 

This feature can be accessed directly in your account and will allow you to see your performance reports in a variety of currency options.

Please note that when viewing performance reports in a different currency from your payment currency, monetary values might not be completely accurate due to currency fluctuations.  In addition, changing your reporting currency will not affect the currency in which you get paid.

To find out more details about this feature, check out this Help Center article.  

We hope that with the launch of this feature, you'll be able to better understand your ad performance.

Posted by Miki Noda - AdSense Payments Specialist

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