[Inside AdSense] The story must go on...

We're excited about the enthusiasm we're seeing for the AdSense Story contest, so we've decided to extend the deadline until November 14th. We've received some great submissions, and we're still looking for more. It doesn't need to be a big Hollywood production, just a simple story from the heart about your own AdSense Story -- how has AdSense helped you? Feel free to review our announcement for more details on what to include in your video.

Oh, and did we mention that winning submissions will get some cool Google schwag? Send us your story today!

Posted by Sunil Subhedar - AdSense Publisher Support

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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 10/29/2007 12:29:00 PM
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[Inside AdSense] Custom channels up and running again

Over the past few days, some publishers let us know that they were unable to view any data for their custom channels. Our engineers have now resolved the issue, and they're currently working on including the missing data from the past few days. Your custom channels should now be tracking data as normal. Please be assured that your aggregate reports, which are used to calculate payments, have not been affected.

Thanks for your patience, and for bringing this issue to our attention!

Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 10/26/2007 04:59:00 PM
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[Inside AdSense] Webinar transcript now posted

In case you weren't able to attend our latest webinar, What's New with AdSense, you can now find a recording on our Help Center. Our support specialists cover the latest features such as Referrals 2.0 and Blogger inline ads and provide a refresher on the top AdSense support issues. You can also find recordings and transcripts of our previous webinars.

Posted by Laura Chen - AdSense Publisher Support

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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 10/26/2007 10:08:00 AM
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[Inside AdSense] Coming soon: Make ad changes without replacing code

We're very excited to let you know about an upcoming feature that lets you easily manage your ad units from within your AdSense account. It isn't live yet, but here's a sneak peek so you'll know what to expect in the coming weeks. (We know many of you have been eagerly anticipating its arrival.)

This new ad management feature means that your ad unit settings (such as colors and channels) for new AdSense for content ad units will be saved in your AdSense account every time you generate ad code. Then, if you'd like to change any of these settings in the future, all you do is make the update within your account -- you'll no longer need to manually replace the ad code on all of your pages. For instance, you can quickly change the borders of all your 300x250 medium rectangles from red to blue with just a few mouse clicks. Fancy! We hope that this new feature will help you save time and will simplify the process of optimizing your ad units.

As we noted above, please keep in mind that the ad management feature isn't yet available in any publisher accounts. We'll be rolling it out in phases in the next few weeks, and we'll follow up with another post at that time to help you better understand how to use the feature. When you see the "Manage Ads" page appear under your AdSense Setup tab, you'll know the feature is available for you to use. Here's what it will look like:





Stay tuned to read more about this new feature!

Posted by Traci Hailpern - AdSense Product Marketing

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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 10/23/2007 09:40:00 A
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[Inside AdSense] AdSense Forum now in Arabic

We've recently opened an AdSense Help Forum in Arabic. Drop by the new forum today to post your questions and share your AdSense expertise with other Arabic-speaking publishers. As with our other forums, a Google representative will participate in the discussions and occasionally contribute posts.

This launch brings the number of AdSense Help Forums up to 15. If you aren't yet one of the 54,000 publishers worldwide participating in the forums, we'd like to let you know that they're available in: Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish.

Join a forum today to meet and learn from other AdSense publishers!

Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 10/22/2007 09:29:00 A
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[Inside AdSense] Site maintenance on Saturday, October 20th

This Saturday, October 20th, we'll be performing routine site maintenance from 10am to 2pm PDT. You won't be able to sign in to your account during this time period, but rest assured that your ads will still appear and your earnings will continue to be tracked in your account. Here's the start time converted for various cities around the world:

London -- 6 pm Saturday
Athens -- 8 pm Saturday
New Delhi -- 10:30 pm Saturday
Kuala Lumpur -- 1 am Sunday
Sydney -- 3 am Sunday

We hope the down time gives you more time to work on your Halloween costume. If you're all out of costume ideas, how about dressing up as an ad unit? We suggest the medium rectangle for maximum visibility :)

Have a great weekend!

Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 10/19/2007 02:44:00 PM
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[Inside AdSense] AdSense Publisher Stories: Askthebuilder.com

Askthebuilder.com's Tim Carter is one publisher who's been able to do
great things with AdSense. Here's his story on moving from building
houses to building websites and how AdSense has helped him along the
way.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ve-6yFHvZ6M

Now that you've heard Tim's story, we want to hear about your
experience with AdSense. We've heard from publishers who've been able
to keep their site free to users, quit their jobs, and even pay for
their wedding! What have your AdSense earnings enabled you to do?
Whether you have a blog, a small website, or an entire company, we
want to hear your story. There's no need for a production crew or
studio; you can create the video at home with a webcam.

Here's how it works:

1. Shoot a video (2 minutes or shorter) about your story with AdSense.
2. Fill out the submission form at https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/request.py?contact=youtube
and submit your video as a video response to Tim's video on YouTube.
3. We will review your submissions and pick a few videos to be
featured on the AdSense blog in the coming weeks.

In your video, you may want to answer some of the questions below, but
feel free to include others.

* Where you are from and what you do for a living?
* Why did you create your site, blog, or forum?
* Who is your intended audience?
* How did you hear about AdSense?
* How has AdSense helped you?
* What are some useful AdSense tips you would give to other publishers
so that they can see the same success?

When creating and submitting your video, here are a few important
things to remember:

1. You need to have a YouTube account to participate -- you can sign
up for one at http://www.youtube.com/signup .
2. Be creative! Use props, backgrounds, and sets; however, please do
not use any trademarked logos, images, or copyrighted material for
which you don't have permission to display in your videos.
3. You can disclose gross earnings, but not any specific AdSense
statistics such as clickthrough rate or eCPM.
4. Feel free to talk about your site, but don't advertise or encourage
users to visit your site and click on your ads.
5. By posting your video you give Google the rights to display,
reproduce, and distribute your content.
6. Your video must adhere to both YouTube and AdSense Terms and
Conditions. These can be found at http://www.youtube.com/t/terms and
https://www.google.com/adsense/static/en_US/Terms.html . Google has
the right to remove any video submission that does not comply with
these terms.

Submission deadline is October 31st, so what are you waiting for?
Create and submit your video at https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/request.py?contact=youtube
today!

Posted by Sunil Subhedar - AdSense Publisher Support

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[Inside AdSense] Celebrating Blog Action Day with Mongabay

It's Blog Action Day, a day when bloggers around the world take time to write about the environment. So, we thought it would be fitting to feature an AdSense publisher who has focused their site on increasing awareness and appreciation of the environment -- specifically, wild lands and wildlife.

Mongabay.com, run by Rhett Butler, originally focused on providing information about tropical rainforests, a topic Rhett is personally familiar with through his travels to a Borneo rainforest that has since been destroyed. In recent years, however, the site has expanded to include environmental news on numerous topics ranging from climate change to green business. He's also added a kids' version of the site aimed to spark interest in youngsters to learn about and appreciate rainforests. Rhett hopes through his work with Mongabay that more people will become aware of the beauty and importance of the environment so they'll be motivated to preserve our remaining biodiversity for the future.

On Mongabay.com, Rhett describes the concept of TREES, which are five basic steps we can take to saving rainforests:

Teach others about the importance of the environment and how they can help save rainforests.
Restore damaged ecosystems by planting trees on land where forests have been cut down.
Encourage people to live in a way that doesn't hurt the environment.
Establish parks to protect rainforests and wildlife.
Support companies that operate in ways that minimize damage to the environment.

The revenue Rhett's sites generate through AdSense has allowed him to quit his 9-5 job and focus on growing his environmental effort: traveling around the world to gain a connection to the efforts he is passionate about, garnering hands-on experiences, and looking for conservation opportunities. This travel also enables him to take these experiences and add valuable content to his website and further educate his readers.

Thanks, Rhett, for raising awareness about the importance of rainforests both to the global ecosystem and to people everywhere.

Posted by Julie Beckmann - AdSense Publisher Support

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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 10/15/2007 11:09:00 A
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[Inside AdSense] Getting more quality inventory for publishers

We're always working on new ways for you to get quality ad inventory, as well as developing safeguards to ensure that the conversions generated on publisher sites are valid. As you may know, referral ads are paid on a conversion basis; a conversion is considered a specific action defined by the advertiser. That action might be a sale, a clickthrough to a specific page on an advertiser site, or an online sign-up for a promotion.

We've recently made a change to help make sure that the conversions generated by referral ads are valid. For some publishers who display referrals for non-Google products, the earnings you receive for the ad may now be less than the maximum referral value displayed for that ad. This is because our system will initially place a restriction on referral earnings as we monitor click and conversion data to determine that the conversions generated are valid. Once this validation period ends, you'll begin earning the maximum value of the conversions as displayed in your account.

We can't say precisely how long the validation period will last, but will make every effort to ensure that it's as speedy as possible. It will vary by publisher since site activity is different for everyone, and we anticipate that the majority of you will be minimally affected. However, advertisers will only be charged the maximum referral value once a publisher has completed the validation period.

Our goal with this change is to ensure the long-term effectiveness of the referrals program for both publishers and advertisers. By increasing the value and quality of the referral network, we believe we'll attract more advertisers and provide more opportunities for you to earn.

Posted by Eva Woo - AdSense Product Marketing

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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 10/12/2007 12:11:00 P
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[Inside AdSense] Introducing video units

AdSense isn't just for ads anymore; it's also a place to get video content for your site -- and earn extra revenue at the same time.

We're excited about the launch of video units -- a new way to enrich your site with quality, relevant video content in an embedded, customizable player. Simply embed a snippet of code and have relevant YouTube partner content streamed to your site. You can choose categories of video to target to your site, select content from individual YouTube partners, or have video automatically targeted to your site content. Companion and text overlay ads are relevant and non-intrusive. To further blend the YouTube player into your site, you can also customize the color scheme and layout as well as choose from three different player sizes.

If you're looking to build "stickiness" with your visitors, show quality YouTube partner video on your site, and earn extra revenue along the way, and want to know more, then review our common questions about video units. You can also check out the video below to see how it works.

Watch the latest videos on YouTube.com

If you're ready to get started now, sign in to your AdSense account and head for the AdSense Setup tab. Click the video units link and you'll be on your way to setting up your first video unit.

See you later! We've got some videos to watch.

Posted by Ryan Hayward - AdSense Product Marketing

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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 10/08/2007 09:21:00 P
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[Inside AdSense] Optimizing Instablogs

Instablogs is a blog network that publishes more than 200 posts a day on 136 blogs spanning 16 niche channels, including luxury gadgets blog Bornrich and technology blog Gizmowatch. With 200+ bloggers blogging from all over the world, Instablogs has around 2 million unique visitors per month.

Instablogs co-founder Ankit Maheshwari tells us that AdSense works well with each blog's unique content. "Since our blogs are very niche-oriented, it's tough for us to sell our inventory directly to advertisers on blogs with less than 30,000 page views per month," he says. "AdSense's high CPC offering and huge advertiser database can help monetize the page views on any site irrespective of its size."

Recently Ankit began to experiment with AdSense optimization. Although he was doubtful of the results, he tried a few minor tweaks on his site, such as opting in to displaying image ads and adding link units to the top of his pages. He also used information from his custom channels to determine the ad unit with the highest CTR on his pages – he then placed this ad unit first in the HTML source of each page. After a week of testing these changes, Ankit found that revenue nearly doubled. While AdSense revenue used to comprise 15% of the company's advertising revenue, since optimizing it's increased to 25%.

Despite the success of his first optimization, Ankit has found that there isn't one standard layout or ad format that is optimal for all of his pages. He says, "We've seen in many blogs that a few ad types perform better in different sections. For example, the large rectangle performs 70% better on the permalink pages of our Tattoo blog, while skyscrapers perform best on all other pages. At the same time, banner ads have performed really well on our Parenting blog."

Today, Ankit continues to make small changes and frequently tests new layouts based on his custom channel data. He feels that "custom channels are not only a useful feature, but also the most important feature in the entire AdSense program for publishers."

Posted by Bennet Abraham - AdSense India Optimization Team

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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 10/05/2007 03:26:00 P
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[Inside AdSense] New Western Union payment method

We're excited to tell you that we're offering a new payment method for some countries. If you're located in Argentina, Chile, China (Mainland), Colombia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Peru, the Philippines, or Romania, you can now sign up for Western Union Quick Cash, a new form of payment that lets you receive your AdSense payments in cash using the worldwide Western Union money transfer service. Payments will be available for pickup at your local Western Union agent the day after they are issued, according to our normal payment schedule.

It's free to receive your AdSense payments by Western Union; you'll no longer need to wait for a check to arrive in the mail. this choice can also cut down on bank fees and long clearing times associated with depositing checks.

Before you sign up, please keep these important points in mind:

• As mentioned above, Western Union Quick Cash is only available in Argentina, Chile, China (Mainland), Colombia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Peru, the Philippines, and Romania. We'll be sure to let you know if we're able to offer new payment options to additional publishers.
  
  
• This payment method is currently only available to individual payee names; we can't offer it to businesses.
  
  
• You'll need to bring your government-issued ID to pick up your payment, so please make sure that your AdSense account payee name exactly matches that of your ID. Please contact us if you need to update the payee name in your account.
  
  
• Payments must be picked up within 35 days of issuance or they will expire. If this happens, a payment hold will be placed on your AdSense account and the payment will be credited back to your account.
  
  
• Payments will be made in US dollars, but depending on your local Western Union agent, they may be picked up in your local currency.
  

If you're ready to begin receiving your AdSense payments by Western Union Quick Cash, just follow these instructions. If you have additional questions before getting started, please review the information in our Help Center.

Posted by Suzie Rha - AdSense Publisher Support

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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 10/03/2007 09:42:00 A
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