[Inside AdSense] EFT launched in Hungary and Hong Kong

We're happy to announce that publishers located in Hungary and Hong Kong can now sign up to receive payments by Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT). With EFT, your earnings will be directly deposited into your bank account so won't need to wait for checks to arrive in the mail and clear at the bank. Signing-up for EFT is a simple process, and just involves entering your bank account information, then verifying a small test deposit. Please keep in mind that all EFT payments will be made in your local currency, and the exchange rate is determined at the time of payment.

While EFT is currently only available in a limited number of countries, we're working on expanding our payment options and will announce any updates right here on the blog.

Posted by Elodie Bodet - AdSense Publisher Support

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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 5/29/2008 09:33:00 A
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[Inside AdSense] Inside AdSense, now in Traditional Chinese

We're excited to let you know that Inside AdSense is now available in Traditional Chinese. The new blog, Inside AdSense: Google AdSense 中文網誌, caters to publishers in areas such as Taiwan and Hong Kong, and our Traditional Chinese team will use it to announce the latest product updates and news. In addition, we'll be featuring local success stories and providing optimization tips to help improve your AdSense performance.

Visit the new Traditional Chinese blog today, and don't forget to subscribe via email or feed!

Posted by Hailei Song – AdSense Taiwan/Hong Kong Publisher Support

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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 5/27/2008 09:47:00 A
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[Inside AdSense] Make the move...to Google Accounts

As you may remember, we started asking publishers to update your AdSense accounts to Google Accounts last May. When you do that, you can manage all of your Google products using one login and password, and also take advantage of new features like Site Authentication and the recently improved AdSense for search.

In the next few weeks, we'll soon be requiring all publishers to update to a Google Account. If you haven't yet updated your account, we recommend doing so as soon as possible to avoid any issues with account access later. Just sign in follow the instructions in the wizard that will automatically appear. If you don't see the wizard, it means that your info has already moved to Google Accounts.

In messages to us and in the Help Forum, we've heard a number of concerns about moving to Google Accounts. We'd like to take a moment to address them.

I don't want to update my AdSense account to the Google Account I use for all of my other products. I'd prefer to keep them separate.

That's okay -- you can maintain multiple Google Accounts, so you're welcome to migrate your AdSense account to a different Google Account than the one you use for other products. For example, you could maintain your 'publisher@gmail.com' account for services like Gmail and Webmaster Tools, but create a new Google Account associated with 'publisher@yoursite.com' just to use for your AdSense account. When prompted to pick the radio button that best describes you, select 'I have an email address and password (Google Account) I already use with Google services like Gmail, Orkut, or the personalized home page.', and then 'I'd like to choose a new login name and password just for AdSense'.


Is this secure? I already gave AdWords with my credit card information and AdSense with my bank account info. I don't trust this.

Please be assured that we take the security of AdSense accounts very seriously, and your AdSense information will never be shared across products. We don't have access to your AdWords credit card from our end, and AdWords doesn't have access to your bank account information (if you've set up EFT). Again, if you'd prefer to keep your two accounts separate, just follow the instructions above.

I tried to update my account in the past, but I saw this error message: 'The Google Account you've selected is associated with another user.' What do I do?

It means that the email address you chose had previously been used to apply for an AdSense account (which may or may not have been approved). However, we've just clarified the messaging in our wizard to help you understand which situation applies to you. In most cases, we've found that publishers are attempting to update their login to an email address associated with an unapproved application. We've just made it possible to continue with the update process from within the wizard in this situation. If you're attempting to update to an email address being used for a different approved AdSense account, you'll receive further options and instructions.

What happens if I don't update?

If you choose not to update your account after the requirement change, you'll no longer be able to sign in to your account. As a result, we encourage you to begin updating your accounts as soon as possible.

Finally, we recommend looking through our Help Center for more information about updating your account to Google Accounts.

Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 5/22/2008 02:17:00 P
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[Inside AdSense] AdSense earnings can help you and others too

We're always delighted to hear how your AdSense payments have made a difference in your life, whether it's covering your web hosting costs, supplementing your school tuition, or helping you quit your day job.

This month, we hope that you'll consider making a difference for others by contributing a portion of your AdSense revenue to the cyclone relief efforts in Myanmar (Burma) and in China. Google.org is donating more than $1.5 million to assist in the relief and rebuilding efforts.

We especially encourage our US and UK publishers to use Google Checkout to donate:

http://www.google.com/myanmarcyclone
http://www.google.com/chinaearthquake

In addition to monetary contributions, the affected areas may also need tents, medicine, or other items. We encourage you to contact your local Red Cross to find out how to donate these items.

If you'd like to help out even more, you can add a Google gadget to your website to encourage your visitors to make their own donations.


Naturally, we want to hear about your generosity, so please let us know if you're able to donate.



Posted by Elizabeth Ferdon - AdSense Publisher Support

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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 5/21/2008 12:28:00 P
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[Inside AdSense] Introducing third-party ads on the Google content network

The Google content network now accepts display ads served from qualified third-party vendors. Third-party ad serving has been a longstanding request from top brand AdWords advertisers who use third parties to create and manage their online campaigns. Initially, we will be only accepting third-party ads in English, but we hope to expand to other languages soon.

Making the Google content network more accessible to large brand advertisers also benefits AdSense publishers and end users. Third-party ad serving will introduce a greater variety of advertising into the Google content network, increase the inventory of quality display ads competing to show on AdSense publisher sites, and offer more engaging ads for end users. In the long run, we believe the increased inventory and ad competition will result in increased revenue for many AdSense publishers.

Rest assured that ad quality on the content network will remain one of our highest priorities. Only advertisers with whom we have proven relationships and who've clearly demonstrated commitments to our quality standards may participate in this program. And our policies governing ad content and formatting are unchanged.

How to control third-party ads show on your site
The same ad management features for Google ads also apply to third-party ads. You can use the Ad Review Center to filter specific placement-targeted ads from appearing on your site. To block contextually-targeted ads from a given advertiser, you can use the Competitive Ad Filter. (The Ad Review Center currently only shows placement-targeted ads, not contextually-targeted ads.)

Optimizing your site to allow third-party ads
To allow third-party ads on your site:

1. Opt into image ads - Currently, third-party ads are only available in image or Flash, so they won't appear in text-only ad units.
   
   
2. Enable advertisers to target your AdSense channels - Most advertisers who use third-party ads are brand-conscious. They prefer to specify websites where their ads will appear in order to optimize the targeting and effectiveness of their campaigns.
   
   
3. Opt into placement targeting - Placement targeting will allow advertisers to target their ads specifically to your site.
   

Following these steps will enable your site to accept third-party ads. However, we can't guarantee where or when third-party ads will appear on your site.

Want to learn more about third-party ads? Visit our FAQ.

Posted by Courtney Chin - AdSense Publisher Support

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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 5/19/2008 09:20:00 A
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[Inside AdSense] Site maintenance on May 17 at 10am PDT

Tomorrow, May 17th, our engineers will be performing routine site maintenance beginning at 10am PDT. While you won't be able to access your account for 4 hours, your ad serving will not be affected and we'll continue to track your earnings as usual.

We've converted the maintenance start time for a few cities around the world:

London - 6 pm Saturday
Dubai - 9 pm Saturday
Mumbai - 10:30 pm Saturday
Jakarta - 12 am Sunday
Melbourne - 3 am Sunday

Thanks for your patience, and enjoy the weekend!

Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 5/16/2008 02:09:00 PM
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[Inside AdSense] Creating a live survey for your site

Have you ever wanted to poll your website visitors on their interests or ask them for feedback on your site content? Now, using a Google Docs spreadsheet, you can create a simple form, collect responses from your visitors in an online spreadsheet, and publish the results on your website -- in a few easy steps. All of the data will be kept in your secure, password-protected spreadsheet.


Here's how it works:

Create a new spreadsheet, build your survey form, and invite users to fill out the form. You can send out an email to people you'd like to fill out the survey (maybe to a mailing list you have), or generate some HTML code that allows you to embed the survey directly on your web page.


Your visitors won't need to sign in to Google Docs to fill out the form. Responses are automatically added to your spreadsheet, and you can receive notifications by email when submissions occur. You can even keep a closer eye on responses by adding the Google Docs forms gadget to your iGoogle homepage.

Finally, in your spreadsheet, you can create graphs and charts showing the results, and then publish those charts back on your site as gadgets. As the responses trickle in, the published charts will update automatically.


Check out the Google Docs Help Center for more detailed instructions on how to create your own live survey. I hope you'll be better able to get feedback from visitors to your site using this tool.

Posted by Andrew Chang - Google Docs Marketing Manager

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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 5/14/2008 01:53:00 P
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[Inside AdSense] Video advertising & monetization: A discussion at Ad:Tech San Francisco

Last month, Google product managers and marketers held a workshop on
video advertising and content monetization at the Ad:Tech conference
in San Francisco. We thought our publishers would be interested in
hearing some perspectives on industry trends, some new details about
AdSense for video, and the opportunities that Google is offering
advertisers to get their messages in video content. Here are some
highlights to guide your viewing at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb8jrcQsyYk:

A state of the market: First, your friendly author takes you
through trends in video consumption, users' consumption habits, and
the estimated market size for video advertising.

History of video ad serving: Robert Victor uses conversations with
"Joe and Sam" to describe the evolving needs of buyers and sellers,
and previews how Google and DoubleClick In-Stream (
http://www.doubleclick.com/products/instream/index.aspx ) can fill the
gaps.

AdSense for video: Shamim Samadi goes into detail about AdSense
for video, describing the various formats we're supporting and recent
success stories from Revver on the publisher side (
http://www.google.com/ads/videoadsolutions/success/revver.html ) and
HP on the advertiser side ( http://www.google.com/ads/videoadsolutions/success/hp.html
).

YouTube: Tracy Chan describes the compelling opportunities for
advertisers on YouTube and how marketers and video creators can take
advantage of the new Insights tool to gather a variety of data on
viewership of their videos ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xo6HBKTyIzQ
).

And if you want to snack on some more Google AdSense videos, check out
our overview of options for publishers to make money from video
content on their pages at http://youtube.com/watch?v=p2hPslGRBfQ. You
can also visit our video solutions site for publishers at
http://www.google.com/ads/videoadsolutions/publisher.html.

Posted by Ryan Hayward - AdSense Product Marketing
Monday, May 12, 2008 at 9:27:00 AM

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[Inside AdSense] Doing his Music Thing

As a fan of gadget blogs such as Gizmodo and Engadget, Tom Whitwell started Music Thing in 2005 after realising that there were no similar blogs for music gear. The blog showcases unique and strange instruments, and traffic grew as gadget sites began to link to Music Thing. Now, the site receives tens of thousands of visitors each day.

In July 2007, Tom wrote an article for The Times discussing his passion for his blog's content, despite the low AdSense revenue he had earned since joining the program in August 2004. His friend James noticed the article and encouraged Tom to make a few changes to improve his earnings. According to Tom, "this was the incentive to tidy up my template a bit, and think more about ad placement."

Tom started by moving the ad unit on his homepage above the fold and opting into image ads, to ensure that all available ads would compete against one another. On his article pages, Tom added link units at the top of each page and placed a medium rectangle below each article. In addition, he removed the borders from his ads and adapted the colours to blend better with the site.

Using custom channels, Tom was able to compare the effectiveness of his ad units on his article pages. Tom notes that "the block I'd considered my main ad (the skyscraper on the right) was much less effective than I'd thought. As Google suggested, the medium rectangle that I placed beneath each article is the biggest earner." Tom also found that small changes could go a long way -- he made a few template changes to ensure that the highest performing ad unit appeared first in the HTML code, which helped increase his earnings.

"It took me a few hours to optimise the site, after reading a few blogs about AdSense, looking at the advice from Google and my friend, and trying a few template changes," Tom says. "The results were amazing - with no extra traffic to the site, my average daily earnings have increased by over 500%." Although Tom doesn't plan to quit his day job any time soon, he notes that "every little bit helps."

After this experience, Tom recommends that other publishers "follow the optimisation suggestions as long as they leave you with a site you're happy with. If you lose confidence in your own site, you'll irritate your audience and lose interest in what you're doing. But at the same time, make sure you watch your statistics, so you know what works and what doesn't."

Do you also have an AdSense success story to share? Let us know.

Posted by Lucy McKenna - AdSense UK Optimisation Team

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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 5/08/2008 01:01:00 P
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[Inside AdSense] Introducing the Known Issues page...and a known issue

A number of you have informed us that your reports are substantially lower than usual today, or aren't being updated. Our engineers are currently investigating the issue and working to resolve it as quickly as possible. Please be assured that your account data has still been tracked, so this issue will not affect your earnings or payments. Sorry for the inconvenience and thanks for being patient.

On that note, we'd like to let you know about the new Known Issues page, where you can check for updates on this reporting issue and other existing issues. There can be occasional hiccups in our system, but we hope that this new resource will help increase transparency and keep you informed. Whenever possible, we'll also try to include temporary workarounds and updates about each issue as we work to resolve them.

Thanks again for bringing this reporting issue to our attention - we encourage you to check the Known Issues page and our AdSense Help Forum for updates.

Posted by Sunil Subhedar - AdSense Publisher Support

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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 5/06/2008 03:31:00 P
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[Inside AdSense] AdSense for search now powered by Custom Search

We're happy to let you know that AdSense for search is now powered by
Custom Search. If you've used Custom Search Engine (CSE) before, you
know that Custom Search offers advanced customization options to help
improve the accuracy of your search results and tailor them to what
users are looking for. With the integration of Custom Search into
AdSense for search, you can take advantage of CSE's most popular
features without having to leave your AdSense account.

Here are some of the new features:

* Site Search: You've worked hard to attract users to your site,
so it's understandable that you'd be concerned about those users
leaving through web search. Now you can choose to provide just site
search so users can find all the information they're looking for on
your site, and you can host the search results on your own pages so
that they can find that information without leaving your site.

* Improved indexing of your pages: We've recently improved our
indexing technology so that you can provide a more enhanced Site
Search experience for your users. AdSense for search will now index
even more pages of your site, as long as we're able to crawl them, so
that your users will see more results from your site in your AdSense
for search results. Stay tuned for more updates on future crawl and
indexing improvements!

* Vertical search: You can also allow your users to search across
multiple sites - this could be a network of sites that you own or
other related sites that you think your users might find useful. If
you write book reviews on your blog, for example, you can use vertical
search to specify a list of online bookstores for users to search
through. Other examples of vertical searches include computer forums,
travel blogs, political sites you endorse, etc.

* Tuning search results and ads with keywords: Search terms can
have different meanings in different contexts, so you can now
configure your search engine with relevant keywords. Let's say you
manage a site about yoga - you can enter keywords such as 'yoga,'
'exercise,' and 'meditation' so that when a user searches for 'mat,'
the search results and ads will be more related to yoga mats and less
to commercial floor mats. (You can see an example of this in the video
at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEwxC9hrxM4 ). In experiments, we've
found that this tuning has led to an increase in earnings for
publishers.

* Selecting ad location: Do you want ads to appear at the top and
bottom of your search results? Or along the right sidebar as well,
just like on Google.com? Now you can make the call on where ads are
placed. (Here's a tip: we've found that placing ads at the top and
right monetizes the best for publishers.)

* Quick and easy updates: Just as you use our ad management
feature to quickly change the settings for your ad and referral units,
you'll be able to do the same for your search engine within your
AdSense account. Your settings will be saved in your account, so you
won't need to generate new search code for each change.

We recommend getting started with the features above by visiting your
AdSense Setup tab and selecting 'AdSense for Search' as your product.
Once you've set up your search box, you may wish to explore more
advanced features such as site exclusion, labels, and collaboration.
More information about these features is available at
http://www.google.com/support/customsearch/bin/topic.py?topic=11496 .
Please note that these new features will only be available to you if
you've migrated your account to a Google Account.

Ready to learn more about the new features available for AdSense for
search? Just visit our Help Center at https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/topic.py?topic=144
. (You might also notice that we've just implemented Custom Search
there too.)

Posted by Sandra Tsui - AdSense Publisher Support
Monday, May 05, 2008 at 4:53:00 PM

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[Inside AdSense] Now open for comments

You may have noticed that we recently enabled comments on this blog. We'd love to hear your thoughts about specific posts you've read, and we hope that this feature will offer you engaging conversations and exchanges on a variety of topics.

We look forward to your comments as you leave them in the field below, but please do keep the discussion relevant to the specific post you've just read. Please note that we reserve the right to remove any off-topic or self-promotional posts in the interest of keeping discussions engaging. Also, we won't address your specific account questions or other personal inquiries via the comments field -- you can direct your questions to other publishers and AdSense representatives in the AdSense Help Forum.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 5/01/2008 09:07:00 A
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