[Inside AdSense] Your guide to the Inside AdSense blog

Whether you're a new to this blog or have been with us since way back in August of aught five, we'd like to provide a few simple tips for effectively using the features provided on our site.

First of all, we've made it easy to subscribe to the blog so that you'll never miss a post. There are a few ways to do so:

• E-mail
  Have a Google Account? Then visit our subscription page, or just enter your email address into the yellow box on the right sidebar of this page. You'll be subscribed via Google Groups, and we'll send you a confirmation email. Once you confirm your subscription, you'll begin to see new blog posts in your email inbox.
  
  
• RSS Reader
  After clicking on the 'Site Feed' link in the upper right-hand corner of this page, you'll be taken to a Feedburner URL, which you can access from any RSS Reader or Live Bookmark of your choice. To view all of your feed subscription options, look for the 'Subscribe Now!' box on the right side.
  
  
• iGoogle
  Click the white '+ Google' icon on the top right, and you can receive the latest Inside AdSense updates on your iGoogle page or within Google Reader.
  
  

There's also plenty of content in our blog archives. Here are some ways to access some of those useful posts from the past:

• Labels
  Each post is tagged at the bottom with one or more labels that reflect the content of that post. All of these labels are also listed on our sidebar, which you can use to sort through past posts - for instance, click the 'Optimization' label to view all the posts related to optimizing AdSense on your site. You'll notice that this post is tagged with 'Newbie', since that's been our focus on recent Fridays.
  
  
• "You may have missed..."
  This name says it all - check the right sidebar for this section, where we'll be rotating links to useful posts from past months.
  
  
• Search box
  You can search for the topic of your choice using the search box at the top right. Using the tabs on the results page, you can choose whether to search within the AdSense blog or other resources such as our Help Center, the AdSense Forum, and the web.
  
  

We hope these tips will help you become a pro at navigating and absorbing our blog posts in the future!

Posted by Takayuki Funakoshi - AdSense Publisher Support

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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 8/29/2008 10:46:00 A
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[Inside AdSense] Ad serving for everyone

Back in March, we announced the beta release of Google Ad Manager, our hosted ad serving and management solution for publishers with smaller direct sales teams. Today, we are pleased to announce general availability of the product -- no invitation required! Thousands of publishers in hundreds of countries already serve billions of impressions each day with Ad Manager, and we've heard from them that Ad Manager has helped increase revenue, cut serving costs, and save time managing campaigns.

Now we're excited to bring those benefits to all publishers. If you have an AdSense account, you can sign in to Ad Manager today. If not, apply for an AdSense account now. A Google AdSense account is a technical requirement for creating an Ad Manager account.

Ad Manager can help you sell, schedule, deliver, and measure both directly-sold and network-based inventory. It offers an intuitive and simple user interface, Google serving speed and reliability, and significant cost savings. Best of all, Ad Manager can be optionally integrated with Google AdSense to offer you an automated way to maximize the revenue of your unsold and network-managed inventory.

We've been busy since March; in addition to supporting thousands of new publishers on Ad Manager, we've been adding new features including:

• Interface available in 32 languages: Do you prefer to work in Turkish or Vietnamese or Hungarian? Now you can! Ad Manager supports international currencies, too.
  
• Ad network management: Easily manage your third-party ad networks in Ad Manager to automatically maximize your network driven revenue.
  
• Automatic macro insertion: Save time and avoid tagging errors since Ad Manager now automatically detects and inserts macros from most popular 3rd party vendors.
  
• Creative preview on live site: Preview the look and feel of ads on your live site to ensure ads look as expected before you start the campaign.
  
• Day and Time Targeting: Don't want your orders to run on weekends? No problem. With day and time targeting, you can set any new line items you create to run only during specific hours or days, or as little as 15 minutes per week. Use day and time targeting in addition to geography, bandwidth, browser, user language, operating system, domain and custom targeting.
  

We also continue to roll out new features for the DoubleClick Revenue Center suite of publisher solutions, including DART for Publishers (DFP), our ad serving platform for publishers with larger direct sales teams. Google Ad Manager serves as an effective complement to the DoubleClick Revenue Center by providing new opportunities for publishers of all sizes.

If you have any additional questions about Ad Manager or want to learn more, visit the Ad Manager Help Center.

Posted by Alex Vogenthaler - Product Manager, Google Ad Manager

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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 8/26/2008 08:05:00 A
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[Inside AdSense] One account, multiple sites

We'd like to remind you that once you've been approved for AdSense, you can place the code from your account on any page that complies with our program policies. Simply generate new code and paste it onto your site -- we don't need to update your account, so there's no need to contact us about your new site (although we appreciate the thought!). Even if your sites relate to completely different topics, our system will display appropriate ads for each site. This is because your ad targeting is based on the content of your pages, rather than set within your account. In addition, please keep in mind that publishers may only maintain one account per payee name, so there's no need for you to submit a new application.

If you run multiple websites, you may wish to view separate reports for each domain. Simply create a URL channel for each one. You won't need to modify your code in any way, and your URL channels will begin tracking data almost immediately. If you need to send these reports to other people who manage your site with you, you can set up emailable reports.

But what if you've sold the website you applied to AdSense, and now you run another one? We don't need to update your account information in any way. Just remove your ad code from the old site, paste new code onto your current site, and our system will automatically take care of the rest.

Finally, we'd like to note that we do constantly review sites displaying Google ads to make sure that they're complying with the AdSense program policies. If we find that a site isn't compliant with our policies, we'll contact the publisher whose ad code appears on the site to address the situation. If you're concerned about others placing your ad code on non-policy compliant pages, we recommend using our Allowed Sites feature.

Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 8/22/2008 02:17:00 P
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[Inside AdSense] Site maintenance on Saturday, August 23

This Saturday, August 23rd, our engineers will be performing site maintenance from 10am to 2pm PDT. You'll be unable to log in during these hours, but we'll continue to track your earnings and serve ads to your pages. For those of you located in different time zones, we've provided the maintenance start time for a few international cities:

London - 6pm Saturday
Istanbul - 8pm Saturday
Bangalore - 10:30pm Saturday
Hanoi - 12am Sunday
Auckland - 5am Sunday

Finally, you may have noticed that we're posting this message a little earlier than usual. Based on your feedback, we'll do our best to post these maintenance reminders earlier in the week to help you plan ahead. Thanks for the suggestion!

Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 8/21/2008 09:56:00 AM
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[Inside AdSense] I feel the need... the need for feeds

When you visit the AdSense Setup tab in your account, you'll notice a new "AdSense for feeds" option. This means you can now use AdSense to place ads in your RSS feeds, allowing you to increase the reach of your content while earning revenue. Our salesforce will sell cost-per-impression (CPM) ads directly to the largest advertisers, while the rest of your inventory will be filled with contextually targeted cost-per-click (CPC) and CPM ads. This means that more of your feed items will be sold and with higher overall revenue, than with any other feed network.

At this point, you may either be thinking, "great!" or "umm...what's a feed?" For those of you in the second category, feeds allow your content to be delivered and subscribed to on the Web, often as headlines, summaries or articles. FeedBurner also has a nifty tutorial that you might find useful.

And here are a few more reasons to try AdSense for feeds:

• Receive higher CPMs and maintain a positive user experience by displaying ads specifically optimized for RSS feeds.
  
• View detailed stats on your feed audience, distribution, and more through FeedBurner when you set up your feeds with AdSense.
  
• Manage monetization for your feeds through the same account that you use to manage other AdSense properties.
  

AdSense for feeds is currently enabled in all languages supported by AdSense for content.

Want to learn more about what feeds are and how to get started with AdSense for feeds? Visit our Help Center and watch our introductory video from Product Manager Steve Olechowski:



To set up AdSense for feeds now, sign in and visit the AdSense Setup page of your account, or apply for an AdSense account.

Posted by Ryan Hayward - AdSense Product Marketing

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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 8/15/2008 03:52:00 P
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[Inside AdSense] Seeing clicks but no revenue?

Have you ever checked your reports and noticed that you have clicks reported, but no revenue? We'd like to explain why this may happen, as we frequently receive emails and questions on our Help Forum about this issue. What you're seeing may be due to one of the following:

1. Allowed Sites setup
   
   The Allowed Sites feature allows you to specify a list of sites where ads from your account may be displayed. If you're using this feature, you'll need to make sure that you've listed all sites where you'd like to display your AdSense ad code.
   
   To check if this is the case, log into your account and visit the 'Allowed Sites' page under your AdSense Setup tab. If the radio button 'Allow any site to show ads for my account ' is populated, you're not being affected by this issue, and you should continue to #2 below. However, if 'Only allow certain sites to show ads for my account' is populated, review the list of sites in the box below -- are all the sites you own listed in this box? If the answer is 'no', you won't be credited for clicks on the missing sites. Please be sure to add all of the sites where you'd like to display your AdSense ad code.
   
   We've noticed some confusion among publishers who have entered the sites of advertisers they'd like to see on their pages into the Allowed Sites list. Please know that this is not the case, as it's not possible to request ads for a particular page - the sites you enter into this box can only be sites where your ads can be placed.
   
   
2. Invalid clicks
   
   It's possible that you have some clicks that our monitoring system has considered to be invalid. As we've mentioned before, we monitor all clicks and impressions on Google ads for any activity that may artificially drive up an advertiser's costs or a publisher's earnings. Any clicks that our system considers invalid will still appear on your 'Overview' page, under the Reports tab. However, because our advertisers aren't charged for these clicks and impressions, we won't show the earnings for this activity. If you're concerned about suspicious activity in your account, we recommend reviewing your site's logs and letting us know about the situation.
   
   Rest assured that AdSense accounts are properly credited for all clicks and impressions we consider to be valid. We'll post your finalized earnings for a given month on your 'Payment History' page during the first week of the following month. For more information about invalid clicks, please review our Help Center.
   

Posted by the Google Ad Traffic Quality Team

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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 8/15/2008 10:39:00 A
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[Inside AdSense] Video units more widely available

We've heard your feedback about the availability of video units, so we've expanded the languages and geographies where they're supported. We've added French, German, and Spanish to our list of supported languages, and also Brazil, Germany, India, and Mexico to the list of supported countries. To help you determine whether you'll be able to use video units, consider these two questions:

1. Do you have an English, French, German, Japanese, or Spanish-language AdSense account?
   
   
2. Are you located in one of the following countries?
   
   Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, India, Ireland, Italy, Germany, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Spain, United Kingdom, United States
   

If you answered 'yes' to both questions, then video units are available to you. Sign in to your AdSense account and visit your AdSense Setup tab to get started. After linking your YouTube and AdSense accounts, you'll be able to customize and embed the video player into your website, and choose between having videos automatically targeted to your content or manually selecting content categories and content providers. Companion and text overlay ads will appear with your videos, and you'll generate earnings for valid clicks and impressions on those ads.

You can find more information about video units in our Help Center, and as always, please feel free to leave us a comment with your video unit feedback. We'll be sure to keep you posted if video units become available in any additional countries or languages.

Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 8/13/2008 10:09:00 A
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[Inside AdSense] Western Union expanded to additional countries

Last October, we introduced Western Union Quick Cash as a new payment method for a number of countries. We're excited to let you know that we've now expanded this payment method to Bulgaria, Egypt, Lithuania, Morocco, and Taiwan. If you're located in one of these countries, you'll be able to pick up your AdSense payments in cash at your local Western Union agent. This payment method is free, and you'll no longer need to wait for checks to arrive in the mail or to clear at the bank.

Please keep in mind that in order to pick up your payment, you'll need to present a government-issued ID that matches your AdSense payee name. If you need to update or correct the payee name listed in your account, please fill out our online form. In addition, we'd like to note that payments by Western Union Quick Cash are only available to individual payee names, but not to businesses.

Signing up for payments by Western Union is a quick process - just follow these instructions. For more information about this payment method, including exchange rates and how to pick up your payments, we recommend visiting our Help Center.

Posted by Korey Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 8/11/2008 12:29:00 P
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[Inside AdSense] Site maintenance on August 9 at 10am PDT

Our engineers will be performing routine site maintenance tomorrow, from 10am to 2pm PDT. While you won't be able to log in to your account during these hours, the maintenance won't affect your ad targeting or delivery and your earnings will still be tracked in your reports like always.

To celebrate the opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympic Games, here's the start time of the maintenance in past, present, and future host cities for the Summer Olympics:

Montreal - 1pm Saturday
London - 6pm Saturday
Athens - 8pm Saturday
Beijing - 1am Sunday
Sydney - 3am Sunday

We hope the maintenance period will give you an opportunity to catch a few matches and root for your home country!

Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 8/08/2008 05:03:00 PM
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[Inside AdSense] Defining invalid clicks and click fraud

We often receive questions from new publishers about what these two terms mean, and we'd like to help you understand the difference.

Invalid clicks are clicks for which we decide not to charge our AdWords advertisers, since they may artificially drive up advertiser cost or publisher revenue. These include extraneous clicks without any value to the advertiser, such as the second click of a double-click. They also include many other types of clicks that we've determined aren't motivated by genuine user interest.

"Invalid clicks" are often confused with "clicking on your own ads". However, we'd like to stress that invalid clicks are generally any clicks that artificially inflate advertiser cost or publisher revenue, regardless of their source.

Click fraud is a subset of invalid clicks that are generated with malicious or fraudulent intent -- in other words, clicks that are intended to drive up advertiser cost or publisher revenue artificially. Sources for these clicks include, but are not limited to:

A publisher clicking on his own ads, or encouraging clicks on his ads

Users or family members clicking to support the site / publisher

Third-party programs with user incentives, such as paid-to-click services and click-exchanges

Automated clicking tools, robots, or other deceptive software

The same principles above apply to ad impressions and conversions as well. Some sources of invalid impressions include, but are not limited to:

Excessive page refreshes, generated either manually or automatically

Third-party programs with user incentives, such as paid-to-surf or auto-surf programs

Third-party programs for purchasing fixed amounts of traffic, e.g. "$10 for 1,000 page views"

As a reminder, any method that artificially generates clicks, impressions, or conversions is strictly prohibited by our program policies. You can also find more information about these topics in our Invalid Clicks FAQ.

Posted by the Google Ad Traffic Quality Team

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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 8/08/2008 12:53:00 P
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[Inside AdSense] On your frequency

In the coming months, we'll be rolling out some new foundational features in AdWords for the content network. These features are intended to enhance your earning potential and the effectiveness of ads we serve to users on your sites. Some of the benefits of these features include:

• Frequency capping, which prevents users from repeatedly seeing the same ads on your pages.
  
• Improved attribution, to help advertisers identify the best performing sites in the network based on post-impression activity.
  
• Improved ads quality, as we're able to improve ad performance within the Google content network.
  

You can read about these in more detail on our official Google blog. To enable these features, we'll be implementing a DoubleClick ad serving cookie on the content network. We now have a program policy that covers data usage related to the launch of these new features.

We're excited about these upcoming features that will improve the experience for users and protect privacy while creating more value for our publishers and advertisers.

Posted by Wei Yang - AdSense Publisher Support

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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 8/07/2008 10:01:00 A
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[Inside AdSense] A picture isn't always worth a thousand words

The maxim about the Internet is that content is king. While this holds true for AdSense publishers, there's one important caveat: if it's not text-based content, our crawler might not notice.

While we're constantly working to improve our targeting technology, our crawlers need text to properly match ads to your pages. Although images, flash, and streaming video can help spice up a site, relying heavily on these sorts of elements will make it difficult for us to get a good read on what your site is about.

If your site uses a lot of these features, make sure you provide enough text-based content in one of our supported languages to effectively convey the topic of your site. If our crawler doesn't find enough text, you may get poorly targeted ads or public service ads (PSAs). While we can't say the exact amount of text content that you'll need to receive targeted ads, we do recommend including complete sentences and paragraphs on your pages.

To improve your ad targeting, here are few other pointers:

• Use text in addition to images when possible. Please note that the crawler can't read text contained within images.
  
• If you use images, be sure to title them appropriately and provide descriptive ALT tags.
  
• Try imagining your site without pictures or dynamic content. This will give you a good idea of what our crawler reads. If you lack imagination, you can try turning the images off in your web browser.
  

Finally, it's important to keep in mind that the AdSense for content ads on your site are automatically determined. Though it's not possible to choose the ads that are placed on your site, including more text-based content will help make it possible for our system to target your site correctly.

Posted by Kent Sugarman - AdSense Publisher Support

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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 8/01/2008 10:07:00 A
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