Adsense tricks: March 2009

Tuesday, March 31, 2009

[Inside AdSense] Optimization Webinar tomorrow

We often talk about optimization techniques here on the blog, but we've heard from many of you that you're looking for a more hands-on learning experience. With that in mind, we'd like to invite you to an AdSense Optimization Webinar we're holding tomorrow. During this interactive 1-hour session, members of our optimization team will explain and demonstrate ways to improve your ad and search performance. You'll also have the chance to chat online with them during the event.

The details:

AdSense Optimization Webinar
Date: Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Time: 11am PDT (GMT -07:00)
Register at: https://googleonline.webex.com/googleonline/onstage/g.php?t=a&d=572860900

You'll need to register before the event starts in order to attend, and we're only able to accommodate the first 500 publishers who register. If you're interested in attending the webinar, be sure to sign up using the link provided above.

If you're unable to attend this webinar, please know that we're planning to host more of these in the future. (And don't forget that soon, you'll be able to update your email notification preferences so we can personally let you know about them.)

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 3/31/2009 03:23:00 P
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Monday, March 30, 2009

[Inside AdSense] New email notification preferences to keep you informed

If you're reading this, you're probably an active publisher who stays up-to-date with all things AdSense. You're probably also signed up to receive newsletters and surveys from our team. But publishers like you keep telling us that we're not doing enough to reach out to you. That's why we're happy to announce that we'll be rolling out new email notification preferences in your account over the next few days.

What does that mean? Simply put, you'll soon have the option to receive specific messages like event invitations, information about webinars, and personalized account suggestions from members of our team.

In a few days, you'll be prompted with a one-time interstitial page after you sign in, which will ask you to select the types of messages you'd like to receive from us. We encourage you to take the new email preferences out for a spin once they're available in your account. If you change your mind, you're welcome to update your selections at any time. Just sign in to your account and visit the Contact Preferences section of your Account Settings page to update the types of emails you want to receive.

Posted by Jen Phillips - Inside AdSense Team

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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 3/30/2009 10:57:00 A
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Friday, March 27, 2009

[Inside AdSense] Sunsetting video units feature

As you may know, we frequently review our products and features to ensure their effectiveness. After reviewing our AdSense video units feature, which allows you to show YouTube content and ads on your pages, we've found that it hasn't had the impact we had hoped for. As a result, we've decided to retire this feature at the end of April so we can focus our resources on other opportunities to help publishers earn from their sites.

If you'd still like to display video content from YouTube, you can do so through YouTube.com directly. Visit any specific video page and look for the code in the 'Embed' box, or sign in to your YouTube account to create a playlist. In addition, please note that this change won't affect the availability of other video-related ads options -- video ads may appear in your AdSense for content ad units if you've opted into image ads, and AdSense for video is still accepting applications from eligible publishers who produce video content.

Starting today, the option to sign up for video units is no longer available to new publishers. If you're currently displaying video units, we recommend that you start removing the video unit code from your pages as soon as possible so you can optimize your available ad space in advance. Please be assured that any earnings you've generated from video units in the past will still be credited to your AdSense account.

Once video units are retired at the end of April, any remaining Leaderboard or Skyscraper video units on your pages will direct users to YouTube.com, while other video unit sizes will automatically be changed to standard embedded YouTube players. These standard video players will display top YouTube videos, but you won't generate earnings from them once this change occurs. If you have less than three ad units on your page, you may prefer to replace your video unit with a regular ad unit.

We appreciate your patience and understanding as we continue to develop our products.

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 3/27/2009 11:13:00 A
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Thursday, March 26, 2009

[Inside AdSense] Pageview tracking back to normal

If you're displaying multiple ad units on your pages, you may have noticed that your pageviews were higher than normal for part of yesterday and today. Our engineers identified a bug which prevented ad units from detecting other units on the same page. As a result, our system logged a pageview for each ad unit that was loaded on a page, instead of a pageview for each page containing ads. In some cases, this also may have caused specific ads to appear in multiple ad units on the same page.

Please be assured that ad unit impressions were still logged correctly and ads were still displayed on your pages, so you were properly credited for all earnings generated from your ads. We've resolved the issue, and although you won't see the pageview count in your reports retroactively changed, your pageview tracking is now back to normal.

Thanks for your patience and your help in identifying this bug.

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 3/26/2009 03:33:00 P
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Wednesday, March 25, 2009

[Inside AdSense] AdSense is a-Twitter

Many members of the AdSense team enjoy using Twitter -- and we've seen that many of our publishers have made it a part of their daily workflow as well. If you're a Twitter user and have something to say about AdSense, chances are you'll "tweet" about it. Twitter has given us daily snapshots of what we're doing right, and what we could be doing better. If there's an issue affecting many publishers, Twitter is one of the very first places we hear about it. (Not familiar with Twitter? Check out Twitter's Getting Started Guide.)

We're thrilled to launch @adsense to communicate with AdSense publishers who use Twitter. Our tweets will be a mix of fresh product news, optimization tips, interesting links, upcoming events, and possibly even pictures of our dogs. Our entire AdSense team contributes, so if you have any suggestions for what you want to see, feel free to send an @reply to us!

Please note that since we want to make this feed as useful as possible to everyone following us, we can't respond via Twitter to questions regarding individual AdSense accounts. Please continue to visit the AdSense Help Center and Help Forum to troubleshoot your specific issues.

Let the tweeting begin!

Posted by Erica dela Cruz - Inside AdSense Team

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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 3/25/2009 10:22:00 A
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Monday, March 23, 2009

[Inside AdSense] Answers to your interest-based advertising questions

Two weeks ago, we let you know about the upcoming launch of interest-based advertising. We've been reading your blog comments and forum posts, and we'd like to address some of the most common questions we've seen:

How should I update my privacy policies?
Your site's privacy policy will need to include the information mentioned in this Help Center entry. However, because publisher sites and laws vary by country, we're not able to provide exact language for your site. Please make any necessary changes to your privacy policies by April 8th, 2009, as the official launch of interest-based advertising will occur on April 9th. If you're a blogger, you can paste your privacy policy into your sidebar.

I noticed some changes in my earnings and the ads showing up on my site -- is it because of interest-based ads?
No. We haven't yet launched interest-based ads on AdSense publisher sites, so there's been no effect on your revenue or the ads appearing on your pages. Interest-based advertising will be rolled out to a limited set of advertisers beginning on April 9th, and then expanded later this year; as a result, the impact of this launch for most publishers won't be immediate. Over time, as interest-based advertising is rolled-out to additional advertisers, you should begin to see positive effects on your revenue.

Does this mean that my sites won't show ads relevant to my content anymore?
No, that's not the case -- interest-based ads won't replace the previous ad targeting options you're used to. Interest-based ads will compete in the same ad auction as contextually- and placement-targeted ads, and we'll continue to show only the ad(s) that will generate highest earnings for you. As noted above, interest-based ads will gradually become available to show on publisher pages, and with more available ads competing in the ad auction, you should see increased earnings over time.

Are these interest-based ads pop-ups?
No, Google doesn't show ads as pop-ups.

If I opt out of showing ads based on interest categories, can I change my mind later? Will I still need to update my privacy policy now?
Yes, you can change your preferences around displaying ads based on interest categories at any time. However, even if you choose to opt out of displaying ads based on interest categories now, you'll still need to update your privacy policies by April 8th. This is because your site may still show ads based on a user's previous interactions with an advertiser, such as past visits to that advertiser's site. Please keep in mind that remaining opted in to displaying ads based on interest categories will help increase the number of available ads for your pages in the long run, which can help increase your earnings potential.

For more information on interest-based adverting, please visit our Help Center.

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 3/23/2009 02:01:00 P
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Thursday, March 19, 2009

[Inside AdSense] Join us at ADSPACE in April

"If you're going to San Francisco..." (in late April), be sure to attend ADSPACE conference and expo on Wednesday, April 22nd. This first-time event will take place alongside ad:tech San Francisco and will be geared towards helping small to mid-sized publishers improve their AdSense performance. You'll have the opportunity to network with advertisers and other publishers, and you'll also hear advice from those who've been successful with the AdSense program.

Members of the Google AdSense team will be present at ADSPACE, and we're looking forward to meeting you. During the conference, you'll hear from our product management team, and our optimization specialists will be on-hand to answer questions and provide you with personalized tips.

If you register for a conference pass with our Google promotional code ADSPACED, you'll receive a 20% discount on the price. With the ADSPACE conference pass, you'll have access to all ADSPACE sessions and keynotes, an ADSPACE attendee lunch, and the ad:tech San Francisco Exhibit Hall. You can find additional information on the official site, including the complete conference schedule, who's speaking, and who's already signed up to exhibit.

We hope to see you in April!

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 3/19/2009 04:56:00 P
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Friday, March 13, 2009

[Inside AdSense] Happy first birthday, Google Ad Manager

A year ago today, we announced the beta release of Google Ad Manager, our hosted ad serving and management solution for publishers with small direct sales teams. Over the past year we've made Ad Manager widely available to all publishers in 32 languages and introduced many exciting new features, including the ability to preview creatives on your site and recently, free-form targeting and roadblocking. We've also made improvements to our forecasting system and to the AdSense price optimization feature in Ad Manager to help publishers maximize the revenue of their advertising inventory, as well as throughout Ad Manager. Now, thousands of publishers in hundreds of countries serve billions of ad impressions each day with Ad Manager, and we've heard from them that it has helped them increase revenue, cut serving costs, and save time managing campaigns. We'd like to thank each and every one of you for using Ad Manager, providing us with product feedback, participating in the Ad Manager Forum, and helping us make Ad Manager a better product.

This time of year also marks another important anniversary, Google's acquisition of DoubleClick, a premier provider of digital marketing technology and services. Our teams have been focused on combining resources to help publishers of all sizes tackle key operational challenges, grow their audiences, and develop new revenue opportunities. Together, we've already made significant enhancements to both Google Ad Manager and DART for Publishers, our advertising platform for publishers with larger direct sales teams, and we look forward to bringing you even more exciting innovations in the year to come.

Want to send us a birthday message or share your Ad Manager story? We'd love to hear from you.

Posted by Talia Brodecki - Ad Manager Product Marketing

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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 3/13/2009 11:46:00 A
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Thursday, March 12, 2009

[Inside AdSense] Site maintenance on Saturday, March 14

This Saturday, our engineers will be performing routine site maintenance from 10am to 2pm PDT. You won't be able to log in to your account during this time, but your ad targeting won't be affected, and we'll continue to record your clicks, impressions, and earnings as usual.

We've provided the maintenance start time in a few other cities for our international readers:

London - 5pm Saturday
Kiev - 7pm Saturday
Mumbai - 10:30 pm Saturday
Singapore - 1am Sunday
Sydney - 4am Sunday

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 3/12/2009 03:43:00 PM
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Wednesday, March 11, 2009

[Inside AdSense] Driving monetization with ads that reach the right audience

Advertisers spend more money on campaigns that reach the right audience; helping them do that should drive more revenue to your websites. This week we're announcing plans to provide interest-based advertising across AdSense publisher sites to help achieve that goal. In the past, advertisers have taken advantage of contextual and placement-targeted advertising on AdSense publisher sites. With this enhancement they'll also be able to reach users based on their previous interactions with them, such as visits to the advertiser website, as well as reach users on the basis of their interests (such as "sports enthusiasts" or "travel enthusiasts").

Over the next few months we'll start offering interest-based advertising to a limited number of advertisers as part of a beta, and expand the offering later in 2009. Whether the advertiser's goal is to drive brand awareness or increase responses to their ads, these capabilities can help expand the success of their campaigns and should increase your earnings as advertiser participation increases.

To develop interest categories, we'll recognize the types of webpages users visit across the AdSense network. As an example, if they visit a number of sports pages, we'll add them to the "sports enthusiast" interest category. You can visit the Help Center to learn more about how interest categories will be developed and your associated account settings. As a result of this launch, your privacy policy will now need to reflect the use of interest-based advertising. Please ensure that your site's privacy policies are up-to-date and make any necessary changes by April 8, 2009.

Users browsing the web will benefit from the additional relevancy that interest-based ads can provide. And by visiting the new Ads Preferences Manager, users can see what interest categories we think they fall into, or add and remove categories themselves. The Ads Preferences Manager can be found by clicking on most "Ads by Google" links you see on Google ads throughout the web.

You can read more about how interest-based advertising benefits the online ecosystem and about the privacy innovations developed for this launch in the Official Google Blog and the Google Public Policy Blog.

We look forward to providing users with ads more closely tied to their interests, helping advertisers reach their campaign goals, and helping you to monetize your website most effectively.

Posted by Aitan Weinberg - Product Manager

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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 3/11/2009 02:15:00 A
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Monday, March 9, 2009

[Inside AdSense] Add Google News to your website

Do you run a site that relates to people or topics often covered in the media? Or are you looking for additional ways to engage your users? If so, we'd like to introduce you to our recently released Google News–based element for webmasters and developers. This element will allow you to easily integrate headlines and previews from Google News into any page to supplement your content and help make it more dynamic. Whether your site's visitors are interested in business, entertainment or fashion, you control the types of stories in your personal news show. You can input keywords like "Obama" or broad topics like "world news" or "politics".

Adding this element to your site or blog is easy using our NewsShow wizard. You can select the size of the frame, the topics, and the number of articles you want to show, and we'll build the code for you. Or, for more customization, take a look at our documentation.

For more information, see our post on the AJAX Search API Blog. To get started now, head straight to our wizard to cut and paste your own NewsShow.

Posted by Adam Feldman - Google AJAX API Product Manager

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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 3/09/2009 10:04:00 A
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Friday, March 6, 2009

[Inside AdSense] AdSense for content bug now fixed

We wanted to let you know that yesterday at around 2pm PST, a bug in our system caused less relevant contextually-targeted ads to appear for approximately 10 hours. You were still credited for all valid clicks and impressions on the ads which appeared on your sites, but this bug may have impacted your overall AdSense for content revenue if you had visitors to your pages during these hours. Please note that because we're unable to determine which ads would have been viewed or clicked on by visitors to your sites in the absence of the bug, we will not be manually adjusting yesterday's earnings.

Our engineers have now resolved the issue and have confirmed that ad targeting has returned to normal. We apologize for this issue; please know that our engineers are performing a thorough analysis of what occurred and will make changes to prevent similar problems from happening in the future.

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 3/06/2009 07:08:00 P
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Wednesday, March 4, 2009

[Inside AdSense] Introducing expandable ads on AdSense sites

We're excited to introduce to you expandable ads, a new type of ad that can appear on your pages. Expandable ads are rich media ads that can expand beyond the original size of the ad unit, following a user-initiated action. This creates more real estate for the ad, allowing for more interaction from interested users. For instance, expandable ads may stream a movie trailer, show video game clips, or display various views of an item for sale.

Expandable ads will be served as third-party ads and will be created by Google-certified rich media vendors for the top display advertisers in our network. And like other Google ads, you'll earn based on whether the expandable ads on your site are priced on a cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-impression (CPM) basis. Keep in mind that you'll generate earnings from CPC expandable ads when a user visits the advertiser's landing page, and not when a user simply clicks to expand the ad.

We thought you might have more questions about the launch of expandable ads, so we've addressed a few key points below:

Will expandable ads alter my site's layout or be disruptive to my users?
No. In order to protect the publisher and user experience, we've created several policies around how expandable ads work:

Ads will expand only after a user clicks and interacts with the ad. Mouseovers or rollovers won't trigger the ad, in order to prevent accidental expansions.
An expandable ad won't expand more than double its width or height.
Once expanded, the ad will appear as a layer over the page content so that your content will not be modified or shifted in any way.
The user may close the expanded panel at any time.
All expandable ads must comply with our standard AdWords image ad policies.

How can I show expandable ads on my site?
You're automatically eligible to receive expandable ads if you meet all three of the following criteria:

You're located in North America or Europe, with a website in Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, or Spanish
You've added the AdSense code directly into your site's source code
You've enabled image ads

You won't need to upload any special "iFrame-buster" files from third-party vendors onto your own servers to allow these new types of ads to expand on your site. Although we don't currently offer expandable ads for all ad serving solutions, we're actively working to support more implementation methods soon, and we thank you for your patience in the meantime.

Can I filter specific expandable ads shown on my site?
Yes - like the other ads on your pages, you can use your Competitive Ad Filter to block contextually-targeted expandable ads. Please note that for third-party ads, we recommend using the top level domain (e.g. 'example.com' instead of 'example.com/sample.html'). Additionally, you'll still be able to use your Ad Review Center to block specific placement-targeted expandable ads. In the Ad Review Center, expandable ads will be classified under the "Rich Media" ad format.

To learn more about expandable ads, please read our FAQs.

Posted by Courtney Chin - Third-party Ad Serving Specialist

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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 3/04/2009 04:12:00 P
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[Inside AdSense] Updates on account access and reporting

We'd like to take a moment to explain a login issue that some of you may have encountered last night, as well as let you know about an upcoming stats delay you may notice.

Login loop

If you tried to sign in to your AdSense account between 10:45 and 11:35 p.m. PST last night, you may have found yourself in a "loop" between the AdSense login page and your Google Accounts page. We're in the process of trying out some new designs for our US English homepage, and we rolled them back after users reported a login error with one of the designs. You should now be able to sign in as normal. Rest assured the next time the new designs are rolled out, you'll actually end up where you want to be: in your AdSense account! Thanks especially to the forum posters and Twitterers for quickly bringing this to our attention.

Slower stats

You may notice more of a delay in your stats than usual today, as our engineers will be performing some maintenance work on our system. Please be assured that ads will continue to be served to your pages, and all activity will continue to be tracked as usual. Although it may take longer than usual to see impressions, clicks, and earnings reported in your account, you'll be credited for all valid activity on your sites. We apologize for the short notice, and appreciate your patience as we work to keep our systems updated for you.

Posted by Erica dela Cruz and Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 3/04/2009 09:02:00 A
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Tuesday, March 3, 2009

[Inside AdSense] Reports have gone international

One of the requests we frequently hear from our international publishers is to view reports in currencies other than U.S. Dollars. That's why we're happy to announce that publishers located in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Spain can now view AdSense reports in Euros.

If you're located in one of these five countries and make this update, we'll convert your earnings to Euros on a daily basis using the prevailing market rate from the previous day. With earnings converted daily, you'll avoid the risk of currency exchange fluctuations between USD and the Euro. You can still choose to receive payments in either Euros or U.S. Dollars and select from a range of payment methods as well.

To make the switch to local currency reports, you'll need to agree to a new set of Terms and Conditions. Here are the main changes involved:

The party that publishers are contracting with changes from Google Inc. to Google Ireland Limited.
Publishers are responsible for paying any local taxes in their jurisdiction. Google will only issue VAT refunds to publishers with an address in Ireland.
The governing law changes from California law to either English or local law.

You can view the full text of these new Terms and Conditions by logging in to your account and looking for the green prompt, "See your daily earnings reported in Euro amounts!" on your Reports Overview page. Unfortunately, we're not able to interpret the meaning of changes in our legal documents for publishers -- if you have questions or need legal advice on interpreting the new Terms, please don't hesitate to contact an attorney.

Before agreeing to the new Terms, we also recommend that you download and save copies of your past reports in U.S. Dollars for your records. Once you update your account, you'll be able to view current and historical reports only in Euros. However, you'll still be able to view your prior payment history of U.S. Dollar earnings.

We encourage you to update your account to local currency reports soon, as we may require this change in the future. If we're able to offer this to publishers in other countries, we'll provide details here on Inside AdSense. For more information, please feel free to visit our Help Center.

Posted by Elodie Bodet - AdSense Payments Team

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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 3/03/2009 05:15:00 P
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