Adsense tricks: February 2010

Thursday, February 25, 2010

[Inside AdSense] Better site traffic data and new name for Google Ad Planner

Already, tens of thousands of AdSense publishers have used Google Ad Planner to share information about their website with advertisers. We are continuing to invest in the product in order to provide the deepest, most accurate data possible. To that end, we have improved how we calculate site traffic by over 10%, upgraded the way we publish opt-in Google Analytics data from publishers, and renamed the product to DoubleClick Ad Planner. Visit the DoubleClick blog to read more about the new product features and new name.

As always, anyone can use the newly renamed DoubleClick Ad Planner whether or not they are a DoubleClick customer. The product remains free and open for everyone. The URL for publishers to update their profile remains the same: www.google.com/adplanner/publisher.

If you are new to Ad Planner, we invite you to learn more about claiming your site.

Posted by Wayne Lin - Product Manager, DoubleClick Ad Planner

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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 2/25/2010 11:10:00 AM

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Tuesday, February 23, 2010

[Inside AdSense] Troubleshooting tips part IIb: Ad relevance and targeting co...

To follow up on our previous post about ad relevance and targeting, let's look at some other reasons why you may experience ad targeting issues on your site.

Have you blocked the AdSense crawler's access to your pages? The AdSense crawler is an automated program that scans your web pages and tracks content for indexing. Sometimes we don't crawl pages because the AdSense crawler doesn't have access to your pages, in which case we're unable to determine their content and show relevant ads. Here are a few specific instances when our crawler can't access a site:

If you use a robots.txt file which regulates the crawler access to your page. In this case, you can grant the AdSense crawler access by adding these lines to the top of your robots.txt file:

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*
Disallow:
If the sites you place the ad code on are behind a login, our crawler won´t be able to access your site. To grant access to such pages, please follow these instructions. Also, be sure to regularly check your site diagnostics tool to be aware of any blocked pages.

Is your site language supported by AdSense? Check to make sure that your site has a substantial amount of text-based content in one of the languages supported by AdSense. When there's enough content, our technology detects the primary language of each of your pages and delivers relevant ads in the appropriate language, even if your site contains multiple supported languages.
- The crawlers used by Google AdSense index content by unique URL. As a result, if the URL is the same regardless which language the user chooses to view the pages in, our system will only have the language version it received when indexing this URL. This means that we'll show ads according to the page our system has in its cache, which might not match the language the user is viewing the page in. In order to resolve this, we suggest either of the following:
  - Create separate directories for each language, such as http://www.site.com/en/index.html
  - Send GET variables (encoded user information appended to the end of the URL after the ? character) in the URL to determine which language should be shown such as for example http://www.site.com/index.php?lang=en
Do you see public service announcements (PSAs) on a site which previously showed paid ads before? If your AdSense account requires PIN or phone verification, you'll see a prompt in your account when you sign in. If you fail to verify your PIN or phone number (requirements vary depending on your location), then you may see PSAs on your site. If this is not your case, please visit our Help Center for further information.

If you continue to have ad targeting issues or are unable to see your ads we recommend visiting the ad troubleshooter in our Help Center.

Posted by Ulrike Jung - Inside AdSense Team

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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 2/23/2010 01:11:00 PM

Monday, February 22, 2010

[Inside AdSense] Introducing the new DoubleClick for Publishers

You may have read previous posts on this blog about Google's ad serving platforms for publishers, such as Google Ad Manager. Publisher ad serving helps website owners better manage and deliver ad campaigns that they've sold directly to advertisers. Ad serving platforms are also used to better manage how unsold ads are allocated to third parties, such as the DoubleClick Ad Exchange, AdSense and other ad networks. If you do a lot of direct media sales and ad network management today, you may already be using an ad server or have investigated using one. Google offers two ad serving products for publishers - Google Ad Manager, for growing publishers, and DoubleClick's DART for Publishers (DFP), for large media companies with complex needs.

Since Google's acquisition of DoubleClick in March of 2008, we've been working to leverage the combined knowledge of our companies and the combined strengths of our product suite to develop an even more effective solution for ad serving and management. Today we announced the new DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) from Google, our next generation ad serving platform as well as DFP Small Business, a streamlined version of our new platform designed to meet the needs of growing publishers. The new DFP offers an even more intuitive workflow to help publishers of all sizes manage campaigns quickly and easily, while providing access to sophisticated feature set including advanced reporting, forecasting, and optimization capabilities.

Google Ad Manager publishers will automatically be upgraded to DFP Small Business in the coming weeks and we will be working closely with DoubleClick customers to upgrade them to our premium platform on a schedule that makes sense for their business. New publishers signing up for Google Ad Manager today will be automatically upgraded to DFP Small Business on the same schedule as current GAM publishers. To learn more about both versions of our upgraded ad serving platform you can visit this link.

Posted by Alexander Vogenthaler - Product Manager

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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 2/22/2010 08:43:00 AM

Thursday, February 18, 2010

[Inside AdSense] Site maintenance on Saturday, February 20

This Saturday, our engineers will be performing routine site maintenance from 10am to 2pm PDT. You'll be unable to log in to your AdSense and Ad Manager accounts during this time, but we'll continue serving ads to your pages and tracking your clicks, impressions, and earnings as usual. In addition, your ad targeting won't be affected.

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

London - 6pm Saturday
Johannesburg - 8pm Saturday
Hyderabad - 11:30pm Saturday
Ho Chi Minh City - 1am Sunday
Brisbane - 4am Sunday

If you'd like to learn more about what goes on during these maintenance periods, check out this Inside AdSense post.

Dia Muthana - Inside AdSense team

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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 2/18/2010 04:02:00 PM

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

[Inside AdSense] Update on the webinar schedule

We experienced some sound issues when we launched our AdSense Optimization Basics webinar on February 10th. We'd like to apologize to those of you that attended for the inconvenience caused, and let you know that we've rescheduled the event to the same time tomorrow. You can continue to post your questions here and we'll answer as many as possible during the live event.

We hope to see you there.

Posted by Siobhán McCormack - AdSense Optimisation Team

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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 2/16/2010 02:49:00 PM

Thursday, February 11, 2010

Thanks for your feedback on the AdSense Product Ideas page

Back in December, we invited you to submit and vote on product ideas
for AdSense. Thanks for participating and voicing your opinions! We
received over 600 ideas, and now, we'd like to follow up on what we're
doing with them.

We've sorted through and categorized your ideas, which ranged from
suggestions such as additional ad format types to new payment methods,
and we recently shared them with the Product Management team. Our
product managers are now looking into a number of these ideas and are
evaluating whether they can be incorporated within our current product
roadmap. We're focused on responding to your feedback, but it might
take a little time before you see the features we choose to include
because product changes require time to build and test across all the
accounts and languages we support. We appreciate your patience in the
meantime.

Also, we noticed a few ideas on the Product Ideas page that relate to
existing features in AdSense, so we'd like to take a moment to
highlight some of them here:

1. You suggested: Show a list of sites displaying ads from a
specific publisher ID to prevent malicious activity.

We recommend: Try the Allowed Sites feature to protect your
account. You can enter the URLs of sites you own, and earnings from
only those sites will be recorded in your account. When you opt in to
this feature, we'll also show you a list of URLs that haven't been
added to the Allowed Sites list, but where your ad code is appearing.
Please keep in mind that if you create additional sites in the future
and would like to earn from them, you'll need to add the URLs to the
Allowed Sites list in order to be credited for valid activity.

To get started with this feature, visit the 'Allowed Sites' page
under your AdSenseSetup tab. You can also find more information in our
Help Center.

2. You suggested: Create an index of AdSense sites so AdWords
advertisers can easily find sites to target.

We recommend: Try the Publisher Center within Google Ad Planner to
provide advertisers with information about your sites. You can claim
sites you own, customize their descriptions, and add categories that
describe your content. In addition, you can share your Google
Analytics data to provide advertisers with insight into your traffic
levels. Recently, we added the ability to display a clickable badge on
your site that will take interested advertisers directly to your Ad
Planner profile. Any publisher can use this feature, but please note
that the interface is currently only available in English.

To claim your sites in Ad Planner, follow our instructions and
visit our Help Center.

3. You suggested: Enable more flexible Custom Search options.

We recommend: Try the Google AJAX Search API or the new Custom
Search Themes feature for additional customization options. These
features will allow you to control the branding of the search box and
change or enhance the look and feel of your search results to match
your site.

For more information on these options, we recommend visiting the
Custom Search blog and the Developer's Guide for the Custom Search
API.

Thanks again for all of your ideas and votes -- stay tuned to Inside
AdSense for the latest news and product updates.

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

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Wednesday, February 10, 2010

[Inside AdSense] Better contextual matching

As an AdSense partner, you know that Google is continually making improvements to the way we match ads to your content so that users see even more relevant ads, which should help you make more money over time.

A "referral URL" is one of many signals we use to deliver contextually relevant ads on your website. The referral URL contains information about the link a user followed to arrive at your website, whether from a search engine or another site on the Internet. Any webmaster for any site can look at referral URLs to see how users arrive at their site.

Let's see how this works today when a user arrives at your golfing advice website from a search engine results page. Imagine that someone searches on Google for [golf shop atlanta] and clicks on a search result that takes them to your site. The referral URL that is passed to your site may look something like this: http://www.google.com/search?q=golf+shop+atlanta. I'm using Google as an example here, but the same type of information is transmitted if a user arrives at your website from another search engine.

To deliver the most relevant ad, we treat the query words [golf shop atlanta] in the referral URL as if they're part of the content of your webpage. We can then better tailor the ad we deliver on your site. In this example, we could use the additional information from the query words to show an ad for a golf shop in Atlanta rather than for one in Chicago (depending on the other words in the page).

We've recently started to expand the use of the query words in referral URLs to a few hours so we can so we can continue to deliver more relevant ads. The technical way that we're doing this is by associating the relevant query words in the referral URL with the existing advertising cookie on the user's browser. After a short period of time (a few hours) the query words are no longer used for the purposes of matching ads. Of course, users can continue to opt out of our advertising cookie at any time here.

This allows us to deliver more relevant ads on a wider range of AdSense partner sites that a user may browse over the course of a few hours. Let's assume the user in our example leaves your golf website and browses through to a news website that is also an AdSense partner. Since [golf shop atlanta] is in a referral URL that was visited in the past few hours, we may use those query words, along with the content of the news webpage itself, to determine the most relevant ad to show the user on the news website.

Using signals from the referral URL is just one part of our teams' continuing efforts to deliver even better contextually matched ads on your website.

Posted by Rebecca Illowsky - Associate Product Manager

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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 2/10/2010 10:16:00 AM

Monday, February 8, 2010

[Inside AdSense] More webinars coming your way

We've just published a new webinar schedule for the next month. In our live webinars, we'll highlight changes you can make to your ad implementation in order to maximize your AdSense revenue. We're also trying something new with our upcoming webinars: we've set up open Google Moderator discussions, where you can raise questions related to the specific webinar topic or vote on questions from other participants. We'll then answer your questions live in the webinar.

To sign up for our webinars, please visit our Help Center. Even if you're not able to attend the live sessions, we'll make sure to upload each webinar recording within 24 hours of the event.

Posted by Siobhán McCormack - AdSense Optimisation Team

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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 2/08/2010 12:02:00 PM

Thursday, February 4, 2010

[Inside AdSense] Donate your AdSense earnings to help Haiti

As you may have already seen, Google has made various efforts to contribute to the earthquake relief response in Haiti. We've heard repeatedly from AdSense publishers on forums about wanting to help, and today, we're pleased to let you know how you can do so with your AdSense earnings.

We're currently accepting donations from AdSense publishers with an unpaid account balance through January 31, 2010. To see what your unpaid account balance is, please visit the 'Payment History' page within your account. Your January earnings will post in the next few days, so feel free to refer to your 'Advanced Reports' page for an earnings estimate until those are finalized.

Working with our teammates at Google.org, we've identified Partners In Health (PIH) as the recipient of these funds. Your funds will go to provide medical aid via PIH and their Haiti-based partner organization. Any contribution you can make will help to ensure that PIH can continue their work throughout this time of great need.

Photo courtesy of PIH

You can donate a portion or all of your entire unpaid balance as of the end of January. Whether you have a balance of $0.10 or $100 in your account, we invite you to participate within the next week.

As you may expect, there are certain restrictions to donating, and all our normal policies still apply -- so even if you're donating, please don't ask others to click on your ads in order to increase your earnings. For more information on how to participate, visit our donation form.

Posted by Elizabeth Ferdon - AdSense Payments Team

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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 2/04/2010 03:36:00 PM

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

[Inside AdSense] Troubleshooting tips part IIa: Ad relevance and targeting

Last week, we took a closer look at implementing your ad code, and today, we'll address some of the common issues related to ad targeting.

If you're seeing irrelevant ads or public service ads (PSAs) on your pages after you've pasted the ad code into your HTML source code and waited the recommended 48 hrs, here are a things to check:

Have you placed the AdSense ad code in frames separate from the main content of your website? If so, you may experience ad targeting issues. In order for our crawlers to match the ads to the content of your website, it is important to place the ad code in the same frame as the main content of your webste. If you're familiar with HTML, and your website is talking about several different topics you could also consider implementing section targeting on your site to highlight relevant content.
Do you have mostly dynamic content on your site? Our crawlers currently can't derive meaning from these types of files:
- audio and video files (.wma, .mpeg, .mov)
- mp3 files (.mp3)
- images (.jpeg, .bmp)
- Macromedia Flash movies
- Java Applets

To receive more relevant ads, we recommend including plenty of text-based content on your site, including complete sentences and paragraphs.
Do your pages use session IDs? A session ID is a piece of data serves as a unique identifier for a session. If your pages use session IDs, you may not receive targeted ads on those pages. Since this session ID - and therefore the URL - changes every time a different user views a page, the URL will not be indexed and will need to be crawled from scratch. Once the URL is crawled, however, the session will most likely have expired. This means that pages seen by the users are rarely in the index. You'll need to remove the session IDs in order to show more targeted ads to your users.

We hope these tips help you resolve any targeting issues you experience with your ads. Next week, we'll take a look at some other reasons why you may see irrelevant ads or PSAs on your site, and how you can best resolve them.

Posted by Ulrike Jung - Inside AdSense Team

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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 2/03/2010 02:13:00 PM

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