[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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