We've moved.
Visit our new home for news and updates from AdSense
Inside AdSense
Google's official blog for news, tips and information on AdSense.
So a video's worth ... 10,000 words?
Tuesday, February 28, 2006
If traffic statistics on video sites are any indication, web surfers have a growing appetite for moving pictures. One of the most interesting aspects of working on Google Video is seeing all the videos that come in, on literally all sorts of topics -- from the
air guitar championships
to
how caffeine works
. With so much great content, wouldn't it be great if you could publish this content on whichever site you want?
Last week, we launched a feature on Google Video that allows you to embed Google Video content in your website. Does your site cover films? Show the trailer for Pixar's new movie
"Cars"
right on your website. Explore Google Video and you'll find a wide selection of content that can be displayed on your site. Here's an example:
Just look for the 'Put on site' link on the video's playback page. It's free, it's fast, and users don't have to download anything to enjoy video right from your site.
Posted by Jon Steinback - Google Video Product Marketing
eCPM -- what exactly is that?
Monday, February 27, 2006
eCPM is a bit of industry shorthand that seems here to stay. You've seen it listed in your AdSense reports; it means, "effective cost per thousand impressions." So how is eCPM calculated, you ask?
eCPM is calculated by dividing total earnings by total number of impressions in thousands. It is a great performance measure for your various ad units, so when experimenting, you can use eCPM to compare your results.
But what if your site doesn't receive enough impressions to have a large sample size? Even for smaller sites, eCPM can be a useful statistic to track ad performance.
For example, let's imagine we have two
custom channels
named 'Blue Skyscrapers' and 'Red Rectangles', respectively, which reflect the types of ad formats we're testing on our site. During our test, the 'Blue Skyscrapers' channel receives 370 page impressions and $1.48 in total earnings. The 'Red Rectangles' channel receives 187 page impressions and $0.97 in earnings over the same period. To make these figures more comparable we calculate eCPM -- i.e., the estimated earnings for every 1,000 impressions received. We find that eCPM for blue skyscrapers is $4.00 while the eCPM for red rectangles is $5.18.
This means if we received 1,000 impressions of blue skyscrapers, we would earn roughly $4.00. But for 1,000 impressions of red rectangles, we would earn about $5.18. Therefore, assuming that our
sample size is large enough
, it is to our advantage to switch to red rectangles throughout our site because they generate more revenue per impression.
Posted by Theresa Chow - AdSense Publisher Support
UK publisher Dan Moore 'tells us how'
Friday, February 24, 2006
Tellmehowto.net
is a site where users can share hints and tips on just about everything -- from do-it-yourself projects to travel and self-improvement. Set up by Dan Moore in 2002, it became part of the AdSense content network in 2004. Dan has some great optimisation feedback and would like to share his AdSense story ...
In 2005, Dan began a full review of his site to improve ad-serving and therefore, increase AdSense revenue. A period of trial and error followed whilst Dan tried out different optimisation tips, including different placements, colours and combinations of ads. Some things worked better than others -- this period of experimentation allowed him to see what worked best for his site and his readers.
One key improvement was to
make ads more visible
. Dan said, "Before, I had small ads shoved away in the corner of pages. I learnt that I had to make them bigger and put them where people would see them -- at the top left of the page -- since this is where people look first."
He also tried rotating the
colours of the ads
, but this was not successful on his site. In fact, through experimentation he learned the most successful change was the one he least expected. "The best tip was to blend the ad into the site. Don't make it contrast with the site and therefore stand out," Dan explained.
The figures prove what an enormous impact these changes had: Following a couple of months of testing, his revenue increased from $18 to $150 per day.
"The
optimisation tips
are really just common sense but you don't think about it or realise what can be done until someone suggests it. In the past I read stories from publishers claiming they were making hundreds of dollars a day on AdSense but I just thought, yeah right. This proves that it really is possible and a few simple changes can have a significant impact!"
Posted by Kate Hammond - AdSense UK Product Marketing
Meet Mike Gutner, AdSense Optimization Specialist
Wednesday, February 22, 2006
We caught up with Mike Gutner, an optimization specialist here at AdSense, to introduce you to one of the people whose job is to make you more money.
How did you get to work this morning?
I cycled. I live in San Francisco and enjoy bicycling the 40 miles to work about once or twice a week. I cycled across the United States a few years ago and like to re-live those days of getting up at 5:30am and cycling the pre-dawn miles.
What do you do on the AdSense team?
I work on AdSense optimization. We run tests to identify the best ways in which AdSense publishers can make the most of their Google ads.
Can all publishers take advantage of these optimization tips?
Of course. We publish a
tips page
, which is updated regularly with best practices and optimal ways to use new features, such as
link units
. We also frequently post tips on this blog, including optimal implementation techniques for
forums
and
blogs
, as well as refreshers on new features like
site targeting
. We'll be doing more optimization-related posts in 2006 -– to stay tuned, subscribe to
Inside AdSense
so you can receive updates automatically! (Subscribe by entering your email address in the text box to the right of this post)
What are the top 3 tips you like to tell publishers?
1. Opt into
image ads
. Doing so deepens the pool of advertisements competing to appear on your site, and allows AdWords advertisers to target your site directly with CPM image ads. This can improve monetization on the site real estate you've devoted to AdSense.
2. Use
custom channels
to track the performance of your ad units. Then, you can see which ad units perform best and experiment with color, placement, and format changes to figure out what works best for your site.
3.
Integrate
ad units into the content of your site. Place ads in locations on your page with heavy eye traffic, such as within article content (wrap the text around the ad unit) and at the top of the page below the your horizontal navigation unit. Check out our
heat map
for more placement ideas.
Do the same optimization tips apply across all websites?
No, certain types of sites perform differently with AdSense. In general, we've seen that ads placed above the fold of the page perform best. However in some cases, Google ads perform quite well below the fold. On article pages, for example, people often want more information about the topic after they've finished reading a story. Placing an AdSense ad unit immediately following an article provides relevant links to readers who want to continue reading about the subject. The same idea applies to forums; people tend to go straight to the bottom of interesting threads to read the most recent posts, and Google ads can perform really well there.
Any other advice?
Never stop experimenting! Don't get frustrated if changes you make to your ads don't have immediate positive effects. Keep tweaking your ad
colors
, formats, and placement, and track how these changes perform with channels. You'll eventually find the optimal ad implementation scheme for your site.
Posted by Suzie Dewey - AdSense Publisher Support
From the mail bag -- link unit edition
Friday, February 17, 2006
Rushabh asks:
My Google ads look funny – All I see is a list of topics displayed next to the 'Ads by Google' logo, but there aren't any actual ads.
We say:
Do you see something like this?
If so, you've implemented a
link unit
rather than a regular ad unit. While you may want to incorporate both ad units and link units into your site, make sure to select the 'Ad unit' radio button when generating your ad code in order to display regular Google ads on your site.
Bart asks:
When I view my link unit, all I get is a small search box with the phrase "View ads about" next to it.
We say:
You might see this happen If there is not enough text-based content on your site for us to determine its meaning, or if there is a limited inventory of ad topics relating to the content of your site. Users can then enter their own search terms into this box to view ads related to their query, and you'll receive earnings for clicks to these ads. A suggestion - you might try adding more text-based content (i.e., sentences and paragraphs) to your site to help us determine relevant topics to display.
Patti asks:
Can I track link unit earnings separately?
We say:
Yes, when generating your code you can use
custom channels
to track earnings for individual link units. Channels allow you to see how link units are performing relative to regular ad units, and can also help you experiment to determine the
optimal location
on your page for your link units so that you can maximize your revenue.
Posted by Theresa Chow - AdSense Publisher Support
Cover all your 'Bases'
Thursday, February 16, 2006
Looking for a place where you can easily share your site content with the world? Try
Google Base
, Google's database of information submitted by businesses and individuals like you. In a nutshell, Google Base is a free service that helps you publish virtually any kind of information -- be it your latest riveting
screenplay
, your physical business locations, or your famous
brownies
recipe.
So what's cool about Google Base for publishers? For starters, it allows you to make your content more accessible and useful. You can describe the content you upload with your own keywords and attributes so users can easily find it when they search Google Base,
Froogle
,
Local
or
Google.com
. For example, if you're posting a recipe, you might include attributes such as 'Meal: Breakfast', 'Main Ingredient: Eggs', and 'Servings: 4'.
The other cool feature is that you can choose to share a lot of your content, or just a little. You can post individual items by completing a simple UI form, or you can submit a bulk upload file with multiple items in standard formats including TSV, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0 and Atom 0.3 formats. This means that if you already have RSS or Atom feeds, you can easily submit your content to Google Base without much additional work. To keep yourself informed with official news and tips about Google Base, read the
Google Base blog
or join the
Google Base Help
Group.
Posted by Naureen Kabir - Google Base Support
Eight for experts
Tuesday, February 14, 2006
After showing our new publishers
some love
recently, we realized our veteran publishers deserve recognition, too. Test your AdSense expertise with the suggestions below.
1. You're probably familiar with
alternate ads
, but you may want to take alternate ads a step further and try out
collapsing ad units
.
2. Save time with
custom reports
and
emailable reports
-- so quick and convenient!
3. Our
optimization tips
are great, but what's even better is testing them on your specific site -- whether it's a
blog
, a
forum
, or a site like
Engineeringtalk
, which really benefited from
link units
.
4. You know how great your site is -- get the word out to advertisers by customizing your
Onsite Advertiser Sign-up
landing page.
5. Integrate AdSense for search into your site even further by making sure that SiteSearch is enabled and
your website is the default
. Be sure to
customize your search box
, too, so it fits in seamlessly.
6. Add your site to Google's search results using
Google Sitemaps
so people can find all the great content you've created.
7. Since you're already using multiple ad units (right?), be sure you're
making the most
of them, including using
section targeting
to get the most relevant ads.
8. Once you've exhausted the AdSense resources, try more of Google's
publisher tools
, like
Google Maps API
and
Blogger
.
Got an expert tip for us?
Let us know
.
Posted by Julie Beckmann - AdSense Publisher Support
We love you!
Tuesday, February 14, 2006
Happy Valentine's Day to all of our AdSense publishers.
Posted by The Google AdSense Team
The experimental approach
Friday, February 10, 2006
One of our responsibilities on the AdSense engineering team is to ensure that you always receive the most relevant and valuable ads on your site. It's exciting because we deal with the entire ad targeting process from analyzing your site's content to selecting ads and determining how to best display the ads on your page. I just celebrated my 2-year AdSense anniversary last week, and it's never ceased to be a fascinating and challenging project.
Prior to launch, any innovation in AdSense goes through three phases: analysis, implementation, and experimentation. When evaluating a new idea that might improve ad targeting, we first analyze all of our existing data. AdSense generates an amazing amount of data every day -- a record of every ad impression and click occurring on every web publisher in our network -- so identifying interesting trends is a never-ending challenge, from determining what ads perform best to identifying the most common causes of
public service ads
in German.
Once we believe a new idea is ready for testing, we have to implement the idea in our ad serving code using the very powerful development tools Google has provided for us. Naturally, all code designed to serve ads to our customers must pass a rigorous review and testing process before release to ensure that we continue to offer uninterrupted service. During the testing process, we typically run an experiment on a small percentage of traffic for anywhere from a few days to a few weeks. We select the experiment traffic randomly so it is as representative as possible of overall traffic; no individual site should ever see more than a small percentage of its traffic involved in an experiment. Because most targeting experiments involve adjustments to the ad-selection algorithms, they are rarely noticed by anyone outside Google. However, we occasionally run experiments that affect the format or display of ads as this is the only way we can verify whether a potential change will provide an overall benefit to publishers, advertisers, and users.
Throughout an experiment, we track a large number of metrics including clickthrough rate and cost per click, and compare this data to regular traffic collected during the same time period. This prevents external factors unrelated to the experiment -- for instance, a large new advertiser or publisher entering the system, or time considerations such as holidays, weekends, and seasons -- from significantly skewing the results.
After an experiment is complete, we consider the effects on publishers, advertisers and end users; we only release new features we believe will provide an overall benefit. Of course, once a feature is launched, we continue tracking the same metrics to make sure everything is behaving as expected, while starting to work on the next innovations in AdSense targeting.
Posted by Scott Benson - AdSense Engineering
Ad Rank explained!
Thursday, February 09, 2006
Ever wonder what determines the order in which ads appear on your site? Then you've wondered about the
Google AdWords
ad ranking system. AdWords is the advertising platform thousands of advertisers use to place their ads on the Google network. Once an ad is in the AdWords system, it competes against other ads to appear on relevant pages in the AdSense network. It's through this real-time dynamic auction system that ads are ranked. Those ads with the highest
Ad Rank
at any given moment are displayed on your site.
So, you ask, how is Ad Rank determined? While bid price (the price advertisers are willing to pay for each click per thousand impressions) is obviously an important factor, we also calculate advertiser
Quality Score
to make sure the best performing ads will always appear on your site. Quality Score takes into account factors such as an ad's relevancy and click-through rate (CTR) (i.e. how likely users are to click on a given ad) because a higher CTR sometimes outweighs the benefits of a higher bid price. This ensures that your site always displays the ads representing the highest revenue potential for you.
You might also wonder: "But image ads usually take up multiple ad slots -- does this limit the amount of money that I can make?" Good question, but no -- for an image ad to appear on your site, it has to produce an effective CPM greater than the sum of the individual text ads.
For a more detailed explanation about how Ad Rank is calculated, visit the
AdWords Pricing overview
.
UPDATED: Image
Posted by Bismarck Lepe - AdWords Product Marketing
I, Robots.txt
Tuesday, February 07, 2006
Often when troubleshooting targeting inquiries, we find that publishers have unknowingly blocked the
Googlebots
from crawling sections of their site, resulting in PSAs or mistargeted ads. With the newest release of
Google Sitemaps
, you can get a report that shows you Googlebot's view of your
robots.txt file
.
In addition to general status updates such as the last time Googlebot downloaded your robots.txt file, this new report allows you to test specific URLs to see if your robots.txt file is blocking them from the MediaPartners Googlebot, the Google content crawler. Plus, you can test changes to your robots.txt file against other Google crawlers (e.g., search or image) or the Robots Standard. This way you can experiment with changes to see how they would impact the crawl of your site, as well as make sure there are no errors in the file, before making changes to the file on your site.
Learn more
about this recent release on the Google Sitemaps Blog.
Still not sure if Sitemaps can really help you? Check out the newest Sitemaps
success story
showcasing fellow AdSense publisher ApartmentRatings.com.
Posted by Shaluinn Fullove - Sitemaps Product Marketing
A gooooood question
Monday, February 06, 2006
Lisa asked:
Hi Google guys - Why do my ads say "Ads by Goooooogle" instead of "Ads by Google" as I've seen on some other sites?
We say:
Just as we have
holiday logos
for our Google homepage and "Goooooooooogle" at the bottom of our search results, we thought "Ads by Goooooogle" would be a fun alternate version of "Ads by Google" for our AdSense ad units. They are both branding features we've tested, and we found that "Ads by Goooooogle" is often more memorable for users than "Ads by Google", so you may notice either label appearing beside your ads at any given time. Currently,
link units
and
AdSense for search
ads are only labeled as "Ads by Google".
So why label our ads at all? The "Ads by Google" label helps distinguish clearly between content and ads, thus providing a more positive user experience. It also distinguishes Google ads from other ads so that when users click on Google ads, they know they can trust Google to provide high quality ads targeted to their interests. This trust provides value to both publishers and advertisers.
Lastly, by clicking on an "Ads by Goooooogle" or "Ads by Google" link, users can
submit feedback
about the
Google AdWords
and
Google AdSense
programs. This feedback is valuable to us as we're always working to improve our feature and product offerings.
Posted by Brian Axe - AdSense Product Management
Labels
#GlobalSpotlight
2
#SuccessStack
9
Active View
9
Ad formats
22
Ad layout
6
Ad Placement
2
AdSense
5
AdSense Anniversary
15
AdSense features
231
adsense guide
14
AdSense In Your City
22
AdSense Interface
61
AdSense Team
31
AdSense101
13
AMP
3
AskAdSense
4
Audience Engagement
4
Beginner's
1
Best Practice
22
Beta
1
Case studies
99
Certified Partners
4
Content strategy
23
DoubleClick
17
download
3
Earnings/Reports
70
eBook
3
Education
4
engagement
1
Facts and Fiction
11
FAQs
1
Feedback
10
Google Analytics
7
Google's Certified Publishing Partner
3
googlenew
13
Guest Blogger
4
Help
2
How to avoid policy violations
1
India
1
infographic
3
International
118
Learn with Google for Publishers
17
Matched content
6
micro-moments
5
Mobile
67
Mobile optimization
3
Multi-Screen
32
Native
1
native ads
4
Newbie
32
Optimal ad placement
1
Optimization
165
Other
245
Other Google products
106
Page-Level
1
PageSpeed
10
Pakistan
1
Passion into profit
8
Payments
62
Policy
2
Pop-Unders
1
Pop-Ups
1
Product update
11
Program Policies
79
Programmatic
1
Social
19
Support
10
Tips
37
Urdu
1
User Generated Content
1
Video
41
Viewability
13
Webinars
15
YouTube
3
Archive
2019
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
May
Feb
Jan
2018
Dec
Nov
Oct
Aug
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2017
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2016
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2015
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2014
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2013
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2012
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2011
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2010
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2009
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2008
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2007
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2006
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2005
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Feed
Subscribe to receive posts via email:
Visit this group
Follow @adsense
Useful links
Get started with AdSense
Sign in to your account
AdSense Help Center
AdSense Help Forum
Related Google products
AdMob: Monetize your app
DoubleClick for Publishers Small Business
Google AdWords
Google Analytics
Give us feedback in our
Product Forums
.
