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Turkeys, thanks, and taxes
Friday, November 28, 2008
This Thanksgiving weekend, we'd like to take a moment to ask our U.S.-based publishers to spend a little post-turkey time (when you're not watching football or taking advantage of those
Black Friday
bargains) to review your AdSense tax information.
Tax season is just around the corner and we want to make sure that we give the IRS the most accurate information. So please pay a quick visit to your AdSense account, and double-check your payee name -- that's the name that we send payments to --and the tax information you've provided, especially your Social Security or Employer Identification Number.
Does the info in your account correspond exactly to the info in your tax documents? If not, you may want to consider
updating your payee name
so that everything matches up.
You can resubmit your tax information by logging in and following the steps in our
Help Center
. Keep in mind that we'll be sending out tax forms to
publishers who qualify
during the month of January.
Posted by Elizabeth Ferdon - AdSense Publisher Support
Happy Thanksgiving from AdSense
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
It's Thanksgiving Day in the U.S. tomorrow, and so we'd like to give thanks to all of our publishers (especially our dedicated blog readers!) for your participation in the AdSense program. If you're a U.S. publisher, we hope you have a happy and turkey-filled holiday weekend, whether you're celebrating at home or traveling over the river and through the woods.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support
The forecast is clear in Google Ad Manager
Thursday, November 20, 2008
If you're a publisher who sells advertising space directly to advertisers, you might have experienced times when you've been unsure about how much inventory is available for you to sell. Google Ad Manager can help you learn what you have available to sell by forecasting your future inventory and subtracting off what you've already sold.
A Helpful Analogy
To put this into context, pretend for a minute that instead of a website, you run a popular destination hotel. Instead of selling space to advertisers, your job is to book hotel stays for guests. You receive all kinds of requests to book hotel rooms: two rooms for a one-week family vacation, 100 rooms for a three-day conference, a suite for a weekend getaway. In order to book these reservations, you have to know both how many rooms your hotel has and how many rooms are already booked. For a hotel, this is fairly straightforward. You know exactly how many total rooms the hotel has, and you can subtract how many rooms are booked for each night.
For a publisher, it's not as straightforward. Since the amount of inventory you have to sell is directly tied to your site's traffic, it can vary day by day. It's also complicated because there's flexibility in how you meet your obligations. If an advertiser has booked advertising space on your Finance and Entertainment sections, for example, you can serve more ads on the Finance page and fewer on the Entertainment page. To compare to a hotel, it's like you have the flexibility to substitute two single rooms for one double room. Because of the variability of traffic and the flexibility in how you can satisfy your reservations, it's hard to know exactly how much space you have left to sell for any day or any specific area of your website.
A Common Problem - and Solution
Even though it's more complicated for websites than for hotels, the customers' (or advertisers') needs are the same: They want a reservation, and you have to be able to guarantee that there will be availability when they show up. A hotel can't operate effectively without this type of capability, and neither can these web publishers.
Google Ad Manager
, our hosted ad serving and management solution for publishers with smaller direct sales teams, addresses this publisher problem. It allows you to predict future availability and be confident that when you sell an ad, you'll be able to deliver it. In Ad Manager, forecasting works by using your historical data to estimate how many impressions you have left to sell. Ad Manager's inventory forecasting system allows you to find availability broken down by different areas of your website, by cities or states, and even by custom criteria that you define, like the user's age. Even better, when the inventory you request is unavailable, Ad Manager will give you suggestions for freeing-up the requested inventory, so that you can still make the sale.
New Improvements
In the last few weeks, we've rolled out major improvements to our forecasting system. It's now up to ten times faster, and it uses much more historical data, so you get more accurate estimates of future availability. The new system allows us to quickly add new features in the future. We've already launched one of these improvements: Forecasts now take account of frequency caps, meaning that the availability estimates are modified to account for the fact that you might only want to show an ad once to each user. And more new features are coming soon!
Forecasting also continues to be a major development focus of our
DART for Publishers (DFP)
ad serving platform for publishers with larger direct sales teams, part of the
DoubleClick Revenue Center
suite of publisher solutions. Google Ad Manager serves as an effective complement to DFP and the DoubleClick Revenue Center to provide solutions for publishers of all sizes.
To learn more about forecasting in Ad Manager, visit the
Ad Manager Help Center
.
Posted by Narayana Tummala - Tech Lead, Google Ad Manager
Optimisation Essentials (Part III)
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Position for performance - be noticed
This is the final video installment in our three-part series on Optimisation Essentials for AdSense for content. We've covered the
best-performing ad unit sizes
and taken a look at how to
design your ad units
for good-looking ads. However, even if you have large, well-designed ad units, they won't perform for you unless your users can see them!
So what can you do to ensure your ad units get noticed? Place your ads where users are likely to look.
We've also made a
heatmap
to show you where the best placements are on a typical page. Great positions include:
Above the fold of a page (the section of the page a user can see without scrolling)
At the end of an article
Aligned with content
But don't just take our word for it - every website is different. Make sure you use your judgment of how visitors interact with your pages to determine good ad placements. Position your ads so that they're visible, but be careful of intruding on the experience of your site's visitors. Most of all,
think like a user
and you'll be able to balance your website's content with a successful ad strategy.
Posted by Mel Ann Chan - AdSense Australia Optimisation Team
Now serving overlay ads in embedded YouTube partner videos
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Today, to help its video content partners earn more money, YouTube will begin running overlay ads in YouTube partner videos embedded on other websites. To date, YouTube has only run ads against partner videos on YouTube itself, and with people viewing millions of embedded YouTube videos every day, this meant that partners were not generating revenue from their views outside YouTube.com. But now, YouTube partners will be able to capitalize on their popularity across the internet and generate revenue from their content no matter where their video lives.
Although this may sound similar to AdSense video units, this YouTube change is separate from AdSense, and we'd like to discuss the differences between the two offerings.
Let's start with a refresher on AdSense video units, which are available within AdSense accounts in specific
languages and regions
. Video units help you enrich your website with fresh, dynamic content from our YouTube partners. Each video unit is accompanied by a banner ad and a overlay ad targeted towards the video and the site's content, and is customizable so you can choose categories of video to target to your site. The ad revenue is divided between the AdSense publisher, YouTube, and the YouTube partner providing the video content.
But AdSense video units aren't the only way our YouTube partners can distribute their content -- just as with other YouTube videos, it's possible for anyone with a website to embed partner videos on their sites. Now, following today's announcement, thousands of videos produced by YouTube partners will begin displaying overlay ads when embedded on other websites. (YouTube will gradually roll out these ads to additional YouTube partner videos in the coming weeks.) This feature is external to AdSense, and so no configuration within an AdSense account is needed. Revenue from these ads will be divided between YouTube and the YouTube partner providing the video content.
By helping YouTube partners generate additional revenue no matter where their videos are played, we hope to encourage further content creation among our most popular and prolific video creators. If you create your own video content and are interested in becoming a YouTube partner,
submit an application today
.
Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support
Optimisation Essentials (Part II)
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Dress for success - impressing your audience
The video below is the second in our "Optimisation Essentials" series, demonstrating our top three tips for maximising your AdSense for Content performance. Last week, we reinforced the importance of
bigger ad units
. This week, we're showcasing how a better ad unit design can result in improved AdSense performance.
*Please note that no leopards were harmed in the making of this video!
Over the years, we've seen some colourful ad unit designs. Some publishers design ad units that contrast with their site so that they stand out. Although this can work in some cases, we've found that ad units that match your site's design tend to perform better in terms of revenue and click-through-rate. Users are more likely to read ads when they're well integrated into your site.
When you design your AdSense ads, keep these tips in mind:
Use colours that either
blend with or complement
your site's colours. Make the ads a part of your site.
Use lighter colours for borders, or no border at all.
Try
rotating colours
or occasionally switching the location of your ads on the page.
Save sets of frequently-used colours as a
palette
.
So give your ad design and colours some thought, and you'll notice the difference!
Posted by Mel Ann Chan - AdSense Australia Optimisation Team
Political ads on AdSense sites
Friday, November 07, 2008
During the recent U.S. election period, our team heard your concerns and feedback regarding political ads appearing on publisher sites. As a Product Manager who helps build the AdSense product, I'd like to take a moment to explain our ad targeting technology and policies, and what we're working on to offer you even more controls.
Ad Targeting
I wanted to help clarify first how advertisers are able to target your sites. As you know, ads that appear on AdSense sites are provided by advertisers participating in the AdWords program. To help publishers earn revenue, advertisers are able to target ads not only based on the content of a site, but also based on the audience of the site. When we first started AdSense in 2003, we only offered
contextually-targeted
ads; advertisers bid on keywords, and our system matched those keywords to the content of publishers' pages. As we developed the product, we expanded these targeting capabilities. For instance,
placement targeting
allows advertisers to select specific topics, sites, and pages on which they want their ads to run. In the U.S., our placement targeting tool also allows advertisers to find sites serving a specific audience, such as "Males ages 18-24."
To help new and existing publishers better understand our targeting options, our support teams will be reviewing and expanding the material available on our
Help Center
and homepage to make sure it better communicates our offerings. In addition, we'll be exploring different methods of explaining this information, such as through webinars and videos, and demonstrating how publishers can optimize their sites to take advantage of these targeting options.
Advertising Policies
We also received questions about why political ads are able to run on Google and AdSense sites. The Google advertising program is managed by a set of
editorial policies
that we have developed based on various factors, including user and customer experience. While Google or its executives and employees may express opinions about specific political issues and candidates, Google's advertising system does not favor one political position over another. Our network provides advertisers with a way to reach their audience, whether they are companies selling products or political campaigns promoting candidates or issues. Just as Google's advertising system does not favor one car manufacturer's ads over a competitor's in our auction, we also allow ads regardless of the particular political position they represent.
Publisher Ad Control
As we've expanded to new forms of advertiser targeting, we've also added controls for the ads that can appear on your sites. Our automated targeting technology will never understand your users as well as you, so it's important that you have the ability to control their ad experience. For example, we mentioned
earlier this week
that tools such as the Competitive Ad Filter and Ad Review Center are designed for you to prevent specific ads from appearing on your pages.
We've heard your feedback about how quickly filters take effect and the ability to block specific categories of ads, and we're working hard to improve our current controls and provide more powerful ones in the near future. Over the next couple weeks, we plan to improve the speed of your filters, and we're working towards filters in the future that will take effect in less than an hour. We'll also continue improving the Ad Review Center, giving you ways to block entire categories of ads in addition to individual ads. We are also working on ways for you to establish guidelines for the type of ads that will be acceptable to your users, so you can "set it and forget it," while feeling comfortable that users will have a good ad experience.
One of our goals with AdSense is to help you easily generate revenue for your site without much work, so that you have more time to focus on developing great content. Many of our best ideas, like the Ad Review Center, are inspired by your feedback and suggestions. Please keep letting us know how we can make AdSense a better product.
Posted by Jason Miller - Group Product Manager, AdSense
Site maintenance on Saturday, November 8
Friday, November 07, 2008
Our engineers will be performing routine site maintenance tomorrow, November 8th at 10 am PST. Although you won't be able to log in to your account for approximately 4 hours, your ad targeting and serving won't be affected, and you'll continue to be credited for valid clicks and impressions.
Here's the start time in a few international cities:
London - 6pm Saturday
Johannesburg - 8pm Saturday
Madurai - 11:30pm Saturday
Manila - 2am Sunday
Sydney - 5am Sunday
Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support
Block this way
Monday, November 03, 2008
When we notice a spike in readers who are interested in a specific topic, we like to address it as soon as we can. There's been some interest in filtering ads from publisher pages, so here's a quick refresher on the filtering tools we offer:
Competitive Ad Filter
You can restrict contextually-targeted and placement-targeted ads from appearing on your pages by adding the URL of each ad to your Competitive Ad Filter. After logging in to your account, click the
AdSense Setup
tab and visit the 'Competitive Ad Filter' page. You can also find
full instructions
and
tips for entering in specific URLs
in our Help Center. To determine the URL of an ad, try the
AdSense Preview Tool
or follow
these steps
. Please keep in mind that it may take several hours for the filter to take effect.
Ad Review Center
The Ad Review Center gives you additional control over the placement-targeted ads that may appear on your pages. Using the Ad Review Center, you can review specific ad groups and advertisers before they appear on your pages, and also block ads by type. You'll need to
opt in
to the Ad Review Center at the top of your Competitive Ad Filter page, and then you can begin
reviewing ads
.
Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support
Optimisation Essentials (Part I)
Monday, November 03, 2008
Bigger is better - for AdSense ad units
AdSense for content is the bread and butter of many of our publishers, and we often receive requests to recommend strategies to improve AdSense performance on publisher sites. While we refer to this as 'optimisation', we understand that this term can make the process sound more difficult than it really is. In response, we're releasing a three-part video series that demonstrates, in plain English, our top tips for increasing your AdSense earnings.
This week, we're recommending you think
big
- big ad units, that is:
Publishers often ask us what the best ad sizes are to include in their site's design, and we always point them to these three:
300x250 medium rectangle
728x90 leaderboard
160x600 skyscraper
These ad units have proven in the past to deliver better results for both publishers and advertisers. Advertisers favour these formats, and if you've
receiving all ad types
, you'll find that advertisers will specifically target your sites more often. If you position your ad units well, users will be more likely to see these ad formats and find an ad that they're interested in.
When you're considering how to design your site, our testing has shown that displaying at least one of these ad formats on your page can increase your AdSense earnings potential. So remember, sometimes bigger is better!
Posted by Mel Ann Chan - AdSense Australia Optimisation Team
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