Friday, October 15, 2010

[Inside AdSense] Site Maintenance on Saturday, October 16

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 account 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
Alexandria - 8pm Saturday
Hyderabad - 10:30pm Saturday
Jakarta - 12am Sunday
Perth - 1am Sunday

To learn more about what goes on during these maintenance periods, check out this Inside AdSense post.



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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 10/15/2010 09:20:00 AM

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Thursday, October 14, 2010

[Inside AdSense] Avoiding accidental clicks Pt. 1: Keeping the right distance

In the past, we've talked about ad placements that are prone to generate invalid clicks. In a past post, for example, Mike noted that publishers should be careful about placing ads too close to navigational controls or other clickable page elements.

It's in the best interest of the user, advertiser, and publisher to avoid implementations that lead to invalid click activity. As you can imagine, users aren't very happy if they accidentally click an ad instead of a link on your page and are directed away from your site. Advertisers also don't want to be charged for a click that a user made accidentally (though of course we do not charge advertisers for invalid clicks that we detect). And why should publishers care? Well, if we see that most of the clicks coming from your pages are invalid, we may need to disable your account to protect our advertisers.

One type of site we wanted to talk about are Flash-based game sites. Playing games on these sites, you'll notice that ads are often placed very close to the Flash player where the game is played. Publishers may reason that they're providing maximum value to advertisers by placing their ads very close to the area where their users are focused. However, many of these Flash games are played with a mouse, and the action in the games can lead users to do a lot of rapid cursor movements and clicking. We've seen many cases where ads were placed too closely to where the action was taking place, generating many accidental clicks.

Since each game and site are unique, we can't advise publishers on an exact distance between ads and games, but we do recommend a minimum distance of 150 pixels between the Flash player and ads.

We've worked with publishers on these issues in the past and noticed that increasing the distance between Flash player and ads has had, on average, a positive long-term effect on CPCs. The reason for this is smart pricing. As you may know, the revenue you receive is based on the amount an AdWords advertiser pays for each click on their Google ad. The amount the advertiser pays varies per ad and from website to website, based on the likelihood that a click will result in a conversion for the advertiser. If we determine that clicks on a site are less likely to lead to business results for an advertiser (e.g., an online sale or registration), we reduce the price that an advertiser will pay for those clicks.

So, in short: Moving the ads further away from Flash games decreases the likelihood of accidental clicks and increases the number of clicks leading to business results for advertisers. A good deal for all involved.



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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 10/14/2010 08:10:00 AM

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Tuesday, October 12, 2010

[Inside AdSense] ‘Tis the season for placement targeting: Market your site wi...

Last week, we introduced you to placement targeting as a great way to capitalize on the increase in advertiser spend during the holiday season. This week, we're kicking off our three-part optimization series to help you maximize your earnings by taking advantage of DoubleClick Ad Planner. Ad Planner can help you market your site, make it easier for advertisers to search for you, and improve the data that these advertisers can see.

As you may recall from last week's post, the first step to enabling placement-targeted ads to appear on your pages is to set up your custom channels as ad placements. Ad placements are specific groups of ad units where an advertiser can choose to place their ads using placement targeting. This enables advertisers to better identify websites that reach their target audiences based on the descriptions publishers provide about their sites, describing the content of their pages or the type of users who visit them. Turning custom channels into ad placements is simple. To learn more, check out our YouTube video and visit our Help Center.

Once you've set up your ad placements, we encourage you to try out DoubleClick Ad Planner, a free media planning tool that helps advertisers find the sites their audiences are likely to visit and helps publishers make their sites easier to target.

In Ad Planner, you can claim the sites you own and customize their descriptions. For each site, you can also add up to five categories that describe your site's content, and the types, sizes, and formats of ads that your site supports. Doing this allows advertisers to easily find ad placement descriptions that match the interests of their target audiences. More targeted ads leads to a better user experience on your site and a greater opportunity to increase your earnings. For more information on how to get started, watch this brief introduction to DoubleClick Ad Planner and sign up today.

Check back next week for more 'Tis the season for placement for targeting tips!



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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 10/12/2010 01:00:00 PM

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Friday, October 8, 2010

[Inside AdSense] Western Union now launched in four African countries

We're excited to announce the launch of Western Union Quick Cash® payments in four countries in Africa! You can now select Western Union Quick Cash payments in:

  • Algeria
  • Ghana
  • Kenya
  • Uganda
Western Union Quick Cash payments will reach you faster than checks, and they're free of charge. Payments will continue to follow our normal payment schedule and will be available for pickup in your local currency at your local Western Union agent the day after they're issued.

A couple of things to note: We can send Western Union payments only to publishers that have an individual account at this time. Also, the payee name on your account must exactly match the government-issued ID card that you'll use when picking up your payments. For more information on how to sign up for and pick up Western Union payments, please visit our Help Center.



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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 10/08/2010 08:10:00 AM

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Wednesday, October 6, 2010

‘Tis the season for placement targeting

With the holiday season fast approaching, everyone is spending more
online. As consumers start shopping for gifts, searching for holiday
activities, and booking vacations, advertisers are putting more of
their marketing dollars online to reach these potential customers.
This means there is an increased demand for the ad space on your site
and an opportunity for you to earn more. To help you capitalize on
this trend, we recommend you take advantage of placement targeting.

Many advertisers create targeted brand campaigns at this time of year
that are shown on AdSense sites in the Google Display Network. In
fact, 99% of Google's 1000 largest advertisers run campaigns on the
Display Network. To ensure their brand is noticed by the right
shoppers, advertisers will often use placement targeting to show their
ads on websites in the Display Network that cater to their target
audiences.

You can take advantage of this holiday increase in advertiser spend,
and help advertisers placement target specific sections of your site
using a feature called ad placements. By creating an ad placement,
you'll make sections of your site available to be targeted directly by
AdWords advertisers.

Imagine a sport shoe manufacturer. To ensure his shoes get to the
right consumers for the holidays, he may want to select sites within
the Display Network that appeal to 25- to 34-year-old athletic males
looking to purchase athletic shoes. As a publisher with a sports site,
you can create ad placements for specific segments of your site so
that the sport shoe manufacturer can find you based on these criteria.
You can provide descriptions of your site, general demographic
segment / audience information, and where the ads appear on your site.
Placement targeting connects you directly to the advertisers who want
to reach your readers, and are ready to spend their holiday budgets to
do just that.

In the coming weeks, we'll post more tips on how to make the most of
placement targeting. In the meantime, check out the Help Center and
this video to learn more about placement targeting and how you can get
started. The sooner you do so, the sooner advertisers can see your ad
placements and potentially include you in their holiday campaigns!

Posted by Katrina Kurnit - Inside AdSense Team

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Monday, October 4, 2010

[Inside AdSense] Announcing beta test of expanded category blocking

Last year we launched sensitive category blocking in order to give you more control over the ads that appear on your sites by letting you opt out of receiving ads that fall into potentially sensitive specific categories such as dating, religion, and politics.

Today we're excited to announce that we're beginning to test a related new feature called general category blocking with a small group of publishers. General category blocking will allow you to block even more categories of ads from appearing on your site. We're testing this feature with 170 more specific categories, including finance, travel, job, and automotive. This feature will allow publishers to block up to 50 ad categories from among a broad range of 170 fine grained categories. To help you understand potential changes to your earnings, we'll provide you with the percentage of your total revenue and total impressions that fall under each category.

General category blocking will initially apply only to ads in English, regardless of the language of the site. We are working on expanding it to other languages in the future.

This feature is available in the new AdSense interface, which is currently in beta and being tested by a limited number of publishers.



Although we're not able to expand this test to additional publishers at this time, we wanted to give you a glimpse into one of the ways we're working to give you even more control over the ads that appear on your site. Over the coming months we'll be working hard to refine this feature so that we can roll it out more broadly in the future. Please stay tuned to the blog for any updates, and feel free to leave us a comment in the meantime.



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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 10/04/2010 02:03:00 PM

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Thursday, September 30, 2010

[Inside AdSense] Insight into your earnings (Part II): How smart pricing fits in

Last week, in the first half of our series designed to help you better understand your earnings, we introduced you to the ad auction for AdSense for content. To recap, eligible ads compete to appear on your pages; our ad auction determines which ads show, and how much you can potentially earn from them.

Now, let's talk about smart pricing, a tool designed to help advertisers bid efficiently and effectively on many publishers' ad auctions at once. Our Chief Economist, Hal Varian, explains the purpose of smart pricing, how it plays a role in the ad auction, and how it benefits the entire advertising ecosystem of publishers, advertisers, and users.

Although we aren't able to provide detailed explanations of our algorithms, we'd like to address a common misconception and show that smart pricing isn't intended to be a 'punishment' for publishers. It's designed to increase advertiser confidence in AdSense sites by helping them set more accurate bids that reflect the business results they're looking for. This then allows advertisers to increase their maximum bids, which ultimately helps publishers earn more in the long run.

We'll let Hal explain the concept of smart pricing in more detail:



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1BaOMqcyQY

Finally, we'd like to take a moment to address some of the questions we've received about the relationship between smart pricing and the AdSense for content revenue share. Smart pricing can impact which ad wins an auction for a particular content page. However, since the revenue share is fixed for all publishers, smart pricing doesn't impact the percentage you actually earn for a valid click. Any changes to advertiser bids as a result of smart pricing will proportionately affect the amount both Google and the publisher earn.

Thanks for following our two-part earnings series. We hope you found the content useful, and that you now have a better understanding of the factors that influence your earnings.



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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 9/30/2010 09:54:00 AM

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