So long 2013 - looking back at this year’s highlights.

We're fast approaching the end of another year and it's time to take a look back over the last 12 months. Here's some of our 2013 highlights:  

• We can't talk about 2013 without remembering that AdSense turned 10 in June. To celebrate 10 years of partnerships with publishers, we took a look back and heard from some of you who have been with us since the very beginning. Over 12,000 of you also joined in by taking part in the AdSense 10 Challenge.

• We looked at ways to drive a positive experience for your users, giving our text ads a more modern and user-friendly design and announcing the launch of our brand new mobile anchor ads. 

• We launched a number of new ad formats, giving you more flexibility and supporting your multi-screen strategy. In fact, we spent a lot of time talking about your multi-screen strategy, with our recent multi-device series and our just launched multi-screen optimization score in your scorecard.

• We were lucky enough to meet many of you at our events and hear about some of your experiences with Google as well as your future plans. Take a look at what some of our European publishers had to say.

• Lots of you gave really valuable feedback on changes and new features you'd like to see in your account - with this in mind, we introduced time zone reporting, currency reporting, and launched our new AdSense homepage.

• You told us that more communication on our AdSense program policies would be really helpful so we launched a new notifications feature in your account, and many of you also joined our Policy Refreshers Hangout On Air series. Coincidentally, our Policy Refreshers announcement was the most visited blog post of 2013.

• Lastly, we gave the Inside AdSense blog a bit of a makeover with a new, cleaner interface - we hope you like it!

We'd like to thank each of you for your continuous feedback and engagement over the past year. Please keep sharing your comments and suggestions through our AdSense +page. We'll be back in January - stay tuned for lots more AdSense updates plus a series on Google Analytics and an inspiring showcase of publisher success stories from around the world.

Happy Holidays from all of us here at Google AdSense! 

Posted by Suzy Headon-on behalf of the Inside AdSense Team

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[Inside AdSense] Boost your multi-screen strategy with our new tools.

We've been talking a lot recently about why you should have a multi-screen strategy in place for your site. Today we're happy to share some product updates to complement and strengthen your strategy, with new features for our responsive ad units and a multi-screen optimization score now available in your publisher scorecard.

New features for responsive ad units

Earlier this year, we launched responsive ad units to help you enhance the user experience on your site across devices. You've shared a lot of positive feedback on our responsive ad units and also made some great suggestions on new features you'd like to see. We've incorporated these suggestions into our next iteration of responsive ads with the following changes: 

• Ad refresh for screen orientation changes:  If your responsive page changes its layout following a screen orientation change (e.g., when a tablet or phone goes from portrait to landscape), we'll request and load a new ad to fit the new page layout.

• Smart sizing based on the space available:  Our ad code will now automatically adapt all newly created responsive ad units to fit your page layout. All existing responsive ad units that have their width and height explicitly specified via CSS will continue to function as before. Please see our Help Center for information on switching to the smart sizing mode.

• Reporting by ad size served: To better understand the mix of ad sizes served by your responsive ad units, your ad unit reports can now be broken out by the size of the ad served. 

More information on responsive ad units can be found in our Help Center.

Multi-screen optimization score in publisher scorecard

To help you understand how well your site is optimized for the many screen sizes of your users, we're introducing a new multi-screen category in our publisher scorecard. For example, if users need to zoom and/or scroll often, this may negatively impact their experience. Your score in the multi-screen category will measure what percentage of your pages are multi-screen optimized and compare this percentage to that of other AdSense publishers. Please note that you may not see this category in your scorecard if you have a low percentage of mobile traffic on your site.

This new score will be visible in the scorecard on your AdSense home page. Don't forget to follow the 'Learn more' link displayed in the scorecard to learn how you can optimize your site for multiple screen sizes. More information on your scorecard can be found in our Help Center.

We look forward to hearing your thoughts on these new features. Feel free to share your feedback on our AdSense +page.

Posted by Nick Radicevic - AdSense Product Manager

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[Inside AdSense] Google Publisher Toolbar, now integrated with DFP Small Business

Many of you are already using the Google Publisher Toolbar to view your AdSense performance and control your ads. If you also use DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) Small Business, we're pleased to let you know that your DFP account can now also be directly integrated with the Google Publisher Toolbar.

The Toolbar is a Chrome extension that gives you a clear overview of which ads are serving on your site and why, through an overlay for each ad showing which line item and creative was served. You can get more information by clicking on any overlay. When you sign in to the Toolbar, you'll see complete information on each ad -- regardless of whether AdSense or DFP served the ad.

Please visit our Toolbar Help Center article for further information and support. 

Download the Toolbar and start using it with DFP Small Business today. We're continuing to improve support for DFP in the Toolbar, and are always happy to hear your feedback.

Posted by Ilia Malkovitch - DFP Product Manager

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[Inside AdSense] The next evolution of responsive ads - custom ad sizes

Today, we're happy to announce the launch of 434,216 new ad unit sizes! Or in other words, we've just made it possible to create custom ad sizes to give you more flexibility and enable you to better design your content for your users. 

Custom sized ads behave just like their standard size counterparts, showing a text or display ad depending on which is likely to have the best performance for the impression. 

Text ads

For text ads, we'll determine the optimal number of text ads to display for a given impression, and show the ads the same way they appear inside standard sizes. Our system predicts the value of each competing ad for every impression, based on historic performance and comparison across a variety of scenarios. For unique ad unit sizes, our system will need some time before it can optimize the number of ads shown. Please see our blog post Understanding the dynamics of the AdSense auction - Part II for more information. Here are three examples of custom-sized ad units displaying text ads:

Display ads

For display ads, our system will determine the appropriate size ad to fit into the space you select; the selected ad will not be larger than the space requested. In the example below, we've shown the same three custom sizes as above, but this time with display ads. Please note that the dotted border is only present to show the total size of the ad unit, but won't actually appear on your pages.

To ensure that ads continue to deliver a positive user experience, we've put a few restrictions in place around maximum and minimum pixels for ad sizes. Any custom ad size that falls outside of the restrictions won't appear on a page. As always, all of your ads must adhere to the AdSense ad placement policies. Remember that users value your content, and that they appreciate a balance of content and ads, knowing that the ads support the content creator. Forcing too many ads into the users viewable screen is not likely to tempt them back to your site.

Ready to get started with custom ad sizes? Create an ad unit in the usual way, select "Custom ad size" from the Ad size drop-down and set the desired width and height for your ad unit in the process. Copy and paste the ad code into the HTML source code of your page where you'd like the ad to appear.

You can also find more information in our Help Center. We're excited about the possibilities of these new custom ad sizes, and appreciate your ongoing feedback as we continue to improve this offering. Please feel free to share your thoughts and suggestions about this update. 

Posted by Omer Gimenez Llach - AdSense Software Engineer & Johan Land - AdSense Product Manager

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[Inside AdSense] Improving the user experience with new mobile anchor ads

Over the past few months, we've regularly talked about the growing number of users accessing publisher content via mobile devices, and the importance of creating a positive user experience across all devices. In this same spirit, we're happy to let you know about mobile anchor ads for smartphones, a new feature we're starting to make available that's focused on giving users a better experience with ads on mobile devices. 

Mobile anchor ads work by allowing a 320x50 banner ad unit to be anchored to the bottom of the smartphone screen, staying there when your users scroll up or down the page. At the same time, users remain in control -- they can dismiss an ad when they find it's not relevant or want to free up the screen space, simply by swiping the ad left or right. When this happens, the anchor ad will fade and be dismissed and no other anchor ad will display unless the user reloads or visits another page.

The mobile anchor ads experience reflects our continued focus on providing users with control. As we've seen from our TrueView video ads and Mute this ad feature, users prefer having choice and control when it comes to viewing ads. In addition, the prominence of mobile anchor ads will give advertisers enhanced visibility while helping improve performance for you, and also remove the need to overload your mobile pages with ads. 

We've started enabling this feature for a select group of publishers today, and will gradually roll it out to everyone over the coming months. 

Thanks for all of the feedback you've provided to date on adapting to the multi-screen environment. Please do continue to share your suggestions so we can keep improving AdSense for you. Watch this space for more news and updates in the near future!

Posted by Pasha Nahass - AdSense Product Manager

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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 11/26/2013 12:16:00 PM

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[Inside AdSense] Got an app? Increase revenue by building a website too

At some point most app developers will be faced with the question: 'What's the best way to monetize my app?'. There are many business models, but many don't think about the additional opportunities to earn revenue from content they've already created. Izumi Artisan is a Japanese developer who's been successful in earning money from his app, then using the content to create a website to earn additional income. We will explore his strategy in this post.

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[Goal]

• Maximize revenue from the web
• Improve user experience
• Expand business overseas

[Approach]

• Monetize both website and app
• Create an environment where the users can help each other to finish the game

[Results]

• 40% of the total revenue came from the website 
•  Improved profitability and usability with low overhead

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'Old Offender was the very first app that we made'

At the time of building our first app, my brother and I didn't have engineering skills. So I went to a local book store and bought "Java for the First Time", and taught myself how to make a mobile app. I chose to make escape games because the programming needed to build one was relatively simple. Also, there were not many other similar apps for smartphones in that category. So we worked together and published 'Old Offender: Escape from Prison' as our first gaming app.

'Ads are better than a paid business model'

When considering the monetization method, we chose ads. At that time, paid apps were not that popular in Japan. Now, we're using multiple ad networks using a mediation tool, and for foreign countries we're only using AdMob.

'We saw a 60% revenue increase by using Google AdSense'

After we launched the app we had feedback from users asking for hint-and-tips, so I immediately decided to take action. We chose to make a bulletin board website where users can interact with each other to find the answer to a challenge in the game. My brother designed the website and had it ready within a week. We also signed up for Google Adsense to post ads on the website. Signing up and implementing AdSense did not take more than 2 days and we were able to stat monetize our website with the least resource but high impact. Furthermore, we saw a 60% revenue increase by using Google AdSense and the web business is now 40% of the sales of the company.

Posted by Yuya Sumida - Account Manager
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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 11/22/2013 10:34:00 AM

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[Inside AdSense] Get the right insights quickly with the new AdSense homepage

As the first thing you see when you log into your AdSense account, your homepage is an important source of information on how your site is performing. We know it's essential that this page gives you access to the most relevant and actionable information possible. With this in mind, we've been gathering and closely analyzing your feedback; today, we're happy to share our newly-designed homepage and invite you to give it a try!

Some publishers have let us know that they want more insights from Google on ways to increase revenue, while others who log in to their accounts throughout the day want to be able to quickly access the right performance data. The new homepage has been designed to give you easier access to our recommendations and insights, not only to increase your monetization but also improve the user experience on your site. At the same time, it emphasizes the key information you need to know and any immediate actions to take.

Here are some of the main enhancements you can expect to see:

• The new Insights stream on the right-hand side of the page provides personalized recommendations for your account, such as monetization opportunities and tips to enhance user experience, which can be put into action in just a few clicks.
• Your key account stats for today are quick and easy to view and now provide comparison data such as earnings so far this month versus the same period last month.
• The new Performance Today section gives you quick access to more detailed information like your countries and platforms reports, without requiring additional clicks.
• Your Scorecard will continue to be prominent on your homepage, providing quick benchmarking information on how your site is performing relative to the sites of other AdSense publishers.

Try out the new homepage directly from your account. You'll still be able to revert back to your old homepage layout if needed. We encourage you to share your feedback on these updates with us so we can continue to improve the homepage for you. Head over to our AdSense +page to let us know if you've enabled the new homepage, and stay tuned for additional account improvements we're working to develop. 

Posted by Matt Goodridge - AdSense Product Manager

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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 11/20/2013 09:17:00 AM

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