We're retiring AdSense Referrals

We're constantly looking for ways to improve AdSense by developing and supporting features which drive the best monetization results for our publishers. Sometimes, this requires retiring existing features so we can focus our efforts on the ones that will be most effective in the long term. For this reason, we will be retiring the AdSense Referrals program during the last week of August. We appreciate your patience during this transition and here are some alternative options to consider:

• Google Affiliate Network: As part of the integration of DoubleClick, the DoubleClick Performics Affiliate Network will now operate as the Google Affiliate Network for advertisers targeting users located in the United States. Similar to the AdSense Referrals program, the Google Affiliate Network enables publishers to apply for advertiser programs and get paid based on advertiser-defined actions instead of clicks or impressions. For further details, please visit: http://www.google.com/ads/affiliatenetwork/.
  
  
• AdSense for content ads: If you have less than three AdSense for content ad units on a page, you may wish to replace the referral ad units with standard AdSense for content ad units.
  

If you currently use referral ads, either to promote Google products or offerings from AdWords advertisers, AdSense Referrals code will no longer display ads beginning the last week of August. We encourage you to take the following steps before the product is retired:

• Remove the referral code from your site(s): Please take a moment to remove all referral code from your sites before the last week of August, so you can continue to effectively monetize your ad space.
  
• Run and save all referrals reports on your desktop: Create and save all reports related to the referrals program on your desktop, so you continue to have access to your valuable campaign information.
  

Thank you for your support of AdSense Referrals in the past. If you have any additional questions, please visit our Help Center.

Posted by Anuj Srivastava - AdSense Product Marketing

Celebrating 50,000 of you

This week, the 50,000th person subscribed to the English AdSense Help Group. To mark this milestone, the AdSensePro Team would like to extend a special word of thanks to all the folks who use our forums, particularly everyone who takes the time to share their knowledge with other publishers. Thank you for providing useful help and advice, and for contributing to the AdSense community.

If you're not familiar with the Help Group, do check it out to share your AdSense experience. Members of the AdSensePro team will also be on hand to help answer questions, raise issues to our product and engineering teams, and collect your valuable feedback. And if you'd prefer to discuss AdSense in a language other than English, feel free to visit one of our international forums: Arabic, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Czech, Dutch, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, and Turkish.

Posted by the AdSensePro Team - AdSense Help Group Support

Five steps to optimising your AdSense performance

"I want to improve my AdSense performance, but I don't know how to get started!"

We hear you. The myriad of optimisation tools and options AdSense offers can be a bit overwhelming. Colors, placements, channels, ad sizes -- there are more options to choose from than you can poke a mouse cursor at! Ideally, we wish you could just click a button and have a fully optimised webpage published to the Internet. But until that magical day comes, we have a solution for you.

The Australian AdSense team has put together a short video that takes the confusion out of optimising. The video goes through a step by step guide to optimising AdSense performance - from analysing your page type, to choosing the right ad sizes and colors, and tracking your results. We also cover our most popular tips to increase eCPM, without adversely affecting your community's experience on your page.



So if it's been a while since you've refreshed your AdSense ad units, or if you're confused on how to use channels to optimise, invest ten minutes into the video. It's the closest thing you'll get to that magic button.

To watch more videos, you can also visit our official AdSense YouTube Channel:







Posted by Mel Ann Chan - AdSense Australia Optimisation Team

Site maintenance on June 21 at 10am PDT

Tomorrow, our engineers will be performing site maintenance from 10am to 3pm PDT. You won't be able to access your account during this 5-hour time frame, but ad serving and ad targeting will not be affected. In addition, your reports will 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
Pretoria - 7 pm Saturday
Mumbai - 10:30 pm Saturday
Kuala Lumpur - 1 am Sunday
Brisbane - 3 am Sunday

In the meantime, we hope you enjoy the first weekend of summer -- or winter, depending on where you are :)

Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

Game on for GameScene

Back in 1995, Gary Rosenzweig published some of the world's first web-based games. Some of his early games as well as more than 100 created by CleverMedia, the company he later founded, are available at GameScene.com.

"Even in those early days, it was clear to us that web advertising was the best way to earn money from our content," says Gary. Revenue from ads offered him creative and financial freedom to be both a game developer and publisher. But the early ad banner market was volatile and fluctuated constantly. It wasn't until he joined the AdSense program in August 2003 that Gary was able to get consistent high-level performance from advertising.

"AdSense not only performs better than banner ads, but is also much better for site visitors," Gary notes. "The text ads and high-quality display ads used by Google were a far better experience than the pop-ups, pop-unders and interstitial ads still used today by our competitors."

At GameScene.com, CleverMedia uses 160x600 wide skyscrapers next to the games, and 300x250 medium rectangles on instructions pages. Gary encourages other publishers to test different ad formats and placements on their own sites, especially as their users grow and change. Having non-obtrusive but relevant advertising on high-traffic pages provides the revenue CleverMedia needs to keep making innovative web games.

Have your own success story to share? We'd love to hear from you.

Posted by Sunil Subhedar - AdSense Publisher Support

Speaking the language of small businesses

Following our recent testimony in front of the U.S. House Small Business Committee, we revisited Washington D.C. to deliver our first seminar for small businesses on the web -- specifically those in the Hispanic-American community. The Spanish-language seminar, co-sponsored by both the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and the League of United Latin American Citizens, focused on making the most of AdSense and other Google tools to effectively and efficiently manage a small business online. We know a number of our publishers are Hispanic small business owners, so we'd like to share the video of the event with you (in Spanish with introductory words in English):



If you're a small business owner, we also recommend taking a look at our small business resource page, available in both Spanish and English.

Posted by Carolina Shea - AdSense Publisher Support

Join us on July 10 for 'Powered By YouTube'

You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. That's why our publishers know how important it is to make their sites sticky to keep users on their pages longer. If you're a savvy coder, love to build cool apps and mashups, and wonder what more you can do to enhance your website with video and increase the stickiness, then we'd like to cordially invite you to attend Powered By YouTube on Thursday, July 10!

Powered By YouTube is our first-ever developer gathering focused on bringing together a wide range of developers to learn more about YouTube's APIs and Tools. You'll spend the day at YouTube's headquarters and learn how to bring YouTube to your website, share best practices, and get hands-on with the APIs. You'll also meet fellow YouTube API developers across a wide range of companies, YouTube engineers and product managers, and hopefully leave inspired to enhance your user experience with the YouTube APIs.

Some important details about the event below:

Powered By YouTube
Thursday, July 10, 2008
10:30am - 5:00pm
YouTube headquarters at 901 Cherry Ave. San Bruno, CA 94066
Cost: Free!

Registration is extremely limited, so we encourage you to register now if you're interested.

Hope to see you there! And if you're interested in staying up-to-date on what's going on in the world of YouTube APIs and syndication, check out our blog.

Posted by Christine Tsai - YouTube APIs & Tools Team

The AdSense Pub(lisher) Crawl

It seems like every time I visit our AdSense colleagues in the Dublin office, I get invited out to celebrate a birthday or a promotion with that great Dublin tradition: the pub crawl. Today I'd like to dedicate a few words to another pub crawl. (I can hear your groans throughout the blogosphere.) That's right, I'm talking about the AdSense "publisher" crawl.

As you may know, it's important to allow the AdSense crawler access to the pages that display your ads. If our crawler can't see the content of your pages, your ad targeting may suffer, and with it your earnings. It's also important that we hold all pages to the same policy standards, and we may eventually stop serving ads to pages that the crawler can't access. With this in mind, I'd like to ask you two questions highlighting potential roadblocks to a successful AdSense crawl and let you know what you can do to correct them.

1. Are you using a robots.txt file on a site with Google ads?

If so, you might be inadvertently blocking the AdSense crawler from accessing parts of your site. If you aren't sure what a robots.txt file is, it's a text file that you include on your domain that allows you to block crawlers from accessing your site. You can find out if you're using a robots.txt file by going to example.com/robots.txt (replace 'example.com' with your own domain name) or by using Site Diagnostics. If you do use a robots.txt file to block certain crawlers from accessing your site, it's a good idea to add an explicit invitation to the AdSense crawler so it knows it's welcome to visit any page with AdSense code. Please keep in mind that the AdSense crawler is separate from the Google bot for our search index.

To give the AdSense crawler access, add these two lines to your robots.txt file:

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*
Disallow:

You can use the Site Diagnostics link in your AdSense Reports tab to see whether we're having trouble crawling any pages on your sites. If you're concerned about the privacy of some pages on your site, keep in mind that we don't publish any of the information retrieved by the Mediapartners-Google crawler, also known as the AdSense crawler, in any index, and it will only crawl pages of your site which contain the AdSense code.

2. Are your pages restricted by a login?

Our crawler will also get tripped up by any page that's only accessible to a logged-in user. If certain pages of your site are only available to users that have logged in, and you place ads on these pages, it's important to give the Mediapartners-Google crawler explicit access to view them too. In this case, the answer is site authentication, which you can find under your AdSense Setup tab. (Please note that you'll need to be migrated to Google Accounts to use this feature.) You can give our crawler access while continuing to prevent other users or bots from accessing the content on your site.

While using the Site Diagnostics tool, you may notice sites that are blocked for other reasons -- please review our Help Center for more information about why your site may be showing up as blocked. By allowing our crawler access to pages hosting Google ads, you'll get the most targeted ads for your pages in return. I think we can all toast to that.

Updated example site

Posted by Ben Ewing - AdSense Publisher Support

Site maintenance on June 7 at 10am PDT

By now, our longtime publishers are likely well-versed in our regular maintenance -- so sing along if you know the words: Our engineers will be performing routine site maintenance tomorrow, June 7th, from 10am to 2pm PDT. During these four hours, you won't be able to log in to your account. However, ad serving will not be affected, and your reports will continue to track your earnings as usual.

We've noticed from past comments that many of you are concerned about public service ads (PSAs) or no ads appearing on your sites during the maintenance period. Please be assured that the maintenance does not affect the targeting or delivery of your ads. If you're experiencing difficulty with your ads, we recommend reviewing our Help Center for more information about PSAs, ad relevancy, and why ads may not appear.

If you're not located in the PDT time zone, here's the maintenance start time for a few other cities:

London - 6pm Saturday
Bucharest - 8pm Saturday
New Delhi - 10:30pm Saturday
Manila - 1am Sunday
Sydney - 3am Sunday

Have a great weekend :)

Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

Video units now available in Australia and Japan

UPDATE: The video units feature has been retired -- however, you may wish to review the other revenue opportunities available for video content owners.

Following the success of video units in a number of international locations, we're excited to announce the launch of video units for English-language websites in Australia. In addition, video units are now available to publishers who are located in Japan or who have Japanese-language websites. If you're not already familiar, video units are embedded, customizable video players which both enrich sites with relevant video content and enable publishers to earn extra revenue. Relevant and non-intrusive companion and text ads accompany the video content.

With this new launch, you can show videos from our YouTube content partners on your site. You can choose those videos by category, choose individual YouTube partners, or have video units automatically target your site with relevant video. You can also choose the individual videos to be displayed in your video units. Finally, if you have video content of your own, you may even be able to sign up as a YouTube partner to have your content distributed to other AdSense publishers' video units.

To set up video units on your site, log in to your AdSense account and visit your AdSense Setup tab; if you have a site in one of our supported countries and languages, you'll see the option to set up video units. For more information about video units, please feel free to re-visit our original launch post and our discussion of some of your most frequently asked questions. In addition, you might find the information in our Help Center useful. Finally, we'd like to note that we're working on expanding video units to additional countries, but we're not able to provide a timeline for when that may occur.

Posted by Elena Martin - AdSense Product Marketing

What's my login again?

As we've mentioned on the blog before, your AdSense login is your ticket to accessing your account and receiving specific account information about your payments. But we know it can be difficult to keep track of all of those email addresses and online usernames -- whether they're for online banking, social networking, a retirement fund, or AdSense.

If you do happen to forget which email address you used as your AdSense login, we can help look the information up for you -- just fill out our Help Center form. If your information matches our records, we'll send you an email with details on how to access your account.

Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support