Site maintenance on Saturday, January 15

This Saturday, our engineers will be performing routine site maintenance from 10am to 2pm PST. 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 - 11:30pm Saturday
Jakarta - 1am Sunday
Perth - 2am Sunday

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

Posted by Katrina Kurnit - Inside AdSense team

Site maintenance on Saturday, November 13

This Saturday, our engineers will be performing routine site maintenance from 10am to 2pm PST. 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 - 11:30pm Saturday
Jakarta - 1am Sunday
Perth - 2am Sunday

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

Posted by Katrina Kurnit - Inside AdSense team

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.

Posted by Katrina Kurnit - Inside AdSense Team

Announcing the AdSense in Your City program

This summer and fall, the AdSense team is coming to visit you! In an effort to work more closely with our publishers, we’ve launched the AdSense in Your City program. As part of the program, members of the AdSense team will be traveling to five cities this summer to hear directly from you, as well as to share best practices, top optimization tips, and new products.

Last month, we kicked off our first AdSense in Your City event in Mountain View, California. Sixty publishers came to Google to learn how to make more money with AdSense, to meet members of the AdSense team, and to get to know each other.

Today we’re heading to Santa Monica, and later this summer we’ll be visiting Chicago, New York, and Boston. While attendance is very limited due to space constraints, we have a few more spots in some cities. If you’d like to request an invitation to an event, please sign up here. Though invitations will be sent on a first-come, first-served basis, we’ll do our best to include as many of you as possible. We'll also be sure to make sessions available online early this fall.

Throughout the summer, look for updates on the blog from the AdSense team who will be traveling to these cities. We’ll also be tweeting live from the events (follow us at http://twitter.com/AdSense) and posting videos and publisher interviews.

And this is just the beginning. We’d like to expand this program to be able to travel to more cities around the United States and to meet with more of you face to face. Are you a publisher in Austin? Seattle? Orlando? Leave us a comment and let us know if we should bring AdSense in Your City to your city next!

Posted by Talia Brodecki - Product Marketing Manager

We’d love to hear your feedback

Your opinion matters to us! So we’ve put together a short survey so you can tell us how we're doing, and what you'd like to see more of on the Inside Adsense blog. We hope you'll take the time to let us know what's on your mind -- click to give us your feedback.

If you’re keen on letting us know how you feel about our product and support, remember that you can opt-in to receive invitations to test new features, surveys about Google AdSense, and heads up about opportunities to provide feedback about your experiences by email. To do so, log-in to Google AdSense and visit the settings page under the 'My Account' tab, edit your 'Email Preference' by checking the box next to 'Google market research,' and click 'Save Changes.'

We look forward hearing from you!

Posted by Natalia Niznik - Inside AdSense Team

AdSense Facts & Fiction Part I: Placement targeting

Fiction: Targetable placements are difficult to set up and don’t do anything for my site

Fact: It only takes seconds to convert your custom channels into targetable placements. This simple change can help increase your visibility to advertisers, and boost your revenue.

Advertisers already take advantage of contextual targeting to have their ads appear next to your content. They also have the option to selectively target sites they know are relevant to their ads -- when you’ve created targetable placements, advertisers can dig even deeper and find the most relevant sections of your site to place their ads.

If you’re not familiar with channels, check out our Help Center for steps on how to change your custom channels into targetable placements.

When writing the description of your channel, keep in mind things an advertiser might like to know. For example:

• What kind of content does this channel reflect?
  
• Is the channel on a specific section of your site (e.g. a forum section, blog section, etc.)?
  
• Are your ads above-the-fold (ATF)? In other words, can a user see them without needing to scroll down the page?
  
• Who is your target audience (gender, interests, income level, etc)?

Your description may resemble something along the lines of: “This is a 300x250 ATF ad unit on the football section of a sports blog. My audience is 75% male, age 18-35, earning between $50,000-$80,000 per year.”

To see the impact that placement targeting has on your site, check out this YouTube video on generating reports that break out your contextual and placement targeted revenue.

You can further increase your visibility to advertisers by taking full advantage of DoubleClick AdPlanner, a media planning tool that allowed advertisers to find their audiences across the web. Take a look at our earlier blog post to find out more.

With these small changes, you make it easier for advertisers to find your site, increase your placement targeting potential, and open the door to generating more revenue.

Posted by Rishan Mohamed - Inside AdSense team

Bridging the gap: Branding campaigns

In the last post in our "Bridging the Gap" series, lets explore how advertisers build tailored campaigns to promote their businesses.

My team and I work mostly with medium-sized businesses that try to be as efficient as possible with their online ad spend. In the past, we found that direct response campaigns (which ask users to make a purchase or sign up for a newsletter) were more common than pure branding campaigns. However, I've seen firsthand that advertisers are slowly but surely beginning to understand the value of online advertising as an extremely cost-efficient, effective and measurable branding mechanism.

As publishers, this means that you'll have more opportunities to capitalize on the increased ad competition that brand campaigns bring. Below I'll explain what types of brand campaigns we see, how advertisers select publishers to include in brand media plans, and how you can ensure that your sites make it in.

Types of Branding Campaigns
The most important difference between direct response and brand campaigns is that brand campaigns aren't focused on driving direct conversions. The goals of online "pure brand" campaigns are very similar to offline ads: reach a specific audience with a sticky message that builds recognition, favor, and/or credibility of the brand. Another type of brand campaign called "brand response" aims to reach a targeted audience and elicit some form of action. Common types of brand response goals include increased searches on brand terms, unique visitors to the advertiser's site, and user interaction on site.

To achieve these goals, most brand campaigns have the following characteristics:

• CPM pricing
  
• Flighted dates (specific, short period of time for an advertising campaign)
  
• Display ads
  
• Placement targeting* (Brand advertisers, especially pure brand advertisers want to ensure that they reach a specific audience by targeting certain sites)

*Though placement targeting is the traditional method for branding, we are seeing a lot of successful brand response campaigns running both placement AND contextual targeting.

Building a Media Plan
When advertisers choose sites to include in the media plan for a brand campaign, they consider much more than 'will it convert?' The top things on their minds as they choose sites to target are:

• Does it have a high composition of their target audience?
  
• Is it aesthetically pleasing?
  
• Does it have highly visible, above-the-fold inventory?
  
• Does it accept image, flash and video ads?
  
• What is the average CPM?

Boost Your Chances of Being Included in a Brand Media Plan
As mentioned, brand campaigns are great for publishers because advertisers are willing to pay a premium for sites they want to show on. This means more revenue for you.

One of the best ways to maximize the chances of being included in a media plan is to update your site information in the Ad Planner Publisher Center. Google Ad Planner is the media planning tool advertisers use to select inventory on the content network. Ad Planner allows advertisers to filter sites by audience composition, accepted ad formats and sizes, reach, unique visitors and daily pageviews.

Other important steps you can take:

• Accept image and video ads
  
• Provide above-the-fold, premium placement ad slots
  
• Open up real estate on your homepage
  
• Opt to receive placement targeted ads

Posted by Claire Kemerling - AdWords Content Specialist team

Bridging the gap: The value proposition - how and why we pitch the Google Content Network to advertisers

I sell the Google Content Network, Google's ad network of over one million publishers to advertisers of all sizes, as a great way to reach customers in all stages of the buying cycle. Content advertising is great for demand generation, for getting the news out about a new product, or about an upcoming sale.

How do I pitch the Content Network? To many of my advertisers, the Content Network can be tricky to navigate. The network's reach is vast and with hundreds of thousands of sites, it can be difficult to choose the most relevant sites. The key here is finding the body of traffic that is already somewhat interested in their products/services. This is always my focus when pitching Content advertising to customers.

There are many industries or "verticals," into which our advertisers are grouped. Part of my job is to share Technology industry information with our advertisers and guide them to Technology websites. For instance, I work with some clients who sell smart phone accessories like skins, covers, faceplates, and chargers. But where should they place ads on the vast Content Network? It's my team's job to point the in the right direction. In this case, I'd recommend several types of websites and also recommend some types of sites to exclude because they may be less relevant. Advertisers may want to target sites with gadget reviews or online publications about technology. Well-targeted and relevant people will see the cell-phone ads there.

I always pitch the network as a place where advertisers can engage with their target audience at the moment of relevance. Once the ads are in front of the right eyes, it's a great way for advertisers to engage with their customers online.

Posted by Sharon Park - AdWords Content Specialist team

Create your AdSense account within your hosting control panel

Website owners who use Plesk, a commercial web hosting automation program, to manage their hosting and website services can now easily configure AdSense. As announced on the Google Blog, Parallels Plesk Panel now offers out-of-box integration with Google Services for Websites.


If you use Plesk Panel to manage your website, you can now create a new AdSense account from Plesk to help monetize your website content. Also, your AdSense account is automatically associated with every Custom Search engine you configure, so that relevant ads are displayed above your search results. When users click on these ads, you earn revenue.

If you already have an AdSense account, there’s no need to create a new one - just configure your existing account within Plesk.

Posted by Ryan Rennaker, Account Strategist - AdSense API

Information about AdSense ads and site speed

Earlier today, our Websearch team announced that we now consider the speed it takes for a website to load when ranking it in Google search results on google.com. As an AdSense publisher and website owner, you may have questions about this change, so we'd like to take a minute to give you more details.

This change is part of our efforts to provide the best possible search experience for our users, as we've found that faster sites create happy users. Our internal studies show that visitors tend to spend less time on sites that respond slowly, and additional recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. For these reasons, we're now taking site speed into account in our search rankings.

Site speed is just one of over 200 signals we use to determine search ranking, and because it's a new signal, it doesn't carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. In fact, less than 1% of all search queries on google.com are affected by the site speed signal. We launched this change a few weeks back after rigorous testing. If you haven't seen much change to your site rankings, then this site speed change possibly did not impact your site.

In general, a website would have to be particularly slow for its ranking to be affected. We look at the time it takes to load all components of a page that contribute to page speed, including images, rich media, and Javascript/HTML/CSS code.

AdSense is built to load ads quickly so there's no need to change your AdSense setup. Even so, we are working to speed up our ads products further. In addition, we also want to give you some suggestions of things you can do on your side, like enabling compression for your site, enabling caching of images, JavaScript, and CSS, and minimizing the size of your JavaScript with Closure Tools.

If you'd like to learn more about speeding up your website, or evaluate your site's speed, we encourage you to look at Site Performance in Webmaster Tools and try developer tools such as Page Speed, YSlow, and WebPageTest.org. Please note that at this time, the only way to determine whether your site has been affected is if you've seen a recent change in your search ranking.

For more information on this change, please visit our Webmaster Central blog.

Posted by Richard Rabbat, Product Manager

Bridging the gap: Flighted campaigns

Fluctuations in AdSense revenue can happen for a number of reasons, and today, I'd like to explain one possible cause: flighted campaigns. Flighted campaigns are advertising campaigns that run for short, specific periods of time. If you're curious about these types of campaigns, why advertisers use them, and how they will affect you as a publisher, read on! Advertisers use flighted campaigns to reach both branding and direct response goals.

Advertisers with branding goals usually run cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM) flighted campaigns to launch something new, or remind people about their brand during strategic periods of time. In addition, flighted campaigns help advertisers get the most out of their budget. For example, instead of taking a $12,000 yearly budget and spending $1,000 per month, an advertiser might spend $3,000 per month during strategic periods, and not advertise at all (or as much) during the rest of the year. Instead of spreading budget evenly using 'always on' campaigns, these advertisers can make a greater impact by using high budgets in short bursts to get more impressions and frequency than they could otherwise achieve.

Flighted campaigns with direct response (DR) goals usually use CPC bidding and promote an event, like a sale or a concert. Instead of focusing on engagement and building recognition, DR campaigns strive to elicit a specific response from their target audience (e.g. purchase a concert ticket, go to a holiday sale).

Now that I've talked about why advertisers run flighted campaigns, let's return to how this affects your business as a publisher. Even though revenue from flighted campaigns is not continuous, these campaigns can be very valuable. Since flighted campaigns need to garner impressions/responses in a short period of time, advertisers usually bid high in order to guarantee placement of their ads. This can mean that during these short-term campaigns, your eCPM may increase.

Flighted campaigns can be unpredictable, but there are steps you can take to ensure that you reap the benefits when they're running on your sites.

1. Make sure to allow image ads on your sites, as many flighted campaigns use display.
   
2. Opt into placement targeting so advertisers can find and specifically target your sites.
   
3. Open above the fold ad blocks since these spots are desirable to advertisers, especially during flighted campaigns.
   
4. Add information about your sites to the Ad Planner Publisher Center to attract advertisers and help them understand the value of your sites.
   
5. Understand your users. This will help you anticipate the types of advertisers who want to target your sites and when they intend to, which can help you to monetize it more efficiently.

Posted by Lauren Weitzman - AdWords Content Specialist team

Announcing Wingdings as a new font

Last year, we announced that publishers could begin changing the font faces of their ad units. We've been listening to your feedback, and we're happy to let you know that we've just added Wingdings as a font face option.

During our extensive alpha testing, we found that this font performed especially well on sites catering to two specific audiences: cryptologists and carrier pigeons. Even if your site's visitors aren't usually comprised of these two groups, this font face can reduce ad blindness and we encourage you to test it on your sites. As a reminder, you can choose to update the font face of specific ad units, or apply your settings account-wide.



To get started with Wingdings, follow these instructions.

We're continuing to look for ways to improve your monetization potential, and we'll be sure to let you know of any updates right here on our blog. We're looking forward to the positive effects this launch will have for publishers, users, and advertisers.

Posted by the Inside AdSense Team

Bridging the gap: The Anatomy of an Advertising Campaign

The Google Content Network (Google's ad network that includes over a million websites) connects Google's hundreds of thousands of advertisers with our 1 million publishers. Advertisers can control where the extra layer of control and complexity is added with our targeting options. Here are the ways an advertiser can show ads on your site.

1. Contextual Targeting
   
2. Placement Targeting
   
3. Remarketing

Advertisers choose a particular targeting option depending on their overall goals. You might be most familiar with contextual targeting, which enables advertisers to choose broad themes that match the content of your site. For example, if I'm marketing my cheese shop, I create a keyword list that includes terms such as "cheese," "gourmet" "cheese," and "delicatessen," among others. This would allow my cheese shop ads to show up on sites about gourmet cheeses as well as next to content on other sites that mention gourmet cheeses.

At the same time, some advertisers are interested in showing their ads on specific sites because they find a match between the site's visitors and their offerings. They can do this using placement targeting; in general, advertisers who tend to be more brand-sensitive use placement targeting because they can choose the sites where they want to show their ads.

More recently, we've opened up remarketing, which enables advertisers to target ads to users they've previously interacted with, to all AdWords advertisers. At the same time, users can continue to control the ads they see by using the Ads Preferences Manager.

To help advertisers target your sites, we recommend ensuring that there's a clear theme to each of your pages, if you're going to allow for placement targeting, create sections of your pages that clients can target easily. Lastly, think about your site from an advertiser's perspective.

Posted by Joanne Liu - AdWords Content Specialist team

Bridging the gap: Introducing the AdWords Content Specialist team

Do you ever wonder who at Google helps advertisers understand which websites are relevant for their placement-targeted ads?

I'm happy to say that this is one of my goals and also one of my team’s goals. My name is Lindsey Kurz, and I manage a team that helps advertisers understand how to best use AdSense sites in the Google Content Network to reach their marketing objectives. We focus on educating advertisers of all sizes on Content Network best practices, and how they can find success running campaigns on AdSense publisher sites.

You, our publishers, help our advertisers by offering high-quality inventory. My team’s job is to help advertisers understand how to make the best use of that inventory. One example of how we do this, is by helping advertisers understand how to connect with users of a site. For example, when someone’s reading an article, what kind of ad do they want to see? Chances are, they're browsing for information, so an ad promoting how to “learn more” may perform better than an ad asking them to “buy now." My team helps advertisers understand these differences to create the most relevant ads for your users. These ads then go through our targeting algorithms and standard ad auction to compete to appear on your pages.

Look for more posts from my team over the next few weeks. We’re excited to share with you more details about what we suggest to advertisers. We’ll talk about the specific recommendations we provide, such as advising advertisers to use a Placement Performance Report to optimize a Google Content Network campaign, along with more broad suggestions, like changing messages to reach different audiences.

Posted by Lindsey Kurz - AdWords Content Specialist Manager

Troubleshooting your AdSense for search box

We hope you found some useful tips in our troubleshooting series for AdSense for content. Today, we’ll take a look at some tips for implementing your AdSense for search box, to avoid some common issues.

• Are your search results hosted on your own webpage? When implementing your AdSense for search box, you have the option to display the search results either on a site hosted by Google or on your own webpage. If you choose the second option, make sure you select an existing site to host the results, such as www.example.com/searchresults. Once you've selected a site to display the search results, hit 'Submit and Get Code' and you'll generate two sets of code:
  
  1. The first is for the search box, to be implemented on the site where you would like to place the search box
     
  2. The second piece of code has to be pasted on the results page

Please be sure not to place the two sets of code on the same page, as this will prevent the search box from working correctly. Also, note that the option to host the result on your own page is not available for Blogger sites.

• Is your AdSense for search code nested within FORM tags? A form tag is used to create an HTML form for user input, such as text fields, buttons, and checkboxes. The code you receive for your search box uses an HTML FORM to submit the search queries. In order for the AdSense for search code to work properly, it can't be nested within another set of FORM tags on a page. To implement the AdSense for search feature on your page, please paste the code into your pages outside of any existing FORM.

Posted by Ulrike Jung - Inside AdSense Team

Site maintenance on Saturday, March 20

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 and Ad Manager accounts 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 - 5pm Saturday
Dar es Salaam - 8pm Saturday
Chennai - 10:30pm Saturday
Singapore - 1am Sunday
Sydney - 4am Sunday

If you'd like to learn more about what goes on during these maintenance periods, check out this Inside AdSense post.

Posted by Dia Muthana - Inside AdSense team

Troubleshooting tips part IV: Ad controls and filtering

We understand that when showing ads on your site, there may be a few you'd like to prevent from appearing. There are a number of ad control and filtering tools in your AdSense account, which we've listed below to help you determine which ones are right for you.

• Competitive Ad Filter You can enter the specific URL of an ad into the Competitive Ad Filter to prevent ads from that site from appearing on your pages. If you'd like to block ads coming from an entire domain, enter a top-level domain such as www.example.com to block all ads that link to subdirectories below that domain.
  
  
• Ad Review Center The Ad Review Center, located under the AdSense Setup tab in your account, lets you review and filter any placement targeted ads that are appearing on your pages. You can filter ads by type (text or image), or by individual ad groups and advertisers.
  
  
• Category Filtering To use the category filtering feature, you first have to enable the Ad Review Center. Category filtering allows you to block ads from up to 8 categories such as dating, politics, and weight loss, from displaying on your pages. Ads in these categories will be filtered if they're in English, French, German, or Spanish, regardless of how they've been targeted to your pages.

If you still see filtered ads are appearing on your site after you've used these features, please take note of the following:

• Ad filters should become effective within 30 minutes, but in rare cases might take up to 48 hours to be effective. Review the information in our Help Center for more information.
  
• If you use both AdSense for content and AdSense for search, and wish to filter an ad from appearing in both products, make sure that you've entered the correct URL in question in both filters.
  
• If you display ads from more than one AdSense account on one page, you need to filter the URL(s) in both accounts.

That brings us to the end of our troubleshooting series for AdSense for content. Stay tuned next week for tips on troubleshooting issues with AdSense for search.

Posted by Ulrike Jung - Inside AdSense Team

Site maintenance on Saturday, February 20

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 and Ad Manager accounts 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
Johannesburg - 8pm Saturday
Hyderabad - 11:30pm Saturday
Ho Chi Minh City - 1am Sunday
Brisbane - 4am Sunday

If you'd like to learn more about what goes on during these maintenance periods, check out this Inside AdSense post.

Posted by Dia Muthana - Inside AdSense team

Holiday wishes from the AdSense team

We'd like to wish you a Happy Valentine's Day from all of us on the AdSense team.

And if you're following the lunar calendar, we'd also like to wish you a Happy Chinese New Year!

Gong Xi Fa Cai!

Posted by Dia Muthana - Inside AdSense team

Thanks for your feedback on the AdSense Product Ideas page

Back in December, we invited you to submit and vote on product ideas for AdSense. Thanks for participating and voicing your opinions! We received over 600 ideas, and now, we'd like to follow up on what we're doing with them.

We've sorted through and categorized your ideas, which ranged from suggestions such as additional ad format types to new payment methods, and we recently shared them with the Product Management team. Our product managers are now looking into a number of these ideas and are evaluating whether they can be incorporated within our current product roadmap. We're focused on responding to your feedback, but it might take a little time before you see the features we choose to include because product changes require time to build and test across all the accounts and languages we support. We appreciate your patience in the meantime.

Also, we noticed a few ideas on the Product Ideas page that relate to existing features in AdSense, so we'd like to take a moment to highlight some of them here:

1. You suggested: Show a list of sites displaying ads from a specific publisher ID to prevent malicious activity.
   
   We recommend: Try the Allowed Sites feature to protect your account. You can enter the URLs of sites you own, and earnings from only those sites will be recorded in your account. When you opt in to this feature, we'll also show you a list of URLs that haven't been added to the Allowed Sites list, but where your ad code is appearing. Please keep in mind that if you create additional sites in the future and would like to earn from them, you'll need to add the URLs to the Allowed Sites list in order to be credited for valid activity.
   
   To get started with this feature, visit the 'Allowed Sites' page under your AdSenseSetup tab. You can also find more information in our Help Center


2. You suggested: Create an index of AdSense sites so AdWords advertisers can easily find sites to target.
   
   We recommend: Try the Publisher Center within Google Ad Planner to provide advertisers with information about your sites. You can claim sites you own, customize their descriptions, and add categories that describe your content. In addition, you can share your Google Analytics data to provide advertisers with insight into your traffic levels. Recently, we added the ability to display a clickable badge on your site that will take interested advertisers directly to your Ad Planner profile. Any publisher can use this feature, but please note that the interface is currently only available in English.
   
   To claim your sites in Ad Planner, follow our instructions and visit our Help Center.


3. You suggested: Enable more flexible Custom Search options.
   
   We recommend: Try the Google AJAX Search API or the new Custom Search Themes feature for additional customization options. These features will allow you to control the branding of the search box and change or enhance the look and feel of your search results to match your site.
   
   For more information on these options, we recommend visiting the Custom Search blog and the Developer's Guide for the Custom Search API.

Thanks again for all of your ideas and votes -- stay tuned to Inside AdSense for the latest news and product updates.

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team