Doing his Music Thing

As a fan of gadget blogs such as Gizmodo and Engadget, Tom Whitwell started Music Thing in 2004 after realising that there were no similar blogs for music gear. The blog showcases unique and strange instruments, and traffic grew as gadget sites began to link to Music Thing. Now, the site receives tens of thousands of visitors each day.

In July 2007, Tom wrote an article for The Times discussing his passion for his blog's content, despite the low AdSense revenue he had earned since joining the program in August 2004. His friend James noticed the article and encouraged Tom to make a few changes to improve his earnings. According to Tom, "this was the incentive to tidy up my template a bit, and think more about ad placement."

Tom started by moving the ad unit on his homepage above the fold and opting into image ads, to ensure that all available ads would compete against one another. On his article pages, Tom added link units at the top of each page and placed a medium rectangle below each article. In addition, he removed the borders from his ads and adapted the colours to blend better with the site.

Using custom channels, Tom was able to compare the effectiveness of his ad units on his article pages. Tom notes that "the block I'd considered my main ad (the skyscraper on the right) was much less effective than I'd thought. As Google suggested, the medium rectangle that I placed beneath each article is the biggest earner." Tom also found that small changes could go a long way -- he made a few template changes to ensure that the highest performing ad unit appeared first in the HTML code, which helped increase his earnings.

"It took me a few hours to optimise the site, after reading a few blogs about AdSense, looking at the advice from Google and my friend, and trying a few template changes," Tom says. "The results were amazing - with no extra traffic to the site, my average daily earnings have increased by over 500%." Although Tom doesn't plan to quit his day job any time soon, he notes that "every little bit helps."

After this experience, Tom recommends that other publishers "follow the optimisation suggestions as long as they leave you with a site you're happy with. If you lose confidence in your own site, you'll irritate your audience and lose interest in what you're doing. But at the same time, make sure you watch your statistics, so you know what works and what doesn't."

Do you also have an AdSense success story to share? Let us know.

Posted by Lucy McKenna - AdSense UK Optimisation Team

Introducing the Known Issues page...and a known issue

A number of you have informed us that your reports are substantially lower than usual today, or aren't being updated. Our engineers are currently investigating the issue and working to resolve it as quickly as possible. Please be assured that your account data has still been tracked, so this issue will not affect your earnings or payments. Sorry for the inconvenience and thanks for being patient.

On that note, we'd like to let you know about the new Known Issues page, where you can check for updates on this reporting issue and other existing issues. There can be occasional hiccups in our system, but we hope that this new resource will help increase transparency and keep you informed. Whenever possible, we'll also try to include temporary workarounds and updates about each issue as we work to resolve them.

Thanks again for bringing this reporting issue to our attention - we encourage you to check the Known Issues page and our AdSense Help Forum for updates.

Posted by Sunil Subhedar - AdSense Publisher Support

AdSense for search now powered by Custom Search

We're happy to let you know that AdSense for search is now powered by Custom Search. If you've used Custom Search Engine (CSE) before, you know that Custom Search offers advanced customization options to help improve the accuracy of your search results and tailor them to what users are looking for. With the integration of Custom Search into AdSense for search, you can take advantage of CSE's most popular features without having to leave your AdSense account.

Here are some of the new features:

• Site Search: You've worked hard to attract users to your site, so it's understandable that you'd be concerned about those users leaving through web search. Now you can choose to provide just site search so users can find all the information they're looking for on your site, and you can host the search results on your own pages so that they can find that information without leaving your site.
  
  
• Improved indexing of your pages: We've recently improved our indexing technology so that you can provide a more enhanced Site Search experience for your users. AdSense for search will now index even more pages of your site, as long as we’re able to crawl them, so that your users will see more results from your site in your AdSense for search results. Stay tuned for more updates on future crawl and indexing improvements!
  
  
• Vertical search: You can also allow your users to search across multiple sites - this could be a network of sites that you own or other related sites that you think your users might find useful. If you write book reviews on your blog, for example, you can use vertical search to specify a list of online bookstores for users to search through. Other examples of vertical searches include computer forums, travel blogs, political sites you endorse, etc.
  
  
• Tuning search results and ads with keywords: Search terms can have different meanings in different contexts, so you can now configure your search engine with relevant keywords. Let's say you manage a site about yoga - you can enter keywords such as 'yoga,' 'exercise,' and 'meditation' so that when a user searches for 'mat,' the search results and ads will be more related to yoga mats and less to commercial floor mats. (You can see an example of this in the video below). In experiments, we've found that this tuning has led to an increase in earnings for publishers.
  
  
• Selecting ad location: Do you want ads to appear at the top and bottom of your search results? Or along the right sidebar as well, just like on Google.com? Now you can make the call on where ads are placed. (Here's a tip: we've found that placing ads at the top and right monetizes the best for publishers.)
  
  
• Quick and easy updates: Just as you use our ad management feature to quickly change the settings for your ad and referral units, you'll be able to do the same for your search engine within your AdSense account. Your settings will be saved in your account, so you won't need to generate new search code for each change.
  

We recommend getting started with the features above by visiting your AdSense Setup tab and selecting 'AdSense for Search' as your product. Once you've set up your search box, you may wish to explore more advanced features such as site exclusion, labels, and collaboration. Please note that these new features will only be available to you if you've migrated your account to a Google Account.

Ready to learn more about the new features available for AdSense for search? Just visit our Help Center. (You might also notice that we've just implemented Custom Search there too.)



Posted by Sandra Tsui - AdSense Publisher Support

Now open for comments

You may have noticed that we recently enabled comments on this blog. We'd love to hear your thoughts about specific posts you've read, and we hope that this feature will offer you engaging conversations and exchanges on a variety of topics.

We look forward to your comments as you leave them in the field below, but please do keep the discussion relevant to the specific post you've just read. Please note that we reserve the right to remove any off-topic or self-promotional posts in the interest of keeping discussions engaging. Also, we won't address your specific account questions or other personal inquiries via the comments field -- you can direct your questions to other publishers and AdSense representatives in the AdSense Help Forum.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support