North American publishers: Participate in AdSense email interviews

To help us better understand what's most important to our publishers, we've recently started conducting email interviews. Interviews are currently available only to publishers located in North America, but we're aiming to expand this program to other countries in the future.

If you're located in North America, you can sign up for a chance to participate in an email interview and openly discuss your opinions about AdSense with a market researcher. Participants will receive a $50 AdWords credit for their time.

If you're interested, fill out this form to let us know. We'll be contacting chosen participants via email; because space is limited, we won't be able to accept all applications.

Posted by Erica dela Cruz - Inside AdSense Team

Become a fan of AdSense

To date, we've been sharing AdSense information with you through this blog, Twitter, the AdSense Help Center, and the AdSense Help Forum. You also expressed your interest in Facebook by creating a number of AdSense groups, and we listened. We're pleased to announce that the official AdSense Facebook Fan Page is now up and running! A one-stop shop for up-to-date information, our Facebook Fan Page will be synched with the blog and Twitter, and will house optimization photos and videos that are currently found on our YouTube channel. (If you're unfamiliar with Facebook, learn more on Facebook's profile.)

The AdSense Facebook Fan Page will open up a new method of communication between our team and our publishers. You'll be able to respond to poll questions and complete surveys, helping our team better understand your needs so we can keep improving our products. You can also find out about upcoming events under the 'Events' tab and look out for posts about new AdSense features, webinars, and more on our wall. Our team will be contributing to the page, so be sure to check the page often for different opportunities to provide us with your input and learn more about AdSense.

To make this new page as useful as possible to all of our publishers, we won't be responding via Facebook to questions regarding individual AdSense accounts. Please continue to visit our Help Center and Help Forum to troubleshoot your specific issues.

Sign up to become a fan, and start taking advantage of all of the benefits our official Facebook Fan Page has to offer.

Posted by Simone Davis - Inside AdSense Team

Site maintenance on Saturday, August 8

Our engineers will be performing routine site maintenance this Saturday from 10am to 2pm PDT. Although you won't be able to access your AdSense or Ad Manager accounts during this time, your clicks, impressions, and earnings will continue to be recorded as normal. In addition, ad serving and ad targeting on your pages won't be affected.

For our international readers, here's the maintenance start time converted for a few cities around the world:

London - 6pm Saturday
Athens - 8pm Saturday
Mumbai - 10:30pm Saturday
Kuala Lumpur - 1am Sunday
Melbourne - 3am Sunday

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

Extending the category filtering beta for English-language ads

In April, we gave you a sneak peek into category filtering, a new feature we've been developing to give publishers more control over their ads. Today, we're excited to announce that we're extending the beta to publishers in a number of English-speaking countries including, but not limited to, Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, the U.K., and the U.S.

As a reminder, category filtering lets you prevent ads from up to 5 specific categories such as religion, politics, and dating from appearing on your pages. Your filters will be applied to ads in English, regardless of how they're targeted. In addition, you'll be able to see the percentage that each category contributes to your earnings, which can help you understand any revenue impact you might notice as a result of filtering.

Based on feedback from our initial beta testers, we've also made a few improvements to the feature:

• Ad impression impact: To give you a better sense of how many ads you'd be filtering, we've now added an extra column to show you the percentage of ad impressions on your pages which fall into each category.
  
  
  
• More accurate percentages: Ad impression and earnings percentages are now calculated based on impressions from the previous 30 days instead of three. This extended time frame should provide a more accurate picture of the types of ads you're receiving and how much revenue they're contributing.
  
  
• Category descriptions: We've added details about each category directly within your account to help you understand the types of ads that may fall into each.
  

To see whether category filtering has been enabled for your location, sign in and visit the Ad Review Center, located under the 'AdSense Setup' tab. We're working on expanding this beta to additional languages and countries, and will be sure to announce any updates here on the blog. If you'd like to learn more about category filtering, please visit our Help Center.

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team