As an AdSense partner, you know that Google is continually making improvements to the way we match ads to your content so that users see even more relevant ads, which should help you make more money over time.
A "referral URL" is one of many signals we use to deliver contextually relevant ads on your website. The referral URL contains information about the link a user followed to arrive at your website, whether from a search engine or another site on the Internet. Any webmaster for any site can look at referral URLs to see how users arrive at their site.
Let's see how this works today when a user arrives at your golfing advice website from a search engine results page. Imagine that someone searches on Google for [golf shop atlanta] and clicks on a search result that takes them to your site. The referral URL that is passed to your site may look something like this: http://www.google.com/search?q=golf+shop+atlanta. I'm using Google as an example here, but the same type of information is transmitted if a user arrives at your website from another search engine.
To deliver the most relevant ad, we treat the query words [golf shop atlanta] in the referral URL as if they're part of the content of your webpage. We can then better tailor the ad we deliver on your site. In this example, we could use the additional information from the query words to show an ad for a golf shop in Atlanta rather than for one in Chicago (depending on the other words in the page).
We've recently started to expand the use of the query words in referral URLs to a few hours so we can so we can continue to deliver more relevant ads. The technical way that we're doing this is by associating the relevant query words in the referral URL with the existing advertising cookie on the user's browser. After a short period of time (a few hours) the query words are no longer used for the purposes of matching ads. Of course, users can continue to opt out of our advertising cookie at any time here.
This allows us to deliver more relevant ads on a wider range of AdSense partner sites that a user may browse over the course of a few hours. Let's assume the user in our example leaves your golf website and browses through to a news website that is also an AdSense partner. Since [golf shop atlanta] is in a referral URL that was visited in the past few hours, we may use those query words, along with the content of the news webpage itself, to determine the most relevant ad to show the user on the news website.
Using signals from the referral URL is just one part of our teams' continuing efforts to deliver even better contextually matched ads on your website.
Wednesday, 10 February 2010
Monday, 8 February 2010
More webinars coming your way
We've just published a new webinar schedule for the next month. In our live webinars, we'll highlight changes you can make to your ad implementation in order to maximize your AdSense revenue. We're also trying something new with our upcoming webinars: we've set up open Google Moderator discussions, where you can raise questions related to the specific webinar topic or vote on questions from other participants. We'll then answer your questions live in the webinar.To sign up for our webinars, please visit our Help Center. Even if you're not able to attend the live sessions, we'll make sure to upload each webinar recording within 24 hours of the event.
Thursday, 4 February 2010
Donate your AdSense earnings to help Haiti
As you may have already seen, Google has made various efforts to contribute to the earthquake relief response in Haiti. We've heard repeatedly from AdSense publishers on forums about wanting to help, and today, we're pleased to let you know how you can do so with your AdSense earnings.
We're currently accepting donations from AdSense publishers with an unpaid account balance through January 31, 2010. To see what your unpaid account balance is, please visit the 'Payment History' page within your account. Your January earnings will post in the next few days, so feel free to refer to your 'Advanced Reports' page for an earnings estimate until those are finalized.
Working with our teammates at Google.org, we've identified Partners In Health (PIH) as the recipient of these funds. Your funds will go to provide medical aid via PIH and their Haiti-based partner organization. Any contribution you can make will help to ensure that PIH can continue their work throughout this time of great need.
Photo courtesy of PIH
You can donate a portion or all of your entire unpaid balance as of the end of January. Whether you have a balance of $0.10 or $100 in your account, we invite you to participate within the next week.
As you may expect, there are certain restrictions to donating, and all our normal policies still apply -- so even if you're donating, please don't ask others to click on your ads in order to increase your earnings. For more information on how to participate, visit our donation form.
We're currently accepting donations from AdSense publishers with an unpaid account balance through January 31, 2010. To see what your unpaid account balance is, please visit the 'Payment History' page within your account. Your January earnings will post in the next few days, so feel free to refer to your 'Advanced Reports' page for an earnings estimate until those are finalized.
Working with our teammates at Google.org, we've identified Partners In Health (PIH) as the recipient of these funds. Your funds will go to provide medical aid via PIH and their Haiti-based partner organization. Any contribution you can make will help to ensure that PIH can continue their work throughout this time of great need.
Photo courtesy of PIHYou can donate a portion or all of your entire unpaid balance as of the end of January. Whether you have a balance of $0.10 or $100 in your account, we invite you to participate within the next week.
As you may expect, there are certain restrictions to donating, and all our normal policies still apply -- so even if you're donating, please don't ask others to click on your ads in order to increase your earnings. For more information on how to participate, visit our donation form.
Wednesday, 3 February 2010
Troubleshooting tips part IIa: Ad relevance and targeting
Last week, we took a closer look at implementing your ad code, and today, we'll address some of the common issues related to ad targeting.
If you're seeing irrelevant ads or public service ads (PSAs) on your pages after you've pasted the ad code into your HTML source code and waited the recommended 48 hrs, here are a things to check:
If you're seeing irrelevant ads or public service ads (PSAs) on your pages after you've pasted the ad code into your HTML source code and waited the recommended 48 hrs, here are a things to check:
- Have you placed the AdSense ad code in frames separate from the main content of your website? If so, you may experience ad targeting issues. In order for our crawlers to match the ads to the content of your website, it is important to place the ad code in the same frame as the main content of your webste. If you're familiar with HTML, and your website is talking about several different topics you could also consider implementing section targeting on your site to highlight relevant content.
- Do you have mostly dynamic content on your site? Our crawlers currently can't derive meaning from these types of files:
- audio and video files (.wma, .mpeg, .mov)
- mp3 files (.mp3)
- images (.jpeg, .bmp)
- Macromedia Flash movies
- Java Applets
To receive more relevant ads, we recommend including plenty of text-based content on your site, including complete sentences and paragraphs. - Do your pages use session IDs? A session ID is a piece of data serves as a unique identifier for a session. If your pages use session IDs, you may not receive targeted ads on those pages. Since this session ID - and therefore the URL - changes every time a different user views a page, the URL will not be indexed and will need to be crawled from scratch. Once the URL is crawled, however, the session will most likely have expired. This means that pages seen by the users are rarely in the index. You'll need to remove the session IDs in order to show more targeted ads to your users.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)