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
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
"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
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 :)
