AdSense launched in Lithuanian, Ukrainian, and Latvian

Do you manage a site in Lithuanian, Ukrainian, or Latvian? If so, we're happy to announce that AdSense for content and AdSense for search are now available for each of these languages.

Visit the AdSense Setup tab in your account to begin generating ad and search code - our system will automatically take care of targeting ads to the content of your pages and user search queries in these three languages. If you're not yet an AdSense publisher but want to start monetizing your pages in one of these languages, we invite you to review our program policies and submit an application.

To celebrate this launch, here are a few fun facts about some of the countries where these languages are spoken:

• This year, Lithuania celebrates the millennium of the country's name (it was first recorded in 1009);
  
• Ukraine is known as one of the world's main producers of sugar;
  
• The widest rapid in Europe, Ventas Rapid, is located in Kuldiga, Latvia.
  

Welcome to all of our new Lithuanian, Ukrainian, and Latvian publishers!

Posted by Tim Evans - AdSense Product Manager

Inside the science of contextual matching

As an AdSense Product Manager for ads quality, I'm part of a group that works to make the ads on your site relevant for users. One of the ways we do this is through contextual targeting, which matches ads to the content of your webpages. With contextual targeting, our system parses and analyzes the content of your page, conducts an auction among the relevant ads, then serves the winning ads -- all in the blink of an eye! Pretty simple, right?

Actually, matching relevant ads to the content of your pages is quite a scientific challenge involving semantic analysis and machine learning. It's a challenge that keeps me and my team busy. Our machines are very good at the matching process, but there are still a few cases where their definition of relevance differs from our human definition of relevance. In these few cases, the system might end up serving ads that don't seem immediately relevant to users. We understand that increased ad relevance contributes to a positive experience for users, publishers, and advertisers, so we're continuously working on ways to improve the relevance and quality of ads that appear on your sites.

I'm excited to let you know that this week, we'll be rolling out a series of enhancements to AdSense's contextual targeting capabilities, which will more accurately match relevant ads to webpages. You won't need to update your AdSense account or ad code, as these changes will be applied automatically. In many ways these types of improvements are par for the course at Google - but I wanted to let you know about the kinds of improvements we've been focusing on. Please keep in mind that these changes won't affect how other types of ads are matched to your sites; for instance, you'll continue to see placement-targeted ads when advertisers bid to appear specifically on your pages.

This is by no means the end of our efforts to perfect the system, but we believe that with these changes users will start to see even more relevant ads, advertisers will generate more attractive returns by finding the right users, and publishers should make more money over time.

As always, we're interested in your feedback on these improvements!

Posted by Woojin Kim - AdSense Product Manager

Default font faces to be updated

In the same way that you regularly try out changes to your AdSense ads to increase your earnings, we're also constantly looking for new ways to help you earn more. We've been analyzing the performance of the three available font faces (Arial, Verdana, and Times New Roman), and have found that each font performs best in different ad formats due to factors like character width. Based on these findings, we'd like to let you know that we'll be updating some of the default font faces associated with specific ad formats within the next few days.

This upcoming change will only affect ad units in Latin-based characters which have 'AdSense default' selected as the font face. If you've set an account-wide font face, we hope our findings will encourage you to experiment with other font faces on an ad unit basis.

Currently, most ad units set to the AdSense default font face are displayed in Arial, with a few in Verdana. Here are the new default font faces we're launching for our ad units:

Arial: 728x90, 336x280, 120x600, 120x240
Verdana: 300x250, 160x600, 468x60, 250x250, 234x60, 125x125, 180x150
Times New Roman: 200x200

While we're optimizing the default font face based on performance across all AdSense sites, we also recommend experimenting on your own to determine the best font faces for your ad units and your sites. Just sign in to your account to manually select specific font faces on an ad unit or account-level basis.

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

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