With a refreshing makeover, MakeupAlley.com boosts interactions, clicks and revenue

When users of MakeupAlley.com, one of the web’s largest beauty communities, review any of the 130,000 products that appear on the site, community engagement motivates them to add reviews. Is the product easy to use? Is it visually appealing? Does the product compare well to other products in its category?

After mastering the art of product reviews, MakeupAlley.com conducted a review of its own site and implemented changes.  In doing so, MakeupAlley.com achieved a 171% increase in on-site interactions, 21% more clicks to affiliate links, and a 50% uplift in AdSense revenue. A host of Google tools contributed to the overhaul, and to these compelling results.

Small changes, big impact
In all, the site hosts well over 2 million reviews. Aiming to improve user experience and increase engagement, MakeupAlley.com first made some simple changes to its product pages, home to the site’s latest reviews. Using Google’s tips and resources for publishers, MakeupAlley.com organized and streamlined content and design to make relevant information easier to find.

Product names and rating statistics were made more prominent to make it easier for users to gather product information at a glance. MakeupAlley.com also restructured the layout by separating review content from member profiles. To encourage deeper engagement, MakeupAlley.com grouped and clearly labeled related content. A final tweak saw an existing AdSense unit move to a more visible placement below the navigation, creating space on the page for an additional ad unit.

Tallying up through testing
To measure the effectiveness of the changes, the team set up Google Analytics Custom Variables to track and compare visitor activity, as well as Event Tracking to evaluate in-page interactions. MakeupAlley.com also created custom channels in AdSense to track the performance of ad units.

MakeupAlley.com ran a month-long A/B test, splitting traffic between the original and new landing pages. The new, user-friendly landing page demonstrated promising results. Featuring related content in a clear way helped grow on-site interactions, while organizing affiliate links in an easy-to-find “Where to buy” section encouraged clicks. And the new ad unit placements resulted in a notable upward surge in AdSense revenue.

A beautiful future
Considering that MakeupAlley.com’s revenue comes primarily from advertising and affiliates, the lessons learned are valuable to the brand. “We’re excited to continue improving the usability of our site using this methodology,” says one team member. Based on these successes, plans are already in the works to apply the same tactics to improving user experience and engagement throughout the site.

Want to replicate this kind of success for your own brand?

●      Read the full case study on MakeupAlley.com.
●      Get tips and best practices for content and design from Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
●      Learn about measuring visitor activity, Custom Variables and Event Tracking with Google Analytics.
●      Find out how to use Google AdSense custom channels to group and track ad units.

Posted by Ian Cohan-Shapiro - Inside AdSense Team

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Diversifying revenue sources in an e-commerce site - dinos’ success story

dinos is a Japanese mail order company that relies on catalogs, TV and the Internet for its business. In their online shopping site, visitors can purchase items they've seen on TV or in catalogs. Their site was established in September 2000 and, as of July 2012, dinos now receives 2.5 million user visits and 58 million page views per month. Revenue from their site accounts for about half of dinos' total revenue.

We recently interviewed Hiroyuki Kikuchi from the dinos marketing team, to find out more about the company’s experiences with AdSense.

■ Inside AdSense (IA): Could you tell us why and how you started to use AdSense?
We started to use AdSense to diversify the sources of revenue from the site and also to monetize the traffic from users leaving the site. The major reason why we decided to use AdSense is because of its flexibility: we can shut off or turn on a campaign at any time. We started out with a pilot in April 2012. Then in May, we began using AdSense more, dramatically increasing the number of pages with ads. As a result, our revenue increased significantly.

■ IA: Did you use any other service before you implemented AdSense?
We used an affiliate service before using AdSense. We piloted this service because it provided control over which ads we served. We also analyzed the results from our pilot to be able to optimize our ad network implementation later on. Our main concern with trying AdSense was that we would not be able to choose the ads we served, but after implementation, we found that we could easily control the ads at the URL and ad category levels. The revenue coming from AdSense is much higher than the revenue we earned from the affiliate network.

■ IA: When implementing AdSense, was there any opposition from within the company?
There was internal concern that using AdSense would decrease product sales on dinos.com. We explained that sales revenue had not changed since AdSense was implemented. In addition, we offered to stop using AdSense if we received any complaints from our users. In the end, sales levels remain constant and we did not receive any complaints. This shows that we're providing useful information to our users and showing high quality ads

■ IA: Was it easier to implement AdSense than you’d expected?
It was very easy to introduce AdSense. It was very helpful that we could set up the ad categories that we wanted to block in the account interface. It was also good that we could block ads on a URL basis.

■ IA: What resources do you use to manage your account?
Since we don’t need many resources to manage AdSense, only one person is managing it.

We hope you enjoyed learning about another publisher's AdSense journey. Stay tuned for more stories.

Posted by Kensuke Ishida, Strategic Partner Manager

Simplified contact resources and consultations for select accounts

AdSense provides access to a number of resources to resolve issues and answer your questions. Many of these resources are available in the Help Center, including the Fix a Problem troubleshooting section, the AdSense Academy learning modules, and answers to common (and not so common) questions.

Today, we’re excited to announce a recent addition to our Help Center: a simplified, personalized contact options page. This page serves as a single source for many commonly used troubleshooters that can help you resolve your issue in minutes. In some cases, these troubleshooters lead to issue-specific contact forms that generate emails to our team. We’ve developed automated tools, closely monitored by our support specialists, to help fix issues you’ve identified and process these incoming emails, making it possible for us to typically answer your questions in only a few hours.

The new contact options page, troubleshooters, and specialized contact forms are available to all publishers with an approved AdSense account.

For those publishers generally earning more than $25 per week, we’re now offering consultations with members of our team via email in 33 languages. We’re happy helping you manage your AdSense account or discussing strategies to grow your business. If your account qualifies, you’ll see an alert notifying you on the contact options page. We aim to reply to all consults within two business days, though turnaround may be longer during certain holiday periods.

We understand publishers want even simpler ways to answer questions and more intuitive contact options, so we’re working on a number of additional initiatives to help you resolve your issues. Keep up to date with new features and opportunities by subscribing to this blog, adding our Google+ page to your circles, and opting in to receiving email.

Posted by Chris Sater - Support and Operations Specialist

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Review your contact information to ensure delivery of important AdSense messages

Throughout your journey as a publisher, we occasionally get in touch to provide information related to your participation in AdSense, such as account and product updates. Our goal is to ensure that this type of information, in addition to other types of messages you can enable like optimization tips, reaches you in a timely fashion so that you can review it and take action. However, sometimes we’re not able to reach you because we have incorrect contact information.

We’ve all been there - we receive too many pieces of information, so we provide a different, less frequently checked email address for an online site we’re signing up for. Or we move, change email addresses, and forget to update contact details for different services. It’s a common occurrence, so we wanted to take this opportunity to ask you to review your contact information in your AdSense account to ensure we have your preferred information. We use the contact details entered in your account to reach you, so it’s important that they’re accurate. As always, Google will only collect and use the information that you provide in accordance with its Privacy Policy. 

To update your contact information, log in to your account and visit the Account settings page under the Home tab. Under Personal settings, click “edit” and enter the desired data in the contact name, contact email and contact phone fields, then press “Save”. If you have multiple users for your account, we encourage each user to check their contact information.

	Review contact information now

Thanks for helping us continue our partnership with you.

Posted by Jamie Firkus - Inside AdSense Team

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Grow your audience across devices with Google+ Sign-In

Starting today, you can offer users the option to sign in to your website or mobile app with their Google credentials, and bring along their Google+ info for an upgraded experience.

In addition to secure authentication, Google+ Sign-In includes features to accelerate app downloads and deepen engagement (like over-the-air Android installs from your website, and interactive posts).

Read the official announcement on the Google+ Developers Blog, or get started right away with our developer docs.



Posted by Seth Sternberg, Director of Product Management, Google+ 

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Keep track of account changes with reporting notes

Your performance reports provide insights into how much you're earning and the factors that impact those earnings. As you may remember, we recently added the ability to view changes to your account in more detail using the “Show events” checkbox or a separate event report. Change events are automatically generated and are shown as small flags on your reporting graphs. Those annotations help you keep track of the actions you’ve taken in your account, like adding a new ad unit or blocking an additional category, and help you determine the impact of your changes.

Based on your feedback, we’ve made further improvements to this reporting functionality. In addition to these automatically generated events, you can now also manually add notes you want to keep track of. This will allow you to find out whether actions which aren’t directly related to your AdSense account, like a website redesign or an advertising campaign for your site, may have had an impact on your earnings. Every user can see all the notes which have been added to an account by other users and can add, edit, and delete their own customized notes.

To add a personalized annotation, visit the ‘Performance reports’ tab in your account. You can either view the changes as an overlay or open a separate event report. Click on ‘Add note’ directly below the graph to add a new annotation to your report. For more information and detailed instructions, please visit our Help Center.

We hope you’ll find this update helpful, and we look forward to hearing your feedback and suggestions on our AdSense +page.

Posted by Matt Goodridge - AdSense Product Manager

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Free video ad serving in DFP Small Business, available to all publishers

Cross posted from the DoubleClick Publisher Blog

Publishers everywhere are discovering the revenue and audience growth potential of video content. As a publisher grows a video viewership on their site, selling their own ads becomes an increasingly important revenue stream. Over the past year we’ve added mobile capabilities and tested out video ad serving features to better help publishers sell advertising across all screens and formats. So today we’re excited to announce the availability of video ad serving features plus an unlimited video ad serving trial offer to all DFP Small Business publishers.

So what’s new?

Comprehensive video ad creative management

• Show pre-roll, post-roll, and mid-roll in-stream ads, as well as overlays and companion creative sets
• Upload and transcode video ad assets to a variety of formats

Simple workflow with trusted partners

• To use the video ad management features, publishers need to integrate with video technology platforms to ensure optimal video ad playback and easy implementation
• Manage your video ads alongside your desktop and mobile display ads in DFP Small Business

Make the most from every stream

• Video backfill options with Google AdSense and the DoubleClick Ad Exchange to help maximize your video ad revenue with a high fill rate
• To apply for the AdSense for video program, send us your details

Video ad serving is free up to 400K ad impressions a month. Until April 30th, we’re offering a free unlimited trial, so you can serve as many video ads as you want. After this trial offer has ended, impressions over 400K a month will be charged a nominal ad serving fee on a CPM basis.

We’d love to hear your opinions and feedback on these new features on our AdSense Google+ page, where you’ll also be able to discuss your thoughts and share best practices with other publishers.

If you’d like to start with DFP Small Business, sign up here. The new video functionality is automatically turned on for all current DFP Small Business publishers, so if you’re ready to start selling video ads, log in now!

Posted by Andrew Kuo, DFP Small Business video product specialist

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Coming soon: international Learn with Google for Publishers events

Edited for accuracy on January 24th, 2013

A little over a month ago we announced that AdSense in Your City events will be evolving into Learn with Google for Publishers. We also published our event schedule for North America. Today we’re excited to announce that the Learn with Google for Publishers event series is international, too!

Below are some international events in the next three months:

Latin America

• Sao Paulo, Brazil - March 19, 2013
• Buenos Aires, Argentina - March 13, 2013

Europe

• Bucharest, Romania - March 4, 2013
• Dublin, Ireland - February 11, 2013

If you’d like to attend one of our upcoming events, fill out this form and we’ll send out event confirmation details two weeks before the event. Space is limited, so sign up quickly.
   
Be sure to check out our complementary Learn with Google webinar series.  And, if you’re as excited as we are about Learn with Google for Publishers, let us know on our AdSense +page.

Posted by Ian Cohan-Shapiro - Inside AdSense Team

Your optimization checklist, Part 2

Last week we covered some oldie-but-goodie optimization tips. Today, we’ll focus on some advanced tips to help you bring your AdSense strategy to the next level. We encourage you to review the full list and check off items as you complete them.

1. Ensure your site has a positive user experience: User experience (UX) can make or break your site’s success. With many other sites offering similar services, it’s important to differentiate your site in the eyes of your users by providing a better experience. Because a user’s attention is limited, you'll only have a few seconds to provide a good experience and quickly guide the user to what they’re looking for. Read these three blog posts to learn our top five UX tips.
2. Make your first ad unit count: AdSense loads the highest paying ad on a page first, so to improve your revenue make sure that your best performing ad unit is the first in your HTML code. Make the changes by following these steps.
3. Fix crawler errors: Ensure that our AdSense crawler can accurately crawl your site so that your ads are as relevant and useful as possible. Visit the Account settings section of your account to see if you have crawler errors and read this blog post for details on the steps to take.
4. Go mobile: It’s clear that mobile is growing rapidly. Ensure you have a mobile strategy for your site, and use our tips and tools to help you along the way.
5. Create a Google+ page to connect with your users: Google+ offers a number of tools to help you reach audiences in new ways. On your +page, you can share your articles, photos, YouTube videos, and even host live broadcasts. Your +page will also include a +1 button that users can click to recommend you. Think about your Google+ page as a way to complement your site, allowing you to grow and measure user engagement before directing users back to your pages for more of your great content. Get started today by reading our Social Fridays blog post series. 
6. Use DoubleClick For Publishers (DFP) Small Business: As your online advertising business continues to grow, you may have started working with other ad networks or doing deals directly with advertisers. DFP Small Business is a free, Google-hosted solution to help streamline how ads are served on your site when you’re working with AdSense alongside other ad partners. With DFP Small Business, you have a vast array of features that give you more control over when, where, and how your ads serve.

That concludes our two-part optimization checklist series. Please visit our AdSense +page to let us know your experience with these optimization tips.

Posted by Jamie Firkus - Inside AdSense Team

Your optimization checklist, Part 1

With a fresh start to the year, now is a great time to review your AdSense strategy to ensure you’re making the most out of your ads. With that in mind, we’re kicking off a two-part optimization checklist series to help you increase your earning potential. In this first post, we’ll review some oldie-but-goodie tips; take a look, check off the items that you’ve already covered, and see if there’s anything you may have missed.

1. Increase ad coverage: Placing additional ad units on your site can have a big impact on your earnings. You can put up to three standard AdSense for content ad units (note only one 300x600), three link units and two AdSense for search boxes on each page of your site. Sometimes publishers find it difficult to decide whether an additional ad unit makes sense for their site. Watch this short video to help you make sure you're following best practices, as outlined on Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, when placing new ad units on your site. As always, it’s important to consider the amount of ads in relation to the quality content on your site. 
2. Use recommended ad sizes: As a rule of thumb, wider ad sizes tend to outperform their taller counterparts, due to their reader-friendly format. If positioned well, wide ad sizes can increase your earnings significantly. The sizes we've found to be the most effective are the 728X90 Leaderboard, the 336x280 Large Rectangle, the 300x250 Medium Rectangle, and the 160x600 Wide Skyscraper. Keep in mind that while these ad sizes typically perform well, you should use the size that best complements your pages.
3. Show both text and image ads: Image ads compete in the same auction for your ad space that text ads do. So, choosing to display both text and image ads increases the competition for ads to appear on your site, and may help you earn more. Check this case study to see how displaying both text and image ads helped one publisher. You can also find instructions how to enable image ads in our Help Center.
4. Experiment with ad color combinations: Choosing the right ad styles can mean the difference between ads your users will notice -- and click -- and ads they'll skip right over. There are three techniques you can use to design ad styles that will be successful for your site: blend, compliment and contrast.  Experiment with ad color combinations to find the best fit for your site. See this Help Center article for additional information. 
5. Ensure optimal ad placement: The placement of your ads plays a big role in revenue earning potential and user experience. While we often recommend placing an ad above the fold, it’s also important that users can easily find the content they are looking for. Check out this resource for more tips on ad placement, and see our heat map for even more information. 
6. Add a search box (or two): As mentioned in #1, you can put up two AdSense for search boxes (along with three standard AdSense for content ad units and three link units) on each page of your site.  AdSense for search is a free product that lets you place a Custom Search Engine on your site to provide users with web search. You'll also earn revenue from relevant ads on the search results page.

We hope you find these tips useful. If you have additional tips to share, or would like to let us know about your experience with using an optimization tip, leave a comment on our AdSense +page. Stay tuned for our second part of the series, where we’ll cover some advanced optimization tips.

Posted by Jamie Firkus - Inside AdSense Team

A look back at 2012 highlights

Time sure flies! We’re coming up on another year end and, with that, we’d like to take a step back to review our AdSense highlights of 2012.

• With your feedback in mind, we made updates to the AdSense interface including a refresh to the Ad review center and the ability to add multiple users to your account. We also introduced more reporting features, a new look to Performance reports, and enabled you to manage your account and block ads directly from your site with the new Publisher Toolbar.
• You asked for more tips to help increase your revenue, so we showed ways to improve your site by using social tools, going mobile, making user experience changes, and using DoubleClick for Publishers Small Business. Many of you reported revenue uplift (up to 400% for some!) after implementing specific changes recommended through an email or the AdSense interface. 
• We had the opportunity to connect with many of you through our AdSense in Your City events (now called Learn with Google for Publishers), and through our newly created AdSense +page. We’d love to continue these interactions, so be sure to opt in to receive special offers, and follow our AdSense +page for the latest updates and Hangouts. 
• You let us know that you value hearing from other publishers, so we highlighted publisher stories throughout the year, including Philip Martin, who became an artist with the help of AdSense. 
• We made the payments process easier by updating the look of the Payments page in the AdSense interface and by extending payment options in Southeast Asia.
• We introduced changes to ad formats to provide you more options and increase your earning potential.
• You also told us that improved communication around the AdSense policies are important to you. We reviewed policy resources, provided some tips and announced ways we can work better together.

And finally, following our annual tradition, we’re happy to reveal our most visited blog post of the year: the announcement of AdSense availability in Indonesian. Please keep +1’ing our posts to let us know when you like them and also +1 our blog in the upper right-hand corner if you’re a fan.

It was a busy and fulfilling year working with you, our dedicated publishers. Stay tuned for updates on future improvements. Happy New Year, and we’ll see you in 2013!

Posted by Jamie Firkus - Inside AdSense Team

Local success stories: Qué Tiempo grows by 30% by going mobile

The increase in smartphone sales and mobile traffic makes it more important every day for web publishers to build a mobile strategy for their businesses. Nevertheless, only 1 out of 10 AdSense publishers has a mobile-friendly version of their site. To encourage other publishers to go mobile, Ángel Hernández and Manuel Lebrón, owners of Qué Tiempo, shared their experience with us.

Qué Tiempo is a Spanish site that displays the weather forecast globally. Ángel and Manuel became AdSense publishers in 2007 and over the years, thanks to investing in their content, optimizing their ads and growing their traffic, they’ve been able to build a team of more than 20 employees and invest in new ventures.

Back in 2008, they could already see through Google Analytics that the traffic coming from mobile devices was growing, so they decided to develop quetiempo.es/mobile in-house.

Their mobile traffic has successfully grown by 20% over the last two years. New users are arriving to the mobile-friendly version of their site from mobile devices, while the desktop version is experiencing a 10% year over year growth. This shows that mobile traffic is additional, not substitutional, and mobile usage is complementary to desktop.

Thanks to the increase in their mobile traffic, together with a successful implementation of their ads, Qué Tiempo saw their daily earnings grow by 30%. The CTR of their mobile leaderboard 320x50 now doubles the CTR on their desktop ads. In addition, the CPC of their mobile ads is 100% higher than the CPC of the desktop site.

Most of Qué Tiempo’s efforts are now focused on improving their mobile site with features like geotargeting, which makes it possible to deliver accurate location-specific weather forecasts.  

“We encourage other publishers to build a mobile-friendly site, not only because they’ll quickly see their revenue grow thanks to the available Google AdSense mobile formats, but also because the future of your online business depends on your mobile strategy, a market with infinite possibilities.”

Posted by Alicia Escriba - Inside AdSense team

This information is current as of December 18th, 2012.

Coming soon: Learn with Google for Publishers

Two and a half years ago we started the AdSense in Your City program with the goal of meeting publishers face-to-face and providing tips to help you increase your earnings.  From Orlando, Florida to Tokyo, Japan, we’ve visited over 100 cities around the world and talked to thousands of publishers.  We asked you what you’ve liked and what could be improved.  Based on your feedback, we’ve made some changes.

We’re excited to announce that, in 2013, AdSense in Your City events will be evolving into Learn with Google for Publishers.  We understand that many of you are using Google products beyond AdSense to grow your business. Our transition to this Google-wide initiative is part of our effort to help publishers like you make the most from the Web.  Learn with Google for Publishers goes beyond just AdSense optimization tips.  We’ll also cover new topics such as site design, analytics and ad serving.  Below is our North America schedule for the next three months; our international schedule will be posted here on Inside AdSense shortly, so stay tuned!

• New York, NY - January 29, 2013 
• Los Angeles, CA - February 7, 2013
• Toronto, Canada - February 19, 2013 
• Chicago, IL - March 5, 2013

Phillip Martin is one publisher who went to a Google event this year; take a look at his inspiring story in this short video:

If you’d like to attend one of our upcoming events, fill out this form and we’ll send out event confirmation details two weeks before the event. Space is limited, so sign up quickly.
   
Be sure to check out our complementary Learn with Google webinar series.  And, if you’re as excited as we are about Learn with Google for Publishers, let us know on our AdSense +page.

Posted by Ian Cohan-Shapiro - Inside AdSense Team

Updates around usage of 300x600 ad format

Since our recent introduction of the new 300x600 ad format, we’ve been happy to see many publishers testing it out on their pages. After carefully reviewing this ad format, we’d like to let you know about an upcoming update to our policies around use of the 300x600 unit.

Because this new format is larger than all our other ad units, we want to help ensure a balance between content and ads across publisher sites. With this in mind, going forward, publishers will be permitted to place a maximum of one 300x600 ad unit on each page. If you’ve placed more than one 300x600 ad unit per page on your site, we ask that you remove any additional ad units by Jan 10, 2013. We’ll also be sending email notifications shortly to affected publishers, asking them to make this update.

Please note that the limit for AdSense for content ad units still remains at three per page, so it’ll be possible to place one 300x600 ad unit and up to two other sizes on a page. As always, it’s important to consider both the user and advertiser experiences when placing any additional ad units on your pages.

We appreciate your understanding and help as we make this update. Thanks again for all of your feedback and enthusiasm for this new ad format; we’re continuing to work on developing new sizes, and will keep you posted on any new developments. If you’d like more information about AdSense policies, please visit our Help Center.

Posted by Charles Huang, Policy Associate

Working better together: Protecting against invalid activity

Publishers are the lifeblood of the Internet, and we’re committed to helping you grow your businesses. Last year alone, we shared $6.5 billion with our AdSense publishers. We also invest immense amounts of time and millions of dollars in systems (including sophisticated algorithms and human reviews) that keep bad ads from appearing on your sites and prevent advertisers from being fraudulently charged for bad clicks. When everything is working well, advertisers trust our network and continue to invest in it, which generates revenue for you the publisher, ultimately funding the free content users love.

But we’ve also heard the stories: publishers finding their accounts suspended or even disabled for “invalid activity” without a clear understanding of why or how to fix it. We know this can be an intensely frustrating, even scary experience. So why does this happen?

While the vast majority of publishers who sign up for AdSense do so in good faith, unfortunately there are some bad actors out there.  As you can imagine, we can’t reveal all the tools we use to keep bad sites and bad traffic out of our network.  But sometimes these tools result in good publishers who become a source of invalid activity having their accounts disabled without much recourse.  We’re making some changes we think will help fix this:

• We are considering tenure more actively when responding to detected invalid activity. For example, some trusted publishers will now have their accounts suspended instead of terminated, and over time we hope to work directly with more publishers to resolve invalid traffic issues without needing to disable the account at all. (As always, we’ll continue to credit advertisers for any invalid activity.)
• We’ve given publishers tools to submit more informative appeals via a new form, which may help resolve issues more quickly.
• We’re providing more details on invalid activity’s causes. If we’ve detected a violation of our policies you’ll receive an email and a notification to your account with further information and instructions. And you can read all about the causes of invalid activity at our Ad Traffic Quality Resource Center, which is now available in most languages supported by AdSense, such as German, French, Polish and Arabic.
• Whether you’re looking for a refresher or just creating your first ad unit, you can review the do’s and don'ts of ad traffic in our expanded AdSense Academy. 
• In order to help publishers avoid common pitfalls, we’re kicking off a video series that explains why some of our policies exist and how you can make sure you’re working with them. Our first looks specifically at invalid traffic.

We want to work with our publisher partners to keep the AdSense network strong -- keeping good publishers’ accounts in good standing, while also protecting advertisers and users from fraudulent activity. This is why we’re making changes, like the ones discussed today, to provide more help when things go wrong. We’ll be making even more changes as the year goes on so look for continued updates on this blog.

Posted by Jonathan Bellack - Product Management Director

We want to hear from you. Let’s continue the conversation -- submit your questions to us about the topics discussed in this post via Google Moderator. We’ll be holding a Google Hangout in January with members of our Product Quality Operations team for the first time to address your questions. Please note that for privacy reasons, we won’t be able to respond to account-specific questions.

Enhancing text ads on the Google Display Network

Text ads have proven to be a great way to help advertisers extend their Google search campaigns to sites in the Google Display Network, enabling publishers like you to earn revenue from your content. This is why we're continuing to work on improving text ads, even as we introduce new ad formats.

One change, rolling out this week, will make the look and feel of text ads more consistent as consumers and advertisers use screens interchangeably, and distinctions between devices fade. You'll notice a new clickable arrow icon, as well as slight optimizations to font size, spacing and text layout. These enhancements are among the largest that we have made to text ads, and our experiments indicate an uplift in clicks across publishers on the Google Display Network.

These changes will happen automatically for most text ads on your pages, and the color of the arrow icon will be based on the color palette you’ve selected for your ad units. For instance, if the background of your ad units is white, the icon will be grey; for other background colors, the icons will be a different shade of the background color. Consistent with our program policies, we ask that publishers refrain from mimicking these arrows or placing similar images around their ad units. Below are some example of this new text ad format in the 200x200 and 300x250 ad unit sizes.

200x200 Ad Unit

300x250 Ad Unit

We understand text ads are important to our publishers’ business and we’ll continue to innovate on new formats. Please feel free to share your feedback and suggestions with us on our AdSense +page; we look forward to helping you find new ways to grow your online businesses.

Posted by Johan Land and Stephen Yuan

More flexible controls with site-level blocking

One of the top requests we hear from publishers who manage multiple websites is the ability to block different ads for different sites. For instance, you may want to block a category of ads from appearing on a children’s site you run, but allow those same ads to appear on a separate sports-related site you also manage. As part of our ongoing efforts to improve AdSense to meet your needs and help you earn the most possible from all of your sites, we’re happy to let you know that this level of granular blocking will be available for AdSense for content within the next days.

There are two steps to getting started with these new flexible controls, once they're enabled in your account:

1. Site management:
To allow you to take actions on a site-level basis, you’ll first need to let our system know which domains and subdomains you own. Under your ‘Home’ tab, visit the ‘Account Settings’ page and navigate to the ‘Access and authorization’ section. From here, you can create your Owned sites list which already contains domains from your existing URL channels and manually add further domains or subdomains. Or, claim a site from an automatically populated “Unclaimed” sites list, which shows all sites where your ads are receiving impressions. Note that manually entering subdomains into the list will enable you to block ads from those specific pages while still allowing the ads to appear on the top-level domain.

2. Site-level blocking:
Once you’ve set up your Owned sites list, visit your ‘Allow and block ads’ tab. You’ll notice some updates, including a new navigation bar, new horizontal tabs, and an option for site-level blocking; your Owned sites list will appear under ‘AdSense for content’ in the navigation bar. To block ads from a specific domain or subdomain, just select it from the list in the left-hand navigation and make updates. If you’d like to apply any blocking changes to all of your sites, just select ‘All my sites’ from the left navigation.

With site-level blocking, you can block by URL; if sensitive and general category blocking are available in your language, you’ll be able to apply these options as well. Please keep in mind that there’s a product-wide limit of 500 URLs that can be added to a block list. And as always, we recommend blocking ads with caution, since doing so decreases the potential revenue you can earn.

Ready to get started? Visit our Help Center for detailed instructions on how to manage sites and set up site-level blocking rules. We’d also love to hear your feedback on this new feature -- visit our AdSense +page to leave a comment and discuss your thoughts with other publishers.

Posted by Adomas Paltanavičius - AdSense Engineering

HiPenpal.com makes more than 50% of AdSense revenue through mobile

HiPenpal.com is an international penpal website that facilitates the exchange of messages between people from different countries across all ages. Since its inception in 2006, HiPenpal.com, a Korea based company, has grown its membership base to 180,000 and has gained popularity in the United States and Japan.

Today, we’re going to highlight HiPenpal.com’s mobile journey, which has resulted in more than 50% of their total AdSense revenue coming from their mobile site.

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You’ve been a publisher with AdSense since 2006. How did you find out about AdSense and what has your experience been to date?

I got to know about AdSense when I was web-surfing through foreign websites. At that time, I managed various websites but because I did not have an ad sales team, I had a hard time with ad orders. However, with the help of AdSense, I no longer had to worry about this. I didn’t have to manage orders and still received good quality ads through AdSense which allowed me to focus on content management. The biggest advantage with AdSense, is that the ads are highly relevant to users, which has resulted in high user engagement and high earnings. All of my businesses depend on Google AdSense for revenue.  I’m very satisfied with the service and revenue that AdSense has been able to provide because it has replaced the need for an expensive sales force.

When did you first build your mobile site and how has this affected traffic and user satisfaction for HiPenpal.com?

In the 2008, I revamped HiPenpal.com and created a mobile site along with it. At that time, since most users had feature phones, the site was not actively used. However, since 2009, with the spread of smartphones, the usage of the mobile site has been steadily increasing. Currently, 40% of our total traffic is accessing our mobile site and the users are extremely satisfied with it.

What things did you consider when building the mobile site and what type of investment was needed to make this happen?

In the 2008, I didn’t know much about mobile web development, so building the initial site took about six months. I wanted to make sure that the site displayed perfectly across all mobile phones and browsers, so I focused heavily on the structure of the site. There are cases when your site displays perfectly on one type of mobile device, but is distorted on another. In order to prevent this, I used a mobile web emulator or browser plug-in to perform quality checks during the development of the mobile site. Before launch, I checked the mobile site on the actual mobile devices. I invested in several devices with different operating systems in order to perform bug fixes and improve quality.

Additionally, I tried to simplify the navigational tree structure, so that people could easily access the desired pages with a simple operation. Most importantly, I was able to attract more mobile traffic by adding mobile-specific content.

How did users respond to ads on your mobile site?

We implemented mobile ads in 2008 and then upgraded to the smartphone-specific ad unit in 2009, when it was first launched. The 300x250 medium rectangle is positioned towards the bottom of the page, so that it will not distract from content engagement. On the other hand, the 320x50 mobile banner is posted on the top of the page, so that it would attract more attention.

Because smartphone ad units are now integrated with general AdSense for content (AFC), AdSense implementation has become more convenient.

We have not received any feedback about the mobile ads on the site, which I’m guessing means that users are not being inconvenienced by this implementation. Our users are very vocal when they find that the ads are distracting to the use of the site.

How does mobile revenue compare to your overall monetization?

Mobile revenue is increasing proportionally to the growth of mobile users. Currently, 40% of of total traffic (over 50% including tablet impressions) is coming from smartphones and resulting in over 50% of total revenue.

The 300x250 medium rectangle is generating the majority of revenue today, due to its high user engagement. Initially, I hesitated in implementing this ad unit, due to its large size, but now highly recommend it to other publishers. Since December 2009, the monthly revenue has increased about 100 times.

What advice do you have for publishers who have concerns about implementing mobile ads?

I believe that publishers who have concerns about mobile ads are actually hesitating about managing a mobile web site. However, mobile is a technology that cannot be ignored, more and more users are accessing the Internet through mobile devices instead of the PC. In my opinion, ignoring mobile is the same as ignoring half of the users. Furthermore, ignoring mobile web ads is the same as throwing out half of your revenue. If you don’t want to miss out on half of your revenue opportunity, do not hesitate. I encourage you to start from today.


Posted by Junho Jung, Publisher Relations Specialist

Search for ads by image in the Ad review center

The Ad review center in your AdSense account is a powerful tool that enables you to control the ads that appear on your site. Earlier this year, we revamped the tool to provide you with even more robust controls, and today, we’re making an improvement that will help you find and review ads more efficiently. Using the technology behind Google Image Search, you’ll now be able to upload an image file from your computer to search for related image ads; you can then review and take action on the returned ads.

For example, you might want to find and block ads that contain the logo of a competitor. After you upload and search for the logo, we’ll return image ads that contain the logo and which are eligible to appear on your pages. Please note that you can upload images with a maximum file size of 2MB and a largest dimension of 1024 pixels. To try this feature, log in to your AdSense account and visit the ‘Allow and block ads’ tab.

As always, we recommend using filters sparingly, and only in cases where you’d prefer not to have the specific ad or advertiser appear on your pages. Please keep in mind that blocking ads isn’t a revenue optimization tool; it can have a negative impact on your potential revenue since it reduces the competition between ads eligible to appear on your pages.

This feature currently only returns image ads, but we’re planning to support more ad formats in the future. We’ll let you know as soon as any additional functionality becomes available -- in the meantime, feel free to share your feedback about this feature on our AdSense +page or visit our Help Center for detailed instructions.

Posted by Marcel Crasmaru -- AdSense Engineering

Larger, brand-friendly ad sizes available in AdSense: 300x600

As screens grow and web content continues to become richer, the format and capabilities of ad units continue to evolve as well. One of the top requests from publishers in the last year has been to add larger ad sizes to our network, and today we’re excited to announce that the popular 300x600 unit will soon be available in your AdSense account.

The 300x600 unit, sometimes referred to as a half page unit, provides a larger space for advertisers to get their message across and can offer users rich engagement. As mentioned in our recently released Display Business Trends, the 300x600 is one of the fastest growing sizes by impressions and is indicative of a trend where publishers are offering more visually impactful ad sizes that are preferred by brand advertisers. Because this unit is new to our network, you’ll currently see a large number of text ads in these placements. Over time we’ll continue to build a wide range of text and display ad inventory eligible to appear in this full slot as well.

As with all ad sizes, it’s important to carefully consider the placement of ad units to ensure both users and advertisers have a great experience with your site. If you’d like more information on the performance of potential placements, check out our heat map in the AdSense Help Center.

If you have feedback about the 300x600 ad unit, feel free to leave a comment on our AdSense +page and discuss your thoughts with other publishers.

Posted by Omer Gimenez Llach - AdSense UI Engineer