Site maintenance on Saturday, May 14

This Saturday, our engineers will be performing routine site maintenance from 9am to 5pm PDT. Your stats reporting may be delayed at that time, but we'll continue serving ads to your pages and tracking your clicks, impressions, and earnings as usual. Your ad targeting won't be affected and you will be able to log-in to your account.

We've converted the maintenance start time for a few cities around the world:



London - 5pm Saturday

Alexandria - 6pm Saturday

Hyderabad - 9:30pm Saturday
Jakarta - 11pm Saturday
Perth - 12am Sunday



To learn more about what goes on during these maintenance periods, check out this Inside AdSense post.



Posted by Katrina Kurnit - Inside AdSense Team

How integrating new ad sizes helped CareerPlanner.com increase revenue by 165%

In 1997, CareerPlanner.com founder Michael Robinson decided to pursue his passion of helping people discover their true career directions. He initially wanted to go into high schools and work directly with students, but decided instead to start a website so that he could keep his day job. Today, CareerPlanner.com helps high school students, college students, and adults alike discover their optimal career paths and learn how to start careers or make career changes.

In 2007, Michael and CareerPlanner.com's top graphic designer realized that 2.5 million visitors per year weren't purchasing any CareerPlanner.com products. "These visitors were clearly looking for something, but it was not anything we offered," says Michael, so they decided to give AdSense a try. Today, AdSense is on over 95% of CareerPlanner.com’s pages and the site receives over 5.5 million visitors a year. The revenue from Google AdSense now helps fund CareerPlanner.com’s Research and Development efforts, IT expansion, as well as special marketing projects that they always wanted to try but could never afford.

Getting more out of AdSense

Following advice from the AdSense team, Michael decided to update his AdSense ad units with the goal of increasing performance. Instead of the three 120 x 600 skyscrapers that had been running one on top another down the right side of each page, Michael began running one 160x600 wide skyscraper on the left column, one 300 x 250 medium rectangle in the center, integrated into his content below the fold, and one 160 x 600 wide skyscraper on the right column. Michael also changed the color scheme of the ad units to match the color scheme of his webpages. Initially, Michael made these changes to 75% of his pages. Within one month, his AdSense for content revenue increased 80%.

The initial revenue growth CareerPlanner.com saw in the first month inspired Michael to take the time to implement the same changes on more of his pages. Today, Michael has optimized 99% of his pages and increased his AdSense for content revenue by 165%.
"The best news," says Michael, "is that since we have made the optimization changes, our Google AdSense revenue has been setting new records every month."

Sign in to your account to upgrade your ad units like CareerPlanner.com today!

Posted by Jane Brinkley - AdSense Optimization team

Got 2 minutes? Learn how to allow and block ads

Last week, we walked you through the Performance reports tab of the new AdSense interface. In the final two videos of this series, we wanted to highlight the key controls available in your account so that you’re empowered to make smart decisions about the ads that appear on your site. Take a look at the videos below to learn more about the ad review center and the additional features that enable you to allow and block ads:

We hope you’ve enjoyed our six videos walking you through key activities in your account, and that it has enabled you to be more comfortable with the new AdSense interface. If you haven’t started using the new interface yet, we hope you'll check out these demo videos and give it a try today!

Posted by Katrina Kurnit - Inside AdSense Team