Redesigned Text Ads on the Google Display Network

Web design is evolving at a rapid pace. With that in mind, today we’re beginning to give our text ads a modern look designed to enhance their performance and the overall user experience.

Our new design puts a strong emphasis on readability. We've introduced larger and clearer titles, more generous white space, and a flat circular button design, which complements the colors of other elements in the ad.
We’ve also updated how we show multiple ads within a single ad unit. Our design, illustrated below, only expands a full view of other ads when a user interacts with an ad unit either by a mouse hover or touch.
Keep an eye out for the redesign and don’t forget to try our recently launched new fonts. Let us know what you think of this new look over on our AdSense + page.

Posted by Adnan Virk - Ad Formats Designer
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Use AdSense on your HTTPS sites

Today, we're happy to announce that AdSense publishers can begin monetizing their HTTPS pages. Many websites, like e-commerce sites and social networking sites, use the HTTPS protocol to protect their users' sensitive data. If you have a HTTPS website you’ll be pleased with how easy it is to monetize using AdSense.

To use AdSense on your HTTPS-enabled sites, simply create an ad unit in AdSense and then paste the ad code into the HTML source code of your page where you'd like the ad to appear. The old version of the AdSense ad code will not work with your HTTPS-enabled sites but you can get and copy the ad code for an existing ad unit.

HTTPS-enabled sites require that all content on the page, including the ads, be SSL-compliant. As a result,  our systems will remove all non-SSL compliant ads from competing in the auction on these pages. This means that if you convert your HTTP site to HTTPS, ads on your HTTPS pages might earn less than those on your HTTP pages.

Please visit our Help Center for more details on this feature. If you have a HTTPS-enabled website we’d love to hear your thoughts.

Posted by Sandor Sas - AdSense Software Engineer
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Exciting new fonts in AdSense

An important element of a user’s experience on your site is how they rate its overall appearance. You’ve been asking for more customization options in our ad units so that they complement the design of your site. Today, we’re pleased to let you know that we’ve added five new font options for you to choose from when customizing your ad units.

We looked at a combination of your requests for specific fonts together with popularity and recent adoption levels on the web when deciding on which new fonts to add. Here’s the full list:
  • Open Sans


  • Open Sans Light

  • Roboto Light
  • Ubuntu Light
  • Lora
You can customize your fonts directly in your account in a few quick steps. We hope you enjoy experimenting with them and would love to hear your feedback on which fonts work best on your site.

Posted by Alan Oursland - AdSense Software Engineer
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More control over advanced ad format features

We’re always looking for innovative ways to improve our ad formats, to help you earn more revenue from your content. We’ve been steadily rolling out new features to maximize the performance of your ad units, including a clickable arrow icon on our text ads, serving similar-sized display ads and most recently, the introduction of favicons to our text ads.

These enhancements are designed to improve the performance of your ads, but we know that sometimes you may prefer not to include them. Based on your requests for more control over the ways ads are served on your site, we’re happy to let you know that you can opt out of the following advanced ad format features:
  • Similar-sized display ads: Showing smaller but higher performing display ads in larger ad units.
  • Enhanced text ads: Displaying text ads with performance-enhancing features such as product images, favicons, or clickable arrow icons, etc. 
  • Expandable ads: Displaying rich media ads that can expand beyond the original size of the ad unit, following a user-initiated action. 
  • Enhanced display ads: Showing display ads with performance-enhancing features such as mouseover highlights, etc.
  • Animated display ads: Showing non-static display (e.g., image) ads, such as ad creatives created using Adobe Flash or animated GIF formats.
Before opting out of any of these enhancements, remember that they have been created to improve the performance of your ad units and disabling them may have a negative impact on your revenue. It’s also important to note that all opt outs apply on an account level and not just on individual ad units.

You can opt out of any of these features in a few short steps. We hope that having more control over these features will be helpful when deciding on the look of your ads. Tell us what you think on our Google+ page.

Posted by Nick Radicevic - AdSense Product Manager
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Achievement Unlocked: monetizing online games with TrueView and AdSense

With every new plot planted and zombie zapped to bits, the online games industry is changing the way we interact with entertainment. Online games publishers work with us to grow their gaming empires across all screens, from distribution and downloads through to in-game advertising. We’ve also recognized a growing advertiser demand to reach highly engaged games audiences. So we were especially excited to announce at Europe’s Game Developer Conference: we’re launching the TrueView video ad format across our games monetization platforms.

TrueView creates a better ad experience for gamers, and higher monetization for publishers

We all know how important it is to create a gamer-friendly ad experience, which is why we’re bringing one of our most successful ad formats to games: the skippable video ad. TrueView Instream skippable video ads drive a lot of advertiser demand on YouTube, the Ad Exchange, and AdSense for video. Following on Susan Wojcicki’s beta announcement earlier this year, we’re now making TrueView video ads available to all games publishers on AdX, AdSense for games, and select mobile publishers on AdMob. During the beta, we found that in general TrueView video ads contributed to lower abandonment rates and greater monetization compared to normal instream video ads.

The rise of gamer-friendly ad formats like TrueView can drive even better monetization for games - which is great news for game publishers, but perhaps not for the zombies.

Posted by Rebecca Illowsky and Allen Huang - Product Managers, Games Monetization
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The responsive web + AdSense

We know one of the biggest challenges publishers currently face is designing websites that adapt to different screen sizes, resolutions and user experiences. You’ve been asking for responsive ad units to help you deliver the best possible user experience on your pages, and we’ve listened to your feedback. Today, we’re happy to share that responsive ad units are now available as a beta feature alongside our recently released asynchronous tag.

The new responsive ad units allow you to support a wide range of devices by working with your responsive design web pages.  You can now dynamically specify the size of the ad that will be served, adapting it to fit the way your site renders a page on a particular device.

As this is still a beta feature, here are a few pointers to keep in mind:
  • Be sure to specify fixed pixel values when setting the width and height of the ad to be served.
  • Make sure that the specified width and height match one of our supported ad sizes. Please note that link unit sizes aren’t supported at the moment.
  • The new ad code is responsive on initial page load only. Subsequent changes to the ad size, such as a screen orientation change, will not cause a new ad to be displayed. We know that this is an important feature for many of you and we’re currently working to address this. 
  • Always set a default ad size in case some media queries aren’t supported.
Step 1 - create a responsive ad unit

Step 2 - modify the sample CSS media queries in the new ad code

More detailed examples and steps to get started can be found in our Help Center. If you’d like to know more about responsive design, have a look at our Google Developers resource.

Thanks for all of your feedback on responsive web design to date. Please do continue to share your suggestions so we can keep improving AdSense for you. Watch this space for more news and updates in the near future!

Posted by Nick Radicevic - AdSense Product Manager
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Get the most up-to-date data on your account with local time zone reporting

We know that access to the most up-to-date data on your account is important in understanding how it’s performing on a daily basis. Up to now, we’ve reported your daily earnings based on Pacific Standard Time (PST). Over the next couple of weeks however, you’ll be able to view your daily earnings based on your local time zone, giving you the latest information.

You can set up your time zone reporting preferences from your account in a few quick steps. From the Account information section on your Account settings page, a field now exists for time zone information where you can select your preferred local time setting. When you update your time zone preferences, you can expect to see some anomalies in your local earnings data for that day. Depending on your local time zone, you’ll either see a reduction or a spike based on whether the change means you are gaining or losing hours - keep an eye out for a notification in your account on this. It’s important to note that this does not affect your payments data which will always remain in PST.


When you update your time zone preferences, your existing saved and scheduled reports will be migrated to your preferred time zone automatically while future reports will also be based on your indicated preference. Updating your time zone preference will only affect your earnings data going forward and does not apply retrospectively.

Learn more about time zone reporting in our Help Center and make sure you’re getting the most up-to-date earnings data on your account.

Posted by Matt Goodridge - AdSense Product Manager
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Introducing favicons to our text ads

We’re constantly thinking about how we can make our ad formats better for you, your users and the advertisers appearing on your pages. Today we’re happy to share the introduction of favicons to our text ads. A favicon is a small graphic that an advertiser can use to brand their website, such as their company logo.

We regularly experiment with small changes to the look of our text ads, measuring the potential impact on user experience and publisher earnings. Our experiments show that adding these favicons to the ads makes advertisers more recognizable to your users, which benefits both you and the advertisers whose ads appear on your sites.


We’d love to hear your thoughts -- feel free to share your feedback about this new look for text ads on our AdSense +page.

Posted by Mohamad Ayyash - AdSense Software Engineer
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Faster, more robust web with AdSense

In a perfect world, putting ads on a web page wouldn’t slow that page down at all.  We’re striving to get to that point, constantly looking at ways to improve the latency of web pages containing ads, and today we’re happy to share a new beta version of our ad code. This new code (known as an asynchronous tag) enhances user experience on your sites by ensuring site content loads for your users, even if they’re having trouble loading the ad. This is particularly good news for mobile users.

Our new asynchronous ad code is still a beta feature, and so changing over to the new version is optional. In your account, you’ll notice that you’re now able to choose between the new and current versions of the code. To try the new ad code, follow the steps to create an ad unit, then, in the Ad code box, select 'Asynchronous (BETA)' from the Code type drop-down menu. As before, copy and paste the ad code into the HTML source code of your pages.


If you choose to switch to the new code, we recommend switching all of the ad units on your pages in order to give users the best experience. If you’d like to read more on the technical aspects of this tag, take a look at our post on the Google Developers Blog. Let us know if you’re planning to try it out and share your feedback on our AdSense +page.

Posted by Johan Land - AdSense Product Manager
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Make faster and better decisions with new Ad Review Center features

We know that having fast access to the right information is important for decision-making. In particular, having quick visibility over similar ads and a broader range of insights is important when deciding whether to allow or block ads on your site. As we continue to celebrate 10 years of AdSense, we’re excited to announce some new changes in the Ad Review Center this week.

Find and take action on related ads
Our new ‘Related Ads’ feature in the Ad Review Center gives you a quicker and more efficient means of identifying similar ads that you would like to allow or block. Related ads are those that have a similar destination page, and you can directly view, allow, or block these ads in the Ad Review Center.

Derive new insights with additional metrics
To help you make informed decisions around whether to allow or block particular ads, we’re giving you better insights with the following new signals:
  • Impression score indicates whether an ad has a high, medium or low number of impressions per day compared to the other ads on your site. As always, we recommend that you consider the potential impact on your revenue before choosing to block ads with high or medium impression scores.
  • Serving status identifies whether an ad is active or not. An active ad is defined as one that has recently received impressions. If an ad is active, it’s more likely to still appear in the next few days. If an ad is inactive, it could still show again, but the longer it remains inactive, the less likely this will occur.
  • Historical trend shows whether the number of impressions per day for an ad has recently increased, decreased or remained stable, according to our historic data. This trend is not a projection of any future performance of an ad, but provides you with additional context while reviewing ads.
Finally, to improve your experience in the Ad Review Center, we’ve made some enhancements to the interface. We’ve now redesigned the Ad Review Center tiles to make the controls more clear and intuitive. In addition, we’ve incorporated new widget styles and an improved layout. Learn more about the Ad Review Center in our Help Center and share your feedback on these new features on our AdSense+ page.

Posted by Fiona Herring - AdSense Product Manager
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