Smarter default font settings

When it comes to customizing the appearance of AdSense text ads, we’ve heard from many publishers that they aren’t always sure what combinations to pick. As a starting point, we offer a set of default options for ad colors, font size and font face, which are based on positive performance across all publisher sites.

Today, we’re announcing an exciting improvement to our default font settings, which will optimize your ad units for your unique site and users. For each ad unit that’s set to show the default font face and font size, our system will now automatically select and show the best-performing option. This best-performing option will depend on a variety of factors, including the user’s viewing environment (operating system, browser) and the ad unit itself (language, size, number of ads, etc). We’ve tested the effects of these factors on our AdSense fonts and incorporated the best combinations into our default font settings. Our aim with this update is to help improve ad performance on your site by automatically applying optimal font settings to your ad units.

Please keep in mind that this change will only affect ad units which have “AdSense default font family” and “AdSense default font size” selected. You won’t be affected if you’ve previously set your ads to a specific font face or size, but we encourage you to give our new settings a try. To change the font settings of any existing ad unit, simply edit it under the My ads tab. If you’d like to change the preferences for future ad units you’ll create, visit the Account Settings page under the Home tab, and edit the “Default ad display preferences” section.

We hope you’re as excited about this development as we are -- we’ll continue to bring you the latest in our research around text ad options.

Posted by: Stephen Yuan, AdSense Engineering

Customize your AdSense personal contact information

As you may know, we periodically send out emails with tips for increasing your earnings, updates on the latest product improvements, and information regarding your account. In your AdSense account settings you can select which type of messages you’re interested in receiving.

We understand that some publishers may prefer to receive AdSense-related messages at a different email address than the Google Account used as their AdSense login. From now on, every user on an AdSense account can specify a personal contact email, contact name and optionally a phone number. It’s important to note that this contact email doesn’t need to be associated with a Google Account, and adding it to your account won’t update your login information or change the login you use to access your AdSense account.

To customize your personal 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 and contact email fields. We encourage you to also take the opportunity to review your email preferences and then save your settings. Once you make any changes, you’ll receive a verification email to the contact address to confirm that you can receive messages at this address.

If you’d like to learn more about the messages we send to publishers and how you can benefit from them, visit this blog post. We’re looking forward to keeping in touch with you!

Posted by Dan Banfield -- AdSense Engineering

New languages and categories in general category blocking feature

We know that being able to control the ads that appear on your pages is important to you, which is why we're excited to share some new enhancements to general category blocking. This feature is already available in English, French and German and from now on, publishers in Spanish-, Portuguese-, Italian-, and Japanese-speaking countries will be able to use it as well. What’s more, we’ve just added 88 new categories to the list of topics that can be blocked from your sites, including apparel, business, family and sports.

If you’re not familiar with the general category blocking feature, it gives you additional control over the ads that are shown on your sites. You have the ability to scalably block categories of ads that you might not find suitable for your audience.

You can block up to 50 categories in your account, and your choices will be applied to ads of all targeting types and formats in the seven supported languages, regardless of the language of the site where they’re showing. Before blocking a general category, please keep in mind that blocking ads can have a negative impact on your potential earnings, as it removes eligible ads from competing in the ad auction. To help you make informed decisions and understand the impact of any blocking choices on your ad performance, we show you the revenue and ad impressions for every category from the last 30 days.

We hope that these extended options help you quickly and easily control the ads on your sites, and we look forward to continuing to enhance these controls in the future.

Posted by Gavri Smith -- AdSense Engineering

Highlighting ad titles

As we continue to improve and launch new features, we’re always interested in hearing your ideas and feedback. Many of you have shared that you want to be able to change the title color of ads when a user moves their mouse over the title link. After a period of testing, we found that this feature resulted in higher earnings for publishers while also increasing user and advertiser value. We are pleased to announce today that we have updated all text ads with this change.

As you can imagine, there are numerous combinations of link and background color across the ad units on all publisher pages. After extensive testing, we have found that the color of the change itself can make a big difference: the wrong shade can even be detrimental to clickthrough rate (CTR). To determine the color that the title link will change to when a user places their mouse cursor over it, we’ll take your chosen title color and find a nearly complementary color on the color wheel. For example, a blue title would change to red. These colors outperformed all the others we tested.

We’ll continue to keep studying the effects of color on CTR and ad performance to bring you more enhancements in the future. Please also feel free to keep sharing your product feedback and suggestions!

Posted by Stephen Yuan, AdSense Engineering

A fresh face for link units

If you're using link units, you know that they're a great way to earn additional revenue from the smaller spaces on your site. We've made a few updates to this ad type in the past, but today, we're giving link units a well-deserved facelift. We decided that it was time to reevaluate the layout of the link unit and the landing page in order to give this ad type both a modern look and a great performance boost. Here’s an overview of what’s changing.

The link unit
We’ve heard feedback from publishers that it isn’t clear why they should choose to show four versus five terms in their link units. Most people pick one of these options by guessing the expected performance. We’ve actually found that link units with four terms almost always perform better than five. As a result, we’re reducing the number of topics in all link units to four for horizontal orientations and three for vertical orientations. If you’re currently using link units, this change will happen automatically. We’re also slightly increasing spacing between and font size of each term.

The ad page
Following the general makeover of Google pages, we’re giving link unit landing pages a fresh look as well. The color scheme, orientation, fonts, and number of ads are being updated to the following:

We’ll continue to work on improving link units and hope to share more exciting news soon! In the meantime, we recommend viewing this video to learn how to utilize link units.

Posted by William Chang - AdSense Engineering

Prepare for the upcoming holiday season with placement targeting

With the holidays right around the corner, premium brand-name AdWords advertisers are preparing for the season by increasing their marketing budgets and scheduling targeted campaigns. You can prepare too by taking advantage of placement targeting to allow advertisers to directly target your site.

While all sites are eligible for placement targeting, there are things you can do to help increase the amount of placement targeted ads on your site. First, turn your custom channels into ad placements. Be sure to fill out a well-written title and description to help potential advertisers understand the audiences they’ll reach by bidding on your site. Some details to include in the description are your site name, vertical, ad position, ad size and site demographic.

Next, ensure you are using our most successful ad units and are placing them in optimal positions. Finally, claim your site in Ad Planner. Following these steps will help advertisers find your site to target and choose where to place their ads on a specific section or area. Placement targeted ads typically receive much higher RPMs, which results in higher earnings for you.

Creating targeted channels is easy and a great way to earn extra revenue, but it takes time for them to show up for advertisers, so act soon! Just follow the instructions in our Help Center. Once you've made the changes, not only will your ads be ready for this holiday season, but they'll also be targetable by advertisers for every premium campaign in the future.

Posted by Jamie Firkus, Inside AdSense team

+1: Now making Display ads more relevant

Earlier today we announced several exciting new additions to Google+, including open signups.  We’d like to announce one more addition for our AdSense publishers, +1 on the Google Display Network.

Starting in October, the +1 button will begin to appear on display ads on your site. With a single click, people will now be able to endorse specific ads and make them more likely to appear to their social connections.  We believe that these recommendations could lead your readers to notice ads on your site more, leading to more clicks and higher returns for you over time.

For example, take Susan, who sees an ad for a good deal on flights.  She +1’s the ad, thinking her friends might value this deal. Now, when Susan’s friends and contacts are signed in to their Google accounts, they’ll be able to see Susan’s picture across the bottom of the ad, with a note saying she +1’d it.

The +1 button and recommendations will appear at the bottom of display ads.

Susan’s friends and contacts will also be more likely to see the ad. While the dynamics of our ad auction aren’t changing, the ad will now be included in the auction for the pages Susan’s friends visit, as we know recommendations from friends can be a strong signal of an ad’s relevance.

+1’s will be one additional signal that help determine an ad’s relevance. All eligible ads will continue to compete in the ad auction, and we’ll continue to show the ones that will generate the most revenue for you. +1 button clicks are not counted as clicks on ads. Although you won’t receive any revenue for +1 button clicks, +1’s will help AdSense to deliver more useful ads to your users, which we think will result in higher returns over time.

On mobile, the +1 button will replace the existing ‘g’ logo and recommendations will appear for several seconds, then fade out.

The +1 button will begin to appear on AdSense for content and AdSense for mobile content display ad formats--image, animated gif, and Flash ads. If you’d prefer not to allow the use of +1 features and social annotations on display ads on your pages, you can opt out starting today by signing in to your account at google.com/adsense.

Display ads become much more powerful when people can see which of their connections have chosen to endorse them, leading to a better advertising experience and higher returns for you.

If you’d like to learn more about the +1 button on display ads, please visit the AdSense Help Center.

Posted by Christian Oestlien, Product Manager

Upcoming improvements to Custom Search Engines

If you use a Custom Search Engine to power search on your site, you may already be familiar with the advanced Custom Search Element launched in 2009. Since then we’ve improved the results pages of these search engines with new features like mobile compatibility, more layout options, and new ad formats. We’re excited to announce that we’re now also taking steps to update the look and feel of traditional Custom Search Engines that embed results in an iframe on publisher sites, or that host results pages on Google.

Over the coming months you’ll see changes in the presentation of your search results pages for a richer, cleaner, and easier to use experience for your users. If you monitor the earnings from your search engine through AdSense for search, you may also see changes in your ad performance. We’re working towards improving ad relevance for users with new layouts and ad formats, while continuing to prevent accidental clicks. No action is required on your part for these updates.

If you’d like to add search functionality to your site and get started with Custom Search, sign in to your account and create a new Custom Search Engine under the “My Ads” tab of the new AdSense interface.

Posted by Michael Brandell, Product Specialist

New insight into how users are accessing your site

Today, we’re excited to offer you a brand new report that shows you the platforms that your visitors are using to access your site. You’ll be able to see a breakdown of your earnings based on where your traffic is coming from, which you can use to then optimize your site and give users a better experience. For instance, if you find that you’re receiving a high percentage of traffic from mobile devices, we’d encourage you to create a mobile version of your website and monetize it with AdSense for mobile content.

With this feature, you’ll be able to see your performance data broken out into these categories:

- Desktop - all traffic coming from desktop users
- High-end mobile devices - includes smartphone devices
- Other mobile devices - includes low end and mid-range phones

Try out this new report by navigating to the new interface and clicking on the Performance reports tab. Choose Platforms in the left navigation.


And as a quick reminder, we’re gradually moving away from the older version as we continue to focus on reporting improvements like these. Do you have feedback about this new report, or are there other reports you’d like to see? Please share your thoughts and suggestions in the comments field below. If you haven’t yet tried the new interface, learn more about getting started today.

Posted by Vincent Zanotti - AdSense Engineering

AdSense for mobile content in 15 new countries

We’re excited to announce the launch of AdSense for mobile content in 15 new countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Czech Republic, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Nigeria, Philippines, Slovenia, Thailand, and Turkey.

AdSense for mobile content allows publishers to generate earnings from their mobile webpages using targeted Google ads. Just like AdSense for content, Google matches ads to the content of your site -- in this case, your mobile site. You'll earn money whenever visitors to your mobile site click on the ads they see.

For mobile websites, AdSense will automatically detect the type of phone viewing your site and deliver ads to match. For example, if someone views your site through an iPhone, we'll deliver ads specifically designed for high-end phones.

Please note that AdSense for mobile content ad units may be used in mobile websites only, not in mobile applications -- our policies don't permit placement of AdSense for mobile content ads in a mobile application. If you’re looking for an advertising solution for your mobile application, sign up for AdMob, Google’s leading mobile advertising display product.

Posted by Emanuele Brandi - Product Sales Lead