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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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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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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Changes in rankings of smartphone results

As the number of smartphone users continues to surge globally, many of you are responding quickly with mobile-friendly sites. Regardless of the device a user views your site on, their experience should be rich and consistent. With this in mind, the Google Webmaster Team is making some changes to the way they rank search results on smartphones. In particular, these changes will address sites that are misconfigured for smartphone users. Read the original post and learn more about common configuration mistakes as well as recommendations from the Webmaster Team on building your mobile-optimized website.

Posted by Suzanne Headon - Inside AdSense team
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AdSense now speaks Vietnamese

The Google AdSense team is pleased to announce the official launch of Vietnamese language support for AdSense for content.

Why Vietnamese language is important to Google
Vietnam is one of the fastest growing online markets in the world, with huge potential ahead. The online landscape has evolved rapidly in the last few years, becoming as vibrant and colorful as the streets of Hanoi.

We hope that introducing Vietnamese language support will help fuel even more great quality content creation, while helping advertisers reach out to a booming online user base through display ads.

How to get started

1. Please start by familiarizing yourself with the AdSense program policies. Need a refresher? Update your understanding of the policies by taking this AdSense policy quiz.
     
2. Sign up for an Adsense account by enrolling your Vietnamese language website.
     
3. Once your AdSense account has been approved, congratulations, simply add the AdSense code to your site to start displaying relevant, contextually targeted ads.

Chào mừng đến với chương trình adsense!

Posted by Emanuele Brandi - Product Sales Lead
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Increase user engagement with link unit ad previews

To increase performance for our publishers, we recently launched an update to link units in select countries and site verticals. When users click on a link unit keyword, the resulting page now shows thumbnails of the advertisers' landing page. We ran extensive experiments on this change and found that users were more likely to click on the results with thumbnail images, leading to increased publisher revenue and more conversions for advertisers.

This change will happen automatically for publishers using link units in the affected countries and site verticals, so no action is required if you’re an existing user of the format.  For publishers not using link units, we’d recommend trying them out!

• Link units are an efficient way of monetizing smaller areas of your website.
• Link units are a non-intrusive way to monetize, as the simple layout doesn’t distract from your content.

As a reminder, our program policies state you may have three link unit ad formats in addition to the three standard units.

We encourage you to test out the link unit format.  For more information visit our Help Center.

Posted By Kwanho Lee - Software Engineer
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Coming soon: Updates to our Terms and Conditions

In order to keep pace with changes in our products, we regularly review our Terms and Conditions to make sure they're up to date and in line with those of other Google products. As a result of our recent review, we’ll be making some updates to our Terms, starting April 23rd. If you're based in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, or North America, you'll see a notification in your account when you log in after this date. It will present you with the updated Terms and prompt you to accept them. For publishers based in the Asia-Pacific region, the change to our Terms will happen slightly later as we’re rolling the changes out gradually across all regions. 

You'll have 30 days to fully review the new terms in detail before action is required. Before the updated Terms appear in your account, we'd like to give you an idea of what's changing:

• With this new version of the Terms and Conditions, our goal has been to make them as clear and transparent as possible. As a result of this, we hope that it’ll be even easier to navigate and find what you’re looking for.
• With mobile being one of the big trends in 2013 and beyond, we’re expanding our Terms to cover mobile properties more specifically. We’ve also incorporated guidelines for using the AdMob SDK and other publisher products.

The updates outlined above are the main areas that will be affected by the change. However, we’ve made smaller changes throughout, so please be sure to review the Terms as a whole before accepting them.

Posted by Matt Goodridge - AdSense Product Manager

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The brand revolution is underway

(cross posted from the Inside AdWords blog)

As we’ve said before, we’ve entered the next wave of digital marketing, as major brands like L’Oreal, Audi and Kay Jewelers embrace digital media and make it a core part of their marketing strategy.  We’ve seen a 65 percent increase in the last quarter alone in the number of brand advertisers using our brand formats and buying tools.

This influx of brand investment is translating into meaningful results for digital publishers.

• We looked at the 50 top publishers that enable brand-friendly ad formats on their sites.  Over the past three months we found that, on average, they experienced a CPM increase of 2x or more when running these engagement-driven ads, such as our Lightbox ad, which expands to a full page only after a user has deliberately engaged with the ad. “We've seen CPM increases of more than 3X, and our advertisers love the large canvas and pay for engagement model," says Rich Dredge, Answers.com's Chief Revenue Officer.

• We’ve seen an overall increase in higher CPMs across our exchange -- in the U.S., CPMs over $5 have increased 24% year-over-year while those over $10 have increased 23% year-over-year. Brand spend is a critical piece of these increases.

Fueling brand adoption
To continue this momentum, we’ve been investing in a suite of brand solutions over the past year to help these advertisers make the most of what digital marketing has to offer:

• New Ways to Buy -- Last year, we introduced Active View, offering for the first time the ability to not only measure whether ads are viewable, but actually buy based on it. Brands are able to “reserve” a guaranteed number of impressions on brand-friendly sites across the web -- and they pay only for impressions that are viewed. 

• Over the past year, the number of advertisers using the reserve option has increased fourfold.
• Nearly two-thirds of those are Ad Age top 100 brands.

• New Ways to Engage -- Last year, we introduced a new family of brand-friendly, engagement-focused ad formats. Engagement formats are already showing terrific early returns.  For example, L’ORÉAL PARiS was one of the first brands to run a campaign using engagement ads. They ran an expandable ad in Germany as part of their “Beauty Minute” campaign and found that 30% of those who expanded the ad watched the entire 30-second embedded video.

• New Ways to Measure -- We’re committed to providing meaningful metrics for brands, measurement that goes beyond just clicks and conversions. Earlier this week, we introduced Brand Lift in AdWords, which will enable marketers to run surveys along with their ad campaigns, to determine how their ads helped their marketing objectives (i.e., whether their ads helped build awareness, increased favorability towards their brand, etc.). Brand Lift complements our other investments in brand measurement, like Active View and Active GRP.

Digital media represents an amazing opportunity for both brands and publishers, bringing together sight, sound, motion, interactivity and measurement in ways we’ve never seen before.

Over the coming year, we’ll be continuing to invest in our products and systems that will help brands thrive in the digital space, as well as help publishers capitalize on the shift...so stay tuned for more to come.

-- Posted by Neal Mohan
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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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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

It’s your turn to talk: Don’t miss our satisfaction survey

The end of 2012 is coming closer and we’d like to thank you for another fantastic year and your continued partnership with AdSense! We’re already busy planning our objectives for next year and would like your suggestions about what could be improved.

In the next few weeks we’ll be sending out our bi-annual satisfaction survey to a sample of publishers opted in to receiving “occasional surveys”, so if you’d like to participate, make sure to update your email preferences. We’re looking forward to reading about the things you love about AdSense and the aspects which could be improved.

Your suggestions and feedback are very valuable to us. Based on feedback you’ve provided in previous surveys, our forums and at in-person events, we’ve made a number of improvements to the AdSense program and product this year. For example, we introduced user management enabling you to share your account with business partners, delivered resources to help you maintain a healthy account, and added additional blocking functionality to control the ads that appear on your sites. While these types of changes and new features do take time to build and test, please know that we incorporate your input as we continuously work to make improvements.

Keep your eyes peeled for our survey, which will be sent the week of October 23rd. We read through every comment, so don’t miss the chance to let us know your thoughts and ideas. We’re looking forward to hearing from you, and we appreciate your time.

Posted by Sahar Golestani, on behalf of the AdSense Publisher Satisfaction Team

Reminder: Join us at DoubleClick Insights on June 5th

Last week we announced that Neal Mohan, Google's VP of Display Advertising, will sit down with industry leaders to explore the explosive growth in ad technology and the next wave of innovation in ad tech. Tune in to the DoubleClick Insights event on June 5th via the live stream to hear leaders from top publishers, advertisers and agencies.

Please register for this virtual event by visiting the DoubleClick Insights Live Stream page.

Agenda items include:

Adapting to the Empowered Consumer - Neal Mohan, Vice President, Display Advertising at Google will be joined by David Kenny, Chairman & CEO, The Weather Channel Companies, and James Pitaro, Co-President, Disney Interactive Media Group, to discuss how technology is being used to deliver new content and advertising experiences to consumers.

If We Build It, Will They (Consumers) Come? Terry Kawaja, CEO and Co-Founder, Luma Partners (and creator of the now legendary LUMAscape chart) will lead a conversation about the ad tech ecosystem, and what it needs to do next to add value for agencies, publishers, marketers – and ultimately consumers. Terry will be joined onstage by:

• Omar Tawokol, Chief Executive Officer, BlueKai
• Greg Stuart, Global CEO of Mobile Marketing Association
• Kurt Unkel, President, VivaKi 
• Shishir Mehrota, Vice President of Product Management, YouTube

Outside the Box: Technology = Creative Friend or Foe? Technology is supposed to make the life of a marketer easier.  For our final conversation, we’re going to focus on the question of:  Is this technology exploring resulting in better marketing?  Or, is it just resulting in mediocre creative and complexity for both consumers and marketers?  Karim Temsamani, Vice President - New Products and Solutions, Google moderates the conversation with leaders from creative agencies, iconic brands and publishers including:

• Brad Ruffkess, Global Connection, Coca-Cola
• Mike Lowenstern, Managing Director of Digital Advertising, R/GA
• Peter Minnium, Head of Digital Brand Initiatives, IAB 
• John Caldwell, Chief Digital Officer, National Geographic

The live stream will start on June 5, 2012, at 9:00 am PDT, and you’ll be able to watch it from your computer, tablet, or mobile device. To learn more about our highlighted speakers go to the Speakers page on our site.

DoubleClick Insights
Tuesday, June 5th 2012
9:00am - 1:00pm PST
Set event reminder today

Following us on Google+ or Twitter? Use #dclkinsights as you're watching the event to ask questions or share comments during the event.

Posted by Stephen Kliff, DoubleClick Marketing

New industry metrics to help publishers make the most from the web

Over 2 million AdSense publishers like you create the unique and diverse content that we all love - whether it’s finding reviews for a new restaurant, or do-it-yourself furniture makeovers. Online advertising helps fuel this creativity, and we’ve been improving our products to help you make the most of every opportunity - from making it easier to earn revenue from the mobile web, or welcoming Indonesian publishers to the AdSense community.  One of the ways we can continue to support you is by giving access to new sources of industry knowledge to enable you to make the most from display advertising. With this is mind, today we’re introducing a new report, “Display Business Trends: Publisher Edition”.

What’s inside for AdSense publishers? Well for starters, there are answers to questions like:

• Which ad sizes are rising in popularity? You control the ad experience on your site by choosing ad sizes that fit the design of your pages. But with such a flexible selection, which ad sizes should you pick? We found that 80% of all ads served tend to be the three best performing ad units for AdSense publishers: the medium rectangle, leaderboard, and skyscraper. We’re also seeing fewer publishers use smaller ad units, like the 468x60 banner.
• Is the mobile web really a big deal? We think so! We saw a 250% increase in mobile web impressions over the last three months of 2011. Growth in mobile usage has exploded, and there’s never been a better time for your site to go mobile. Check out resources for publishers on our GoMo site and Mobile Mondays blogposts.
• Which sites are showing strong impression growth? In 2011, we found that Shopping, Sports, and Auto & Vehicle sites were some of the fastest year-on-year growth verticals on the Ad Exchange and AdSense. We saw impressive figures across the board, with 15 out of 25 publisher verticals displaying double-digit growth.
• Where in the world are you? All over, as it turns out. Of a possible estimated 245 different countries and territories, we saw publisher ad impressions from 235 of them. These included the island country of Palau - one of the world’s newest sovereign states - and the middle-African nation of Equatorial Guinea, with astounding growth rates of 1106% and 4635% respectively. And while the United States still accounts for the highest percentage of impressions overall, we’re seeing a significant representation from China and Japan, coming in at 11% and 6% respectively.

The Publisher Edition will be the first in a series of publications looking at aggregated global data from across Google’s display advertising solutions, so stay tuned for more industry metrics to come. In the meantime, join the conversation and tell us what you think is behind these trends on our AdSense +Page.

Posted by Mel Ann Chan, Product Marketing Manager, Display Advertising

Mark your calendars for DoubleClick Insights on June 5th

As the digital media world continues to grow and diversify, we see unprecedented opportunity for both publishers and advertisers. AdSense publishers are an integral part of the display industry community -- so what does this mean for the future of buying and selling ads?

Tune in and watch Google's Neal Mohan, VP of Display Advertising, sit down with industry leaders to explore the digital ecosystem's swift evolution, and how publishers and advertisers can work better together to make the most of every opportunity, while simultaneously addressing the challenges both face.

The live stream will start on June 5th, 2012, at 9:00am PDT, and you’ll be able to watch from your computer, tablet, or mobile device.

Please register for this virtual event by visiting the DoubleClick Insights Live Stream page.

DoubleClick Insights

Tuesday, June 5th 2012

9:00am - 1:00pm PST

Following us on Google+ or Twitter? Use the #dclkinsights as you're watching the event.

Posted by Stephen Kliff, DoubleClick Marketing

A message from an AdSense publisher: How to balance conflicting interests

Editor’s Note: Today we’d like to share some tips from AdSense publisher Dave Taylor, owner and author of askdavetaylor.com. Dave Taylor has been online for over thirty years and has been producing helpful tech content for just about all of that time. You can find him online at http://www.davetayloronline.com/.

It's a tricky balancing act being an AdSense publisher because once you start seeing your earnings increase, there's a natural desire to shift your attention to your revenue. The problem with focusing on your revenue is that you're taking attention away from producing the most useful content for your readers. And without readers, you have no audience to run ads for in the first place.

I know, because it's a challenge I face as an AdSense publisher too. I run a popular tech support site called Ask Dave Taylor and my focus since 2003 has been on answering tech questions in a simple, free, and easily obtainable manner. I had over 18 million visitors to the site last year -- but it's also a business, not a hobby, so maximizing my per-visitor revenue is important.

I’m sure you’ve heard that "it's all about content,” and that the best sites have high quality content that's regularly updated and provide a value to their customers. That's still true, and it's important to have your primary focus be the experience you offer to your reader.

But there's that tension. It's the lure of the dark side, in Star Wars terminology. What is the perfect middle ground along the content/revenue continuum?

Here's how I try to balance things…

The first place I stop every week is Google Analytics. The data gives me food for thought, like how many visitors are using mobile devices. This helped me decide how much money to invest in a mobile-friendly version of the site (and when it made sense for me to add AdSense for Mobile Content to my advertising mix). Analytics also shows the most popular pages on my site, which offers great insight into what my readers visit most frequently. Since I categorize all my content, it helps me understand if tutorials about the Sony PSP are garnering more traffic than those about the Apple iPod, for example.

Hook Analytics to AdSense (and yes, I have an article about how to do that on my site) and you can also produce a report of your most profitable pages, a cross-correlation between traffic and AdSense revenue. You’ll gain a reliable way to figure out if that blog entry you wrote three months ago is actually now generating 11% of your overall site revenue.

But there's the ugly head of profiteering rearing up again.

Let's look at this a different way. There's a name for a restaurateur who focuses exclusively on per-customer revenue and keeps raising prices: out of business. On the other hand, a restaurant that doesn't pay attention to what items are popular, what daily specials get people excited, and the fluctuations in supply cost runs the risk of ending up with a menu that's completely out of touch with customer desires and they too go out of business.

I spend the majority of my time and attention on producing the best possible content and use my desire to maximize revenue as a secondary goal, something for me to keep in mind as I proceed. It doesn't launch my ship, but it helps me build it most efficiently.

If you're a long-time AdSense publisher, you've hopefully also found that sweet spot between being completely content driven and ignoring the business side of your publishing business. If not, here's a suggestion based on my years of participation: Once a month, really dig into your AdSense reports to understand what categories, what topics and what pages on your site are performing well. Set a goal of producing more of the same in the following 30 days, then put revenue out of your mind and focus completely on what you can contribute to your customer community. Rinse, wash, repeat.

-------

Posted by Raina Rathi, Strategic Partner Manager, AdSense

Join us on our official Google+ AdSense Page

We’ve just launched our official AdSense Google+ page, and we’re excited to start connecting with you in new ways via Google+.

On our new page, you’ll find AdSense updates and tips, and you’ll have access to exclusive Hangouts with members of the AdSense team. These live video chat sessions will give you the opportunity to share your product feedback with our Product Managers, ask your questions to our optimization specialists, and get to know many others who work on AdSense. We hope that through these Hangouts on our page, you’ll also have the chance to meet other AdSense publishers from around the world to share your experiences and best practices.

Be sure to follow us on Google+ today and join the conversation!

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

The Google AdSense Forum Community invites you to our housewarming

We hope that by now you've found the AdSense Help Forum to be the best place to ask questions, search for answers and share tips with other AdSense publishers. We've been listening to your feedback about forum features you'd like to see, and we're excited to announce that we’ve moved the AdSense Forum (together with all its content, users and user levels) to a brand new solution: Google Product Forums.

The new Google Product Forums platform, which is built on Google Groups, offers members of the AdSense Community improved search across the forum, Help Center and the blog.
At the same time, the most important features of our current forum, like levels and marking a Best Answer, will continue to be available in the new forum. Additionally, your browser bookmarks and links to the content in the old forum will still work, as you’ll automatically be redirected to the new one.

Google Product Forums also includes some new features that you've told us you'd like to see. For example, you’ll be able to add a “Me too!” vote to a question to quickly share that you’re interested in the question. You’ll also be able to +1 your favorite topics. We hope you’ll enjoy the modern look and feel of the new forum.

Visit the Getting Started Guide to learn about basic features of the new platform.

Join the conversation and discuss this post in our revamped AdSense Forum!

Posted by Kateryna Malinovska, AdSense Community Manager

2012: Our resolutions to improve AdSense for you

It's already a few weeks into the new year, but it's never too late to set resolutions. That’s why today we'd like to share the outcome of our bi-annual publisher satisfaction survey. If you’re opted in to receive occasional surveys from us, you may have seen or filled out this survey. Over 28,000 of you participated globally, and we received more than 33,000 comments on your favorite aspects about AdSense as well as changes you’d like to see.

The main areas of improvement that emerged from the survey are: AdSense Program Policies, AdSense Support, and Communication from AdSense. Your feedback is very important to us and we'd like to share some insights on what we've done in these areas so far and how we want to further improve them. We’re also working on improving in other important areas like payments and we'll continue to report back on those throughout the year.

AdSense Program Policies
Many of your comments in the survey showed that you’re interested in more transparency around our program policies and which ad implementations are allowed. We’ve started adding more resources like our regular blog posts about specifics of our program policies and we're also working on:

• Making the violation messaging clearer to ensure the actions you need to take are clearly highlighted.
• Providing you with more information on how to contact the AdSense policy team and where to find important resources.

AdSense Support
We know that it’s important for you to get quick answers to your questions, and that’s why we have a variety of support resources available. However, you’ve told us that you sometimes struggle to find the information you need, or would like to be able to address questions directly to our team. With this in mind, we’d like to address two main points:

• After a ground-up rebuild of our AdSense Help Center we’ll continue to focus on improving usability and content quality in 2012. We’ll also be testing more personalized support options and want to make the available levels of support clearer for you.
• In the coming months, we’re hosting events in various countries to give you the opportunity to meet the AdSense team in person, ask questions, and get optimization tips. We want to be more accessible for you, so opt in to our “Special Offers” emails in order to receive event invitations and watch out for more information on our Inside AdSense blog or the AdSense newsletter.

Communication from AdSense
As you might know, in addition to receiving messages in your AdSense account, you can subscribe to receive occasional emails from AdSense with performance suggestions, special offers, and newsletters. We asked for your thoughts on the emails we’ve been sending, and  based on your feedback, here’s where we’ll be focusing on making improvements:

• We’ll collect and share new case studies focusing especially on small to medium sized publishers, with examples from specific verticals or industries to make our optimization suggestions even more relevant for you and your website.
• Following your suggestion to feature more local updates, we’ll incorporate local content in our AdSense newsletter, whenever possible.

A big thank you to everyone who participated in this survey! If you’d like to participate and share your thoughts with us in upcoming surveys, make sure you update your email preferences to receive “occasional surveys to help us improve AdSense”.

Posted by Sophie Emmerich, on behalf of the AdSense Publisher Satisfaction Team

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year from the AdSense team! We enjoyed celebrating the holiday and hope you did too.

Cheers to 2012!

Posted by Jamie Firkus - Inside AdSense Team