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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