Year in review: 2011

A lot of great things happened this year in AdSense, so as 2011 comes to an end, we’d like to take this opportunity to reflect on some of the highlights.

New Interface
We fully transitioned to the new AdSense interface and launched a number of new features including bulk edit, multi-dimension reporting and ad styles. We also launched a video series highlighting some of the functionalities of the new interface.

Social
2011 was a big year for all things social at Google, which included many improvements for our AdSense publishers. We introduced the +1 button, first on the Google search results, then on publisher sites and display ads. Based on your feedback, we made +1 buttons faster and provided reporting options. Most recently, we launched Google+ Your Business and Google+ Pages to help you grow your audience and start conversations with the right people.

AdSense in Your City
We met many of you in person through our AdSense in Your City events in North America and other similar seminars around the world. We’re continuing the program next year so make sure to check back for more details. Also, opt in to receiving special offers so we can send you details about AdSense events.

Payments
We expanded our payment options by offering Western Union in sub-Saharan Africa, Mexico, Palestinian Territories and numerous other countries. Your passion to help Japan after the devastating earthquake truly inspired us so we offered a way for you to donate your AdSense earnings.

Policy
We listened to your feedback about wanting to know more about our policies, so we dedicated monthly posts with tips on how to keep your account in good status. For example, we provided tips on creating unique content and information about invalid clicks.

Finally, we’d like to highlight our most popular blog posts of the year, as determined by your visits. Our post on new in-ads notice label and icon received the most visits from readers, and the post that you +1’d the most was our announcement about +1 buttons being added to display ads. Make sure to keep +1ing 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.

Thanks for your continued partnership throughout 2011 and for your support of the Inside AdSense blog. We look forward to seeing what 2012 brings!

Posted by Jamie Firkus - Inside AdSense Team

The power of Search Ads, now available on your mobile site

Recently on the Official Google Blog, we talked about the momentum we’re seeing in mobile search advertising. We also announced a new mobile search ad product: Custom Search Ads for Mobile Sites. We wanted to give some more details about this new format and how you can begin using it to grow your business on mobile.

As increasing numbers of users access websites using their mobile phones, more and more desktop publishers are bringing their businesses to the mobile web. You may have seen our recent initiative, ‘GoMo’, which is designed to help publishers and businesses take their site mobile.

Currently, publishers can monetize their mobile sites using AdSense for Mobile Content. We wanted to also help mobile web publishers earn from their search traffic, and so with Custom Search Ads for Mobile Sites, we're bringing the power of search ads to the world of the mobile web.

Mobile websites that provide a search option will be able to show ads related to search queries. Users will see ads relevant to what they're searching for, and publishers will open up a new revenue stream from their mobile properties.

Many mobile websites contain custom search functions that ask users to search within a variety of specific parameters. With Custom Search Ads for Mobile Sites, these parameters are taken into account to help determine what ad is shown and deliver the most relevant ad for a user's query. For example, in the image below you can see that someone using Trulia, a real estate search engine, is searching for properties in Washington, DC, and the ads match this query.

Trulia.com implemented Custom Search Ads on their mobile site. When a user scrolls through their search results (in this case, for property in Washington, DC), they are served both search results and Custom Search Ads relevant to their query.

Moreover, mobile web publishers can customize the look and feel of the ads to complement their site’s design and layout. Some of the customization options include changing the font size, background color and gradient. Custom Search ads can also be integrated into mobile apps with the same customization features and options.

We're currently accepting applications from publishers to use Custom Search Ads for Mobile Sites. If you're a mobile publisher or app developer interested in this product, apply now on the Custom Search Ads page.

Posted by Chris Monkman, Product Manager, Mobile Ads

Happy Thanksgiving

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day in the U.S so we’d like to take this opportunity to thank all of you for your dedicated participation in the AdSense program.

(artwork courtesy of Sofia Andrianakou)

Wishing our U.S. publishers a happy and turkey-filled Thanksgiving!

Posted by Jamie Firkus - Inside AdSense Team

New Layout for the Help Center

As AdSense has developed over years, the Help Center has also grown to help you answer your questions and learn more about AdSense. With continuous updates and articles being added regularly, however, the Help Center became increasingly difficult to navigate. Today we’re pleased to announce a redesigned Help Center, making it easier for you to access materials to answer your questions.  We’re excited to share some of the changes we have made to make the Help Center more user friendly.

With the new layout, you can quickly move through topics to answers and in the left navigation bar, you'll see all articles related to the same topic. The links along the top that show you how you've progressed through topics will help you navigate more quickly. In addition, we've reorganized help articles based on the task you're trying to accomplish. We hope that this will cut down the time it takes you to find the article you're looking for, make it much easier to find that content, and help you learn about AdSense.

In the new layout, you’ll recognize that we have four separate sections:

• Learn about AdSense contains all help articles organized by category.
• Fix an issue is for publishers that have a specific question.
• Additional resources in the right navigation bar has more useful information about AdSense.
• Get Started in the left navigation bar has basic information about AdSense and how to get started.

For security reasons, some forms require publishers to login. Thus, we recommend that you login to your account while you are visiting the Help Center, especially the “Fix an issue” section.

In the coming weeks, you may notice more design and layout changes that will make your Help Center experience even better. Combined with the new Help Center organization, we hope that these ongoing design changes will make your learning experience in the Help Center more enjoyable, efficient, and useful.

Posted by Özge Kökçü, AdSense Help Center Lead

Bringing the benefits of TrueView to our video publishers

It’s no secret that I watch a lot of video ads. It’s one of the perks (or pains!) of working in the video advertising business. And yet, I was surprised to see that my younger cousins were gathered around a laptop showing each other their favorite ads over the weekend. Maybe it runs in the family. More likely, people just love watching great content and engaging ads. Every statistic we’ve seen shows that sharing and watching online videos has become a part of everyday life, and that the gap between video ad spend and audience attention is slowly narrowing. At Google, we’re always trying to improve the experience of watching video ads. With that in mind, we’re rolling out a new ad format called TrueView to our network of video publishers.

TrueView ads, pioneered on YouTube, differ from traditional video ads in two main ways. First, they give viewers choice - for example, the ad may be skippable or present a choice of ads to watch. Second, TrueView ads are sold through a Cost Per View (CPV) basis. You may be familiar with Cost Per Click (CPC) where the advertiser pays when someone clicks on their ad; similarly with CPV ads, advertisers are charged when a viewer chooses to watch the ad.

For example, say you're about to watch an interview with the makers of a new movie on The Hollywood Reporter. A TrueView in-stream video ad will start to play and a counter will appear giving you the option, after five seconds, to skip the ad and continue watching the video.

We believe TrueView is a win for users, publishers and advertisers. Users have more control over the ads they see. Advertisers get to combine the engagement of video with the precision of online advertising. And publishers see higher returns, since advertisers value a truly engaged audience.

A small group of our AdSense for video publishers are already using TrueView ads on a portion of their video inventory, and have seen RPMs equal or better than standard pre-roll ads, while dramatically improving the user experience. TrueView video ads also help to decrease audience drop-off rates by 40% on YouTube Partner sites when compared to regular in-stream ads, which means more viewers are continuing to watch videos.

One of our partners The Hollywood Reporter has been experimenting with TrueView ads and has already seen a significant increase in viewer retention. Product Manager Reed Halstrom tells us, “We’ve seen video views increase by 21% and viewed minutes increase by 17% since we started using TrueView ads.”

If you have existing video content on your site and are interested in gaining access to TrueView video ads through AdSense for video, please leave your details by completing our online form. We’re committed to improving the overall online video viewing experience and will continue to work with our publishers and advertisers to make that happen - which should come as no surprise.

Posted by Payam Shodjai, Lead Product Manager, Video Monetization

Gold Star Partner Showcase

Over the past month, we highlighted homebuyinginstitute.com and govisitcostarica.com as the first two AdSense publishers in the Gold Star Partnership Showcase.  To recap, the showcase is an opportunity for us to publicly recognize some of our AdSense partners.

We asked publishers to submit their sites for consideration if they clearly demonstrate the following:

• Exhibit original, engaging and useful content for users
• Adhere to AdSense policies
• Test and try new ways to optimize AdSense ad placements

Today we'd like to highlight Max Levitte, founder of cheapism.com:

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Name: Max Levitte
Site: Cheapism.com
Vertical: Shopping
AdSense Partner for:  5+ years


Tell us about your site:
Called by The New York Times ‘a Consumer Reports for the cheap’, Cheapism.com is a budget-products review site, serving consumers who can only afford/wish to buy inexpensive products, but still want the best value for their money. Cheapism is the only review site that focuses exclusively on low-price products, a part of the market that is rarely reviewed by the experts.

What we do at Cheapism is research the low price products and services in various categories and then create a thorough buying guide on how to buy budget products in that category. Our editorial process involves defining the low-price range for each category, identifying must have features, summarizing key performance attributes, and then analyzing relevant reviews and recommending the best budget buys and what to avoid. We follow strict journalistic editorial guidelines when creating our content and take great pride in our articles.

What makes cheapism.com a great AdSense publisher?
We implement AdSense in a non intrusive way yet generate high eCPMs.  We also manage to generate a significant amount of our AdSense revenue from a link unit.

Why do you love AdSense?
Because it targets exactly what our visitors are looking for.
Because it saves us from having to deal with advertisers.
Because it generates most of our revenue.

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Finally, thank you again to everyone who submitted their sites for consideration!

Posted by Julia Riley, AdSense Partnerships

Meeting and collaborating with our Help Forum Top Contributors

A couple weeks ago, 32 AdSense Help Forum Top Contributors (TCs) from around the world came to our Mountain View headquarters for a two-day summit, along with almost 300 other product TCs. If you participate in our Help Forum, you've probably noticed the very visible presence of our TCs, who lead product discussions and help answer questions. During the summit, we spent a bit of time discussing opportunities for further collaboration, the development of the TC program and new ideas for Google Forum Communities.

Here are some fun facts about the AdSense TCs:

• There are 82 AdSense TCs worldwide.
• TCs posted over 100K times in the last 12 months.
• 8 of the TCs have posted more than 10K times in the Forum since they joined. We’d like to give a special mention to PeggyK of our English Help Forum, as she’s contributed an amazing 47,972 posts to date!

Thanks to all of the TCs who were able to join us -- we truly enjoyed meeting everyone face-to-face. We appreciate all of the contributions our TCs make to the AdSense community, and look forward to continued collaboration with them going forward.

Posted by Kateryna Malinovska, AdSense Team

Join us at GDC Online in Austin

This year the Google AdSense team will be attending the Games Developer Conference Online (GDC Online) expo on October 10th, 11th and 12th in Austin, Texas.

As part of the GDC Online, we’ll be hosting Google Developer Day where we'll share ways in which publishers can use AdSense and AdMob to monetize their online games, websites and mobile applications. After our session, we're looking forward to chatting with publishers and developers at the conference, and we'll also be available at the Google booth to discuss and demo our AdSense for Games, AdSense for Content and AdMob products.

If you have an online flash game or mobile app and are interested in the potential of earning revenue from ads, we hope you’ll be able to join us on Google Developer Day and visit our booth on the expo floor.  For more information on our presence at GDC Online, including session and speaker details, please visit the event site or read our related post on the Google code blog.

Hope to see you in Austin!

David Hall,  Google AdSense Partner Development

Gold Star Partner Showcase

Last week, we highlighted homebuyinginstitute.com as the first publisher in the Gold Star Partnership Showcase.  The showcase is an opportunity for us to publicly recognize some of our amazing AdSense partners.

Out of hundreds of submissions, we selected three publishers who clearly demonstrate the following:

• Exhibits original, engaging and useful content for users
• Adheres to AdSense policies
• Tests and tries new ways to optimize AdSense ad placements

Today we'd like to highlight Todd Sarouhan, founder of GoVisitCostaRica.com:

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 Name: Todd Sarouhan
 Site: GoVisitCostaRica.com
 Vertical: Travel
 AdSense Partner for: 5+ years

Tell us about your site:
“GoVisitCostaRica.com is a very informative travel website dedicated to traveling to and within Costa Rica. You can plan your perfect Costa Rica vacation; on the beach, in the forest or next to the volcanoes. See why Costa Rica is one of the best countries to vacation in.”

What makes govisitcostarica.com a great AdSense partner?
“We have a great use of AdSense within our large amount of content.”

Why do you love AdSense?
“AdSense has been a great add on to our monthly income for our very popular travel website.”

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In the next couple of weeks, we’ll highlight our final Gold Star Partner so be sure to keep an eye on the blog!

Posted by Julia Riley, AdSense Strategic Partnerships

Gold Star Partner Showcase

A few weeks ago, we announced the Gold Star Partnership Showcase as an opportunity to publicly recognize some of our amazing AdSense partners.



We asked you, our blog readers, to submit your sites for consideration and to tell us why your site should be featured. After carefully reviewing each submission, we've selected three publishers that we believe clearly demonstrate the qualities we were looking for:

• Exhibiting original, engaging and useful content for users
  
  
• Adhering to the AdSense policies
• Testing and trying new ways to optimize AdSense ad placements
  
  

We'll share the stories of these three publishers over the coming weeks. Today we'd like to highlight Brandon Cornett, founder of HomeBuyingInstitute.com:

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Site: HomeBuyingInstitute.com

Vertical: Real Estate

Name: Brandon Cornett

AdSense publisher for: 3-5 years



Tell us about your site:

“The Home Buying Institute is an educational resource for home buyers. In addition to publishing in-depth tutorials on the home-buying process, we conduct our own consumer research. We share all of this information with our readers, and at no cost. We also publish a real estate news blog that is currently included within Google News.”

What makes homebuyinginstitute.com a great AdSense partner?



“We publish unbiased information and advice for home buyers. We are not trying to sell them anything, like most housing-related websites. We are dedicated to creating a smarter class of home buyers and homeowners, to reduce the chances of another housing crisis.



We are currently finishing a major content overhaul. Over the last few months, we have been updating and/or expanding every single article on the site. More than 200 new articles have been published since March 2011.”

Why do you love AdSense?

“Revenue. Simplicity. Reach.”

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Finally, we want to thank everyone who took the time to submit their site for consideration! It's always great to see the vast array of sites in the AdSense network, and we hope you'll continue to develop and optimize your sites.



Posted by Julia Riley, AdSense Strategic Partnerships