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.
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.

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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