Posted by Katrina Kurnit - Inside AdSense Team

Want to be invited to upcoming events like AdSense In Your City? Make sure you check the box next to Special Offers when you edit your email preferences so you can stay up-to-date with giveaways and other special programs in your area.

Want tips from the AdSense team for how to earn more with your AdSense account? Check Customized help and performance suggestions and/or Newsletters so we can offer personalized guidance to improve performance and maximize your revenue.

Want to help us improve AdSense by testing out features like the new AdSense interface? Check Google Market Research and you’ll be able to share your valuable feedback with us through surveys and beta tests.

Want promotions and key updates for other Google products that can help you grow your AdSense business? Check Information about other Google products and services which may be of interest to you so we can send you news and coupons based on your potential needs.

We want to help you earn more with tips and promotions, invite you to in-person events, and gather your feedback so we can continue to improve AdSense. So log in, update your preferences, and take advantage of the opportunities coming your way from the AdSense team!

Posted by Katrina Kurnit - Inside AdSense Team

• What: Blogger’s 11th birthday celebration!
• How: Sign up for a Meetup near you or get one going in your town.
• Where: Anywhere you are.
• Who: Everyone! You never know who might show up.
• When: Any time on Tuesday, August 31, 2010
• RSVP: www.meetup.com/bloggerfiesta

Posted by Katrina Kurnit - Inside AdSense Team

With sensitive category blocking, you can prevent ads from up to 11 specific categories from appearing on your pages. Ads in these categories will be blocked if they’re in any of the supported languages, regardless of how they’ve been targeted to your pages.

If you’d like to set up sensitive category blocking, please sign in to your AdSense account and visit the Ad Review Center, located under the ‘AdSense Setup’ tab. Once you click ‘change,’ you’ll be able to view the full list of categories you can block. In addition, to help you understand the impact of applying these filters, we’ll show you the percentage of revenue and ad impressions you’ve been receiving from each category in the last 30 days.

For more information about sensitive category blocking, we encourage you to visit our Help Center.

Posted by Katrina Kurnit - Inside AdSense Team

We’ve converted the maintenance start time for a few cities around the world:

London - 6pm Saturday
Alexandria - 7pm Saturday
Hyderabad - 10:30pm Saturday
Jakarta - 12am Sunday
Perth - 1am Sunday

To learn more about what goes on during these maintenance periods, check out this Inside AdSense post.

Posted by Katrina Kurnit - Inside AdSense Team

Despite our varied interests (ranging from hot sauce to sheepdogs, ab workouts to online video games), every single person in that room was connected by their intense passion for their site’s subject, experience with AdSense, and desire to learn more.

We covered a lot in a single afternoon, and the Googlers learned a lot about your needs and concerns. Whether it was a feature request for the new user interface, a question about what Analytics report to check to help maximize ROI, a clarification about how to leverage DoubleClick for Publishers Small Business, or an optimization tip for the group, I was thrilled to see such lively discussion and engaged participation.

My favorite part of the day was getting some one-on-one time with a few publishers during the cocktail reception and individual optimization sessions. Regardless of site content or amount of product experience, everyone I spoke to shared a similar story: the money earned from AdSense has allowed them to spend more time doing the things they love. Some had more time to build great content for their users, others to quit their day job and blog about their favorite hobby. I was lucky enough to speak to two publishers who shared that AdSense not only allowed them to spend more time with their families, but even to put their kids through college.

Though Boston was the last stop of the AdSense In Your City roadshows, we hope to come visit more of you in the coming months. We’ve looked at all of the comments left so far, and will be sure to ask all of you before we decide where to go next. Make sure you’re opted in to receive special offers via email so we can invite you to events like this, and hopefully AdSense will get to see you in your city very soon!

Posted by Katrina Kurnit - Inside AdSense Team

Most every business, including ours, starts small. These days, technology is giving businesses even more ways to grow bigger… faster.

In our recent Small Business series on the Official Google Blog, a handful of real-life entrepreneurs have shared their experiences building companies from scratch and embracing Internet tools that have taken their businesses to the next level. We’ve received fantastic feedback about these posts, and realized that there’s a healthy appetite among small- and medium-sized business owners who want to know all about the latest web tools and tricks. Fortunately, we have lots more to share with you, too!

That’s why we’re introducing the Google Small Business Blog, a central hub that brings together all the information about our products, features and projects of specific interest to the small business community. Rather than having to sleuth around in many different locations for details about templates for creating video ads on YouTube, tips for your employees using Gmail or how to respond to the business reviews on your Place Page, you can find all of this helpful information right here in one place.

Of course, we’ll continue to post relevant news about individual services such as AdWords, Apps, Google Places and YouTube on their respective “home” blogs, but feel free to visit or subscribe to the Google Small Business Blog to get everything relating to your small business needs. We’re starting small today, but who knows what tomorrow will have in store!

Posted by Deanna Yick - Small Business Blog Team

• Leaderboard (728×90): the title, description, and URL are now arranged in rows instead of columns (except in the case when only one ad is showing)
• Medium and large rectangles (300×250, 336×280): the URL is now in the same line as the title

In certain cases, you’ll also see a few minor adjustments to the font size. For example, the font size for the leaderboard with four ads is much more readable. Please note that these changes will roll out over the next few weeks.

During testing, the redesigned ads performed extremely well. We’ll continue to experiment and innovate on our formats to help you monetize your content, and we encourage you to submit ideas in the comments below.

Posted by Amy Wu - AdSense Product Manager

I’m really looking forward to meeting some of you in person at our AdSense in Your City events and engaging with you through our other social media channels. If you don’t already, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, and leave us some comments so we know what you’d like to hear more about. We want to make sure that you’re getting the information you need, and will do our best to provide you with whatever content you find most interesting and useful. To start things off, we’re giving the blog a little makeover so it’s easier to read and navigate. You should notice the new background soon, and we’d love to hear what you think!

For any technical or account questions, check out the Help Forum, where you can interact with AdSense employees, Top Contributors (expert AdSense users vetted by the AdSense team), and a vibrant community of online publishers ready and willing to answer your toughest questions.

No matter which channel you choose, we look forward to interacting with you. See you in cyberspace!

Posted by Katrina Kurnit - Inside AdSense Team

As you probably already know, our self-service publisher program, the Yahoo! Publisher Network Online (YPNO) was closed effective April 30, 2010.

Accordingly, the YPN blog—this blog—will be shut down in about a week.

The most pertinent content over the last four years has already been shifted to the Yahoo! Advertising blog. You can find it under the Publisher tab. After we shut the YPN blog down the YPNblog.com URL will automatically redirect to the Yahoo! Advertising blog,

Since our very first post, the YPN blog’s authors and editors have strived to serve the interests not just of Yahoo! Publisher Network partners but publishers everywhere, with helpful tips and tricks on how you can be better and more profitable at what you do. And we will continue to serve your interests on the Yahoo! Advertising blog. (And let’s face it, the line between publishers and advertisers is disappearing, so it makes sense to treat both in a single space.)

After the YPN blog is closed down and the URL redirected to the Yahoo! Advertising blog, publishers wanting look back at our content will be able to do so from a link on the Yahoo! Advertising blog Publisher page.

To all of our publishers and partners, past and present, we wish peace, love and sock monkeys!

— The Team

Local advertising is definitely a sector we are extremely exciting to be getting into. We have partnered with some guru’s in the local ad industry, like YellowBook and CityGrid Media. The potential benefits of
Chitika | LAX are going to be plentiful for Chitika publishers as this will bring a great new way to monetize local traffic that was, until now, ignored.

LAX will work in two different ways, there will be a Chitika | LAX for Desktop & Chitika | LAX for Mobile. Your local search traffic on a standard home computer will see an ad featuring a map of local businesses matching what they’re looking (searching) for near them, as well as local listings- it will look something like this:

For your mobile search traffic, LAX is the first solution that will automatically detect the mobile users and adjust their experience accordingly. One touch (touch to call) will allow potential customers to call local advertisers from the mobile ad. This ad will look something like this:

(click to enlarge)

Chitika | LAX will be available soon!!

Click here to learn more about Chitika | LAX
Click here to read our LAX Press Release

AdSense for search with CSE gives you more control over your search results without changing how you earn money showing AdSense for search ads. For example, with the new version, you’ll have access to advanced features like refinements and promotions. Our team has developed a number of updates and improvements during the past few months, and you can access more advanced features at www.google.com/cse.

Your existing AdSense for search box will continue to work normally for a few more months, and we’ll be sure to update you when we retire this version. To take advantage of the benefits offered by the new version of AdSense for search and ensure you don’t miss any revenue during the transition, we encourage you to update your code now. You’ll just need to regenerate your AdSense for search code by signing in to your account and following these instructions:

1. Visit your “AdSense Setup” tab and select “AdSense for Search.”
2. Select the sites you’d like your users to be able to search across (Learn More).
3. Customize the look and feel of your search engine results.
4. Update the code on your website.

For more information about AdSense for search with CSE, please visit our Help Center.

Posted by Katrina Kurnit - Inside AdSense Team

We hope you’ve enjoyed learning more about what goes on behind the scenes in AdSense. If you have feedback on this series, or ideas for future series, we’d love to hear them so please leave us a comment!

Posted by Katrina Kurnit - Inside AdSense Team

• Optimization Best Practices
• AdSense for Search
• AdSense Top Tech Tips

If you haven’t seen one yet, you can view the recordings of these events whenever it’s convenient for you!

Posted by Caroline Halpin - AdSense Optimization Team

• Optimization Best Practices
• AdSense for Search
• AdSense Top Tech Tips

If you haven’t seen one yet, you can view the recordings of these events whenever it’s convenient for you!

Posted by Caroline Halpin - AdSense Optimization Team

For more videos, please visit our YouTube channel.

Posted by Katrina Kurnit - Inside AdSense Team

If you’re keen on letting us know how you feel about our product and support, remember that you can opt-in to receive invitations to test new features, surveys about Google AdSense, and heads up about opportunities to provide feedback about your experiences by email. To do so, log-in to Google AdSense and visit the settings page under the ‘My Account’ tab, edit your ‘Email Preference’ by checking the box next to ‘Google market research’, and click ‘Save Changes.’

We look forward hearing from you!

For more videos, please visit our YouTube channel.

Posted by Dia Muthana - Inside AdSense Team

Fact: We rely upon a detailed set of guidelines when looking at policy violations, and these policies are published in our Help Center. Our intent is to keep Google’s content and search networks safe and clean for our advertisers, users and publishers. We seek to be as transparent and consistent with our decision making.

Part of our job of monitoring the AdSense network involves working with publishers to identify and address potential issues. We understand that there are a lot of policies to take into account, and so for minor policy violations our first step will be to issue a warning. The reasons a publisher might receive a warning will vary, but in general they tend to be for violations that can be fixed fairly easily. Examples of these violations range from deceptively labeling ads “Today’s hot deals” to having a minimal amount of adult-content comment spam in a forum. Publishers, after receiving a warning, are given three days to fix their violations. If changes are not made in that time, ad serving will be disabled to the violating site.

There are some situations when we would need to disable ad serving to a site without first sending a warning. We usually reserve this action for egregious violations like adult content, copyright infringement, as well as cases of extreme violence and gore. We may also disable ads to a site when we find a violation that we’ve already contacted a publisher about in the past.

The final and most severe action that our teams can take is to close down an account completely. This normally only happens when we find that a publisher’s entire network consists of violating sites or for repeat policy offenders. If you have received a policy notification from the AdSense team, please visit this help center entry for additional information.

We want to point out that notifications that result from the previously mentioned policy violations are different from notifications sent because of issues with invalid click activity, which are monitored by Google’s Ad Traffic Quality Team. Invalid click activity consists of any clicks or impressions that may artificially inflate an advertiser’s costs or a publisher’s earnings, and for which we decide not to charge the advertiser. For more information about invalid clicks and impressions, please refer to this page, which includes a link to our FAQ page for accounts disabled due to invalid activity.

Lastly, we highly recommend reviewing these guidelines to help avoid policy violations, and to help keep your AdSense account in good standing.

Posted by Andres Schabelman - AdSense Policy team

Over the next few weeks you’ll find out just that! We’re kicking off a video series where you’ll meet some of our AdSense team members. You can hear their stories, learn more about their role in AdSense, and listen to the tips they have to offer.

In the first video, Debby, a member of the AdSense Optimization team talks about her favorite websites, what she likes about working for Google, and the Google products that she recommends every publisher try.

Posted by Dia Muthana - Inside AdSense Team

Our product and engineering teams have been hard at work to bring you ideas from the wishlist. We still have more to do, but wanted to share some of the progress so far:

You asked for…More transparency about how much you’re earning from AdSense.
What we’ve delivered…The AdSense for content and AdSense for search revenue shares are now publicly shared.

You asked for…The ability to block certain categories of ads, like religion and dating.
What we’ve delivered…Category blocking (previously known as category filtering) is now available in 13 languages. You can filter up to 11 ad categories, including religion, dating, politics and weight loss.

We’ve also been developing a new version of the AdSense interface. Although the interface is currently in beta, it addresses many of the requests we saw on the Product Ideas page. Take a look at the improvements that the new interface offers:

You asked for…Make it easy to change addresses when we move from one location to a new one.
What we’ve delivered…You can make requests to change the country of your payment address directly in the new AdSense interface. (Due to legal and system constraints, some country updates will still require you to create a new account.)

You asked for…Automatic revenue tracking to quickly and easily compare performance of ads of different sizes and types.
What we’ve delivered…The new AdSense interface offers Ad units, Ad sizes, and Ad types reports in the Performance Reports tab. These detailed reports cam help you understand which individual ad units, ad sizes, and ad types perform best on your site.

You asked for…The ability to view data for a custom date range, similar to Google Analytics.
What we’ve delivered…The new AdSense interface includes a date range selector just like Google Analytics. Plus, to see how your earnings have changed over time, we also have a feature that allows you to compare two date ranges. Simply select the date range you want to compare, check “Compare to other dates”, fill in the start date, and we’ll fill in the end date for you!

You asked for…More time frames for analyzing metrics. Specifically we heard the wish to “select the same period of time and say group by week or month to see the trend.”
What we’ve delivered…Reports by week and month, in addition to by day, are available in the Performance Reports page. Along with reports for “Entire account by day” you can choose from weeks and months.

If you’d like the new beta interface enabled in your account, you can make a request.

Thanks for all your ideas and votes. Your ideas and feedback help our teams determine where we should be spending our time, so keep them coming!

Posted by Becky Feren - Product Specialist

Fact: Although there can sometimes be delays in the stats pipeline, all data is still tracked accurately.

We call the process of tracking your clicks, impressions, and earnings the “stats pipeline.” The stats pipeline runs continuously, reviewing the logs of activity written by our ad serving system, aggregating them, and updating the storage system. So that we can generate these statistics quickly and reliably, without losing any information, the process of aggregating your statistics spans several data centers.

Sometimes in rare cases, the process for aggregating stats can be delayed for several hours. This can happen for a few possible reasons:

• We sometimes make updates to our datacenter to make use of the latest technologies. However, these don’t affect how your clicks are tracked or how much you earn. Depending on the time it takes for the updates to complete, you may notice that stats are delayed by several hours.

• We have scheduled database down-times, generally on Saturday mornings (Pacific Time). Since the process of aggregating your statistics depends on database data, any such downtime also leads to delay in statistics. I’d recommend reading this Inside AdSense post for more information about these downtimes.
• On rare occasions, data centers can have unforeseen problems, causing unplanned delay in updating statistics.

These downtimes only delay your statistics — they don’t impact the actual tracking of your statistics. We make sure that all events are processed exactly once, and we have implemented a number of internally and externally audited verification procedures to ensure that this is the case. Also, events in the aggregation pipeline are processed in a way that’s not specific to a particular publisher, so all of you should get your stats updates at the same time.

When downtimes occur, we work to notify publishers in advance and as quickly as possible using this blog, the AdSense Help Forum, and our Known Issues page. We understand how important it is for you to have up-to-date statistics, and continue to work towards making sure that the delays are kept to a minimum.

Posted by Dia Muthana - Inside AdSense Team

That’s why we put together Google Ad News. Powered by Google News, Ad News is a simple but powerful way for anyone in the advertising industry to track current news coverage on relevant subjects such as display, search, mobile and even traditional media - all in one place. Subscribe to news feeds in the categories you care about most, or search to find coverage on topics related to your business, such as your niche industry or brand.

We invite you to check it out and share it with your colleagues. Hopefully, you’ll find lots of relevant news that’ll help you spend less time scouring the web and more time building your business.

Posted by Oliver Deighton - Business Marketing Manager

The Google Display Network will comprise all of the sites where advertisers can buy ads through Google, including the over one million AdSense and DoubleClick Ad Exchange partners as well as YouTube and Google properties such as Google Finance, Gmail, Google Maps, and Blogger. As an AdSense publisher you’re already part of the Google Display Network. We’re not making any changes to how AdSense works, so no action is required on your part. If you use AdSense for search, your AdSense for search ad space won’t be part of the Google Display Network. Advertisers will continue to be able to purchase ads on your search results pages in the same way they always have.

While this new name reflects our significant investment to bring more display advertising to your sites, we want to make sure you know that we are still committed to delivering relevant text ads. If you receive text ads on your sites today, rest assured that you will continue to do so. The Google Display Network offers all ad formats - text, image, rich media, and video ads - enabling advertisers to unleash their creativity and engage visitors on your websites in various ways. If you haven’t opted into receiving image ads, we encourage you to do so in order to benefit from the investments we’ve made.

We’re working hard to offer the best display advertising solutions, and we look forward to continuing to introduce new features on the Google Display Network that help advertisers reach their goals and that help our AdSense publishers earn more revenue.

Posted by Neal Mohan, Vice President of Product Management

Fact: There are many factors we have to consider when launching EFT in new countries. In the meantime, please know that we’re always working towards expanding our payment options for publishers in all regions.

Where we can provide in-country EFT depends on a number of factors. Whenever we launch Electronic Funds Transfer, our fastest payment method, in a new country, we hear a number of requests to launch it in even more countries. Don’t worry — we hear you! We’d like to launch EFT in as many countries as possible, but there are many things that we need to take into consideration before launching it, including legal and banking restrictions.

We’re working constantly to overcome the hurdles to launch EFT in more countries, so thanks for being patient with us. We also know that you are the local experts — if there are payment methods that we don’t offer, but would work well for you otherwise, please leave us a comment! We’d love to have good suggestions from those who know best.

Posted by Posted by Elizabeth Ferdon - AdSense Payments team

As we shared in February, Yahoo! and Microsoft have formed a search alliance that we believe will help provide more rapid innovation and better monetization to our partners. Innovating search and search advertising is essential to Yahoo!’s strategy and will help deliver more value to partners like you.

Over the last several months, we’ve been working closely with Microsoft to develop a high-quality transition experience for our partners. While there’s nothing you need to do at this time, we did want to let you know that your Yahoo! account manager will be in touch in the coming weeks to provide you with a detailed overview and to answer any questions that you may have.

Transition timing
Our priority is to make this transition as seamless as possible for you. We know how important the holiday selling season is to both our advertisers and partners. That’s why our aim is to complete the transition in the U.S. and Canada before the start of the 2010 holiday season.

Next steps and resources
Please note there are several resources to help you stay up to date on the transition:

Transition Center – The Yahoo! Transition Center includes articles, downloadable materials.
YPN Blog – The Yahoo! Publisher Network blog will post regularly about the transition.
Updates – We’ll send you updates via email, and your account managers will reach out to you directly, so you won’t miss a thing.

We are committed to making this transition as seamless and beneficial for you as possible. We appreciate your business, and look forward to bringing you the benefits of the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance.

— The Team

What is changing in my reports?

With the addition of these CPM ads, we will no longer be reporting on clicks. Because of this, the CPC and CTR values in your reports now become quite irrelevant and alter your focus from your actual revenue earnings. We feel that removing the CPC and CTR fields, will help you see the most important aspect of your earnings: your revenue.

How should I read my reports?

Focusing on your impressions and the revenue earnings for those impressions will show you the CPM rate you are getting. Previously, your CPC and CTR stats did not include stats from CPM ads on your site. So as of today, your reports will now give you a breakdown of Impressions, CPM and Revenue.

Fact: It only takes seconds to convert your custom channels into targetable placements. This simple change can help increase your visibility to advertisers, and boost your revenue.

Advertisers already take advantage of contextual targeting to have their ads appear next to your content. They also have the option to selectively target sites they know are relevant to their ads — when you’ve created targetable placements, advertisers can dig even deeper and find the most relevant sections of your site to place their ads.

If you’re not familiar with channels, check out our Help Center for steps on how to change your custom channels into targetable placements.

When writing the description of your channel, keep in mind things an advertiser might like to know. For example:

• What kind of content does this channel reflect?
• Is the channel on a specific section of your site (e.g. a forum section, blog section, etc.)?
• Are your ads above-the-fold (ATF)? In other words, can a user see them without needing to scroll down the page?
• Who is your target audience (gender, interests, income level, etc)?

Your description may resemble something along the lines of: “This is a 300×250 ATF ad unit on the football section of a sports blog. My audience is 75% male, age 18-35, earning between $50,000-$80,000 per year.”

To see the impact that placement targeting has on your site, check out this YouTube video on generating reports that break out your contextual and placement targeted revenue.

You can further increase your visibility to advertisers by taking full advantage of DoubleClick AdPlanner, a media planning tool that allowed advertisers to find their audiences across the web. Take a look at our earlier blog post to find out more.

With these small changes, you make it easier for advertisers to find your site, increase your placement targeting potential, and open the door to generating more revenue.

Posted by Rishan Mohamed - Inside AdSense team

The Mega unit is a non-conventional ad size, and Chitika is the only company that offers it. Because the ad unit did so well for a test group of publishers, we made it available for all. The Mega Unit comes in sizes: 550×250, 500×250.

We realize that some sites do not have the space to place such a wide ad unit, but you still would like to receive the benefits from it. So, now available is the Mega Unit Jr., size: 468×250:

This will give you the large, successful size of the Mega Unit for those who do not have a 550 or 500 pixel space.

To try this size out, simply edit the ad code on your page, or generate a new ad in your code panel:

This all began with feedback from you, please let us know what you’d like to see!

To register for this webinar, please visit our Help Center.

The topics we’ll cover in this webinar are:

• How to determine which ad variations perform best for you
• How to use HTML/CCC to wrap text around ad units
• How to ensure your best-performing ad units are defined first in your ad code
• Using Google Analytics to better understand your users and make your ad implementations more effective
• Using Webmaster Tools to increase the index and rank of your site

Prior to the webinar, you can post your questions on our Google Moderator page and we’ll address them during the webinar.

Posted by Caroline Halpin - AdSense Optimization team

As you may already know, AdSense is comprised of several products. The most popular are AdSense for content, which allows publishers to generate revenue from ads placed alongside web content, and AdSense for search, which allows publishers to place a custom Google search engine on their site and generate revenue from ads shown next to search results. Since AdSense for content and AdSense for search offer publishers different services, the revenue shared with publishers differs for each of these products.

AdSense for content publishers, who make up the vast majority of our AdSense publishers, earn a 68% revenue share worldwide. This means we pay 68% of the revenue that we collect from advertisers for AdSense for content ads that appear on your sites. The remaining portion that we keep reflects Google’s costs for our continued investment in AdSense — including the development of new technologies, products and features that help maximize the earnings you generate from these ads. It also reflects the costs we incur in building products and features that enable our AdWords advertisers to serve ads on our AdSense partner sites. Since launching AdSense for content in 2003, this revenue share has never changed.

We pay our AdSense for search partners a 51% revenue share, worldwide, for the search ads that appear through their implementations. As with AdSense for content, the proportion of revenue that we keep reflects our costs, including the significant expense, research and development involved in building and enhancing our core search and AdWords technologies. The AdSense for search revenue share has remained the same since 2005, when we increased it.

We also offer additional AdSense products including AdSense for mobile applications, AdSense for feeds, and AdSense for games. We aren’t disclosing the revenue shares for these products at this time because they’re quickly evolving, and we’re still learning about the costs associated with supporting them. Revenue shares for these products can vary from product to product since our costs in building and maintaining these products can vary significantly. Additionally, the revenue shares for AdSense for content and AdSense for search also can vary for major online publishers with whom we negotiate individual contracts.

Of course, we can’t guarantee that the revenue share will never change (our costs may change significantly, for example), but we don’t have any current plans to do so for any AdSense product. Over the next few months we’ll begin showing the revenue shares for AdSense for content and AdSense for search right in the AdSense interface.

We hope this additional transparency helps you gain more insight into your business partnership with Google. We believe our revenue share is very competitive, and the vast number of advertisers who compete to appear on AdSense sites helps to ensure that you’re earning the most from every ad impression. Additionally, when considering different monetization options, we encourage you to focus on the total revenue generated from your site, rather than just revenue share, which can be misleading. For example, you would receive $68 with AdSense for content for $100 worth of advertising that appeared on your site. If another ad network offers an 80% revenue share, but is only able to collect $50 from ads served on your site, you would earn $40. In this case, a higher revenue share wouldn’t make up for the lower revenue yield of the other ad network.

We’re continually working on helping you improve the returns from your site while giving you more control and insight into AdSense. For example, we continue to improve our technology so that we can deliver even better matched ads and attract even more advertisers to your websites. Additionally, we recently began providing more granular ways to find and review the ads on your site, as well as the ability to filter more ads by category. We’re also focused on finding other ways to make AdSense better for you. As you may remember, last December, we asked for your ideas and feedback on how we can make AdSense better. We received more than 600 suggestions and 35,000 votes, and we’ve been reviewing them all.

Keep an eye on this blog for updates about the new features we’re building to help you maximize your advertising revenues.

Posted by Neal Mohan, Vice President, Product Management

With category filtering, you can prevent ads from up to 11 specific categories from appearing on your pages. Ads in these categories will be filtered if they’re in any of the supported languages, regardless of how they’ve been targeted to your pages. To start using category filtering, sign in to your AdSense account and visit your Ad Review Center, located under the ‘AdSense Setup’ tab. Once you click ‘change’, you’ll be able to view the full list of categories you can filter. In addition, you can see the percentage of revenue and ad impressions you’ve been receiving from each category in the last 30 days; this information can help you understand the impact that applying filters might have.

To learn more about category filtering, please visit our Help Center.

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

AdSense for Search Ads Only

You may remember that last year, we introduced the Custom Search element to help you easily bring Google search results and ads to your site. More recently, we introduced data rendering to give you even more control over how the results are shown to your users.

We understand that some of you may have your own, non-Google search results that you’d like to monetize. In the past, this typically meant that you weren’t able to use AdSense for search ads. Now, with AdSense for search ads only, publishers can now include AdSense for search ads on their pages and pair them with their own, homegrown search results.

By adding just a few lines of JavaScript to your page, you can display AdSense for search ads above, beside, or below your own search results. You can pick the size, shape and number of ads displayed in each block, and you can even adjust the style of the ads to better fit the look and feel of your site. For instance, check out how seamlessly MerchantCircle has integrated AdSense for search ads only above and next to their search results.

AdSense for Ajax

Whether your site offers your own search results or not, if you have dynamic content, you may be interested in delivering your AdSense for content ads with AdSense for Ajax. With traditional AdSense for content, ads refresh only when a page is reloaded. This works great — but isn’t optimal when your site relies heavily on Ajax, which allows visitors to navigate a lot of content without actually leaving a single page. Also, sites that generate a lot of dynamic content that isn’t crawlable are difficult to target accurately.

Here’s where AdSense for Ajax comes in. With AdSense for Ajax, your AdSense for content ads will refresh whenever there’s a context change - regardless of whether the page reloads or not. Travel site trip.com has taken advantage of this by showing relevant ads based on the selected tab. Try clicking on the “Hotels” tab. The page doesn’t reload, yet the Ads by Google have refreshed to show ads more relevant to hotels than flights.

In addition to the ads refreshing, you might wonder why the subject of the ads changed since the crawlable content on the page didn’t change much when the tab changed. The second benefit of AdSense for Ajax is that it allows you to provide hints about your site’s uncrawlable content with each refresh.

Both of these AdSense features can be easily added to most sites by just copying and pasting a few lines of JavaScript code, which will help you show highly relevant ads to your visitors.

Sound right for your site? Please sign up to try out AdSense for Ajax or AdSense for search ads only today!

Posted by Adam Feldman, Product Manager and Michael Brandell, Product Specialist

You can register for this webinar through our Help Center.

In this webinar we’ll cover:

• Implementing and customizing AdSense for search
• Optimizing your search results using AdSense for search performance
• Improving your search results using keywords
• Custom Search Engine advanced features

You can already start asking questions related to this topic on our Google Moderator page and we’ll do our best to address them during the webinar.

Posted by Posted by Caroline Halpin - AdSense Optimization team

Great news for publishers with traffic in Europe! We will be slowly expanding your ad display to your traffic in the following countries: UK, GB, DE, IT, ES NL, DK, NO, SE

Your Earnings Quick Report table that’s available right in your dashboard after you login, will show you a 7-day rundown:

Additional custom reporting will be available in your advanced settings:

Click to Enlarge

Please note: We will be displaying ads to only a portion of this traffic to start, and you may see some abnormalities in your impressions counts for international stats. These will be ironed-out soon.

Vik Chhabra, Director of Business Development at Chitika, was asked to present on the: Developing Any City panel.

Not all cities are created equally. What core strategies can be used to monetize any city’s potential, regardless of size or tourism numbers (or lack thereof).

Vik Chhabra speaking at GeoDomain Expo 2010

Alden DoRosario, Co-Founder & CTO, Chitika spoke on a panel about “What Works for Ad Networks: Technology Challenges” at AppNexus Summit 2010.

Alden was joined on a Technology Panel with others who represent the richness of innovation happening in the ecosystem of technology. Click the video below or click here to watch.

For the past month, we at Chitika have been experimenting with a UI optimizer for some of our highest-performing sites, and our beta partner sites have seen as much as a 30% lift in their clickthrough rate.  Now, we’re excited to announce our entire network is getting the opportunity to see our research at work, making your site’s ad performance jump from a Porsche to a Lamborghini!

The UI optimizer works by testing a large number of ad designs in the same spot on your page.  For example, we may have fifteen ad styles designed for a single 300 x 250 spot.  With our optimizer, we’ll test all fifteen styles over a period of time – that way we’ve got numbers to show you which look-and-feel variant works the best for your traffic.  Once the testing period ends, you’ll see the highest-performing design in that spot, and it’ll bring its specially-targeted clickthrough rate with it!

Now, the 30% increase in CTR is the best result so far and your mileage may vary, but we are 100% confident that you’ll love the results of working with Chitika’s UI optimizer.  By the end, you’ll know absolutely that the ad units on your site are the very best, most effective, and most appealing units for your users.  Your users will be happy, you’ll be happy, and your wallet will be very happy.

Optimizing today will help you see the clicks and money roll in tomorrow!

1. AdSense Optimisation Best Practices
   Wednesday 12th May at 5pm GMT

In this webinar we’ll guide you through how you can implement AdSense on your site for optimal results. We’ll cover:

• Optimizing your AdSense for Content implementation by choosing the right placements, ad formats and colour palettes
• Tracking the results of your changes via channels
• Improving the user experience and generating additional revenue with AdSense for Search

You can sign up for our webinars through our Help Center. These webinars are also available in German, French, Italian, Spanish and Russian. Just change the language drop-down to see what’s available in your market.

Prior to the webinar, you can start asking questions related to this topic and vote on others’ questions in our Google Moderator. We’ll answer as many questions as possible during the live event. If you’re not familiar with Moderator, please check out our Google Moderator Help.

Posted by Caroline Halpin and Miguel Romar - AdSense Optimization Team

We’ve converted the maintenance start time for a few cities around the world:

London - 5pm Saturday
Alexandria - 8pm Saturday
Hyderabad - 10:30pm Saturday
Jakarta - 12am Sunday
Perth - 1am Sunday

To learn more about what goes on during these maintenance periods, check out this Inside AdSense post.

Posted by Dia Muthana - Inside AdSense team

Posted by Matthew Carpenter-Arevalo - Inside AdSense team

In the first part of our video series the AdSense team’s own Vijay Vachani will walk through the ins and outs of the DoubleClick Ad Planner. Vijay will explain how advertisers find information about your site through the Ad Planner, and how you can take advantage of the features available in the Ad Planner’s ‘Publisher Center”.

Posted by Posted by Matthew Carpenter-Arevalo - Inside AdSense team

My team and I work mostly with medium-sized businesses that try to be as efficient as possible with their online ad spend. In the past, we found that direct response campaigns (which ask users to make a purchase or sign up for a newsletter) were more common than pure branding campaigns. However, I’ve seen firsthand that advertisers are slowly but surely beginning to understand the value of online advertising as an extremely cost-efficient, effective and measurable branding mechanism.

As publishers, this means that you’ll have more opportunities to capitalize on the increased ad competition that brand campaigns bring. Below I’ll explain what types of brand campaigns we see, how advertisers select publishers to include in brand media plans, and how you can ensure that your sites make it in.

Types of Branding Campaigns
The most important difference between direct response and brand campaigns is that brand campaigns aren’t focused on driving direct conversions. The goals of online “pure brand” campaigns are very similar to offline ads: reach a specific audience with a sticky message that builds recognition, favor, and/or credibility of the brand. Another type of brand campaign called “brand response” aims to reach a targeted audience and elicit some form of action. Common types of brand response goals include increased searches on brand terms, unique visitors to the advertiser’s site, and user interaction on site.

To achieve these goals, most brand campaigns have the following characteristics:

• CPM pricing
• Flighted dates (specific, short period of time for an advertising campaign)
• Display ads
• Placement targeting* (Brand advertisers, especially pure brand advertisers want to ensure that they reach a specific audience by targeting certain sites)

*Though placement targeting is the traditional method for branding, we are seeing a lot of successful brand response campaigns running both placement AND contextual targeting.

Building a Media Plan
When advertisers choose sites to include in the media plan for a brand campaign, they consider much more than ‘will it convert?’ The top things on their minds as they choose sites to target are:

• Does it have a high composition of their target audience?
• Is it aesthetically pleasing?
• Does it have highly visible, above-the-fold inventory?
• Does it accept image, flash and video ads?
• What is the average CPM?

Boost Your Chances of Being Included in a Brand Media Plan
As mentioned, brand campaigns are great for publishers because advertisers are willing to pay a premium for sites they want to show on. This means more revenue for you.

One of the best ways to maximize the chances of being included in a media plan is to update your site information in the Ad Planner Publisher Center. Google Ad Planner is the media planning tool advertisers use to select inventory on the content network. Ad Planner allows advertisers to filter sites by audience composition, accepted ad formats and sizes, reach, unique visitors and daily pageviews.

Other important steps you can take:

• Accept image and video ads
• Provide above-the-fold, premium placement ad slots
• Open up real estate on your homepage
• Opt to receive placement targeted ads

Posted by Claire Kemerling - AdWords Content Specialist team

How do I pitch the Content Network? To many of my advertisers, the Content Network can be tricky to navigate. The network’s reach is vast and with hundreds of thousands of sites, it can be difficult to choose the most relevant sites. The key here is finding the body of traffic that is already somewhat interested in their products/services. This is always my focus when pitching Content advertising to customers.

There are many industries or “verticals,” into which our advertisers are grouped. Part of my job is to share Technology industry information with our advertisers and guide them to Technology websites. For instance, I work with some clients who sell smart phone accessories like skins, covers, faceplates, and chargers. But where should they place ads on the vast Content Network? It’s my team’s job to point the in the right direction. In this case, I’d recommend several types of websites and also recommend some types of sites to exclude because they may be less relevant. Advertisers may want to target sites with gadget reviews or online publications about technology. Well-targeted and relevant people will see the cell-phone ads there.

I always pitch the network as a place where advertisers can engage with their target audience at the moment of relevance. Once the ads are in front of the right eyes, it’s a great way for advertisers to engage with their customers online.

Posted by Sharon Park - AdWords Content Specialist team

As you may know, publisher ad servers like DFP help website owners better manage and deliver ad campaigns they’ve sold directly to advertisers as well as ads that are allocated to third parties, such as ad networks. The DFP platform also integrates directly with AdSense and the DoubleClick Ad Exchange to provide an even more dynamic solution for managing advertising from multiple sources.

The new DFP introduces many important innovations to ad serving such as an intuitive user-interface, sophisticated reporting and forecasting tools and a flexible application programming interface (API). We believe that these improvements will help our publishers work faster, grow their businesses, and help them maximize the value of each and every ad impression. More details about the DFP Small Business roll-out are available on the new DoubleClick Publisher Blog.

Posted by Jonathan Bellack - Group Product Manager, Publisher Ad Platforms

Please keep in mind these important points:

• Payments will continue to follow our normal payment schedule and will be available for pickup at your local Western Union agent the day after they’re issued.
• You’ll need to present a government-issued ID that matches your AdSense payee name when picking up your payment. If you need to update or correct the payee name listed in your account, please follow the instructions in our Help Center.
• Right now, only individual payee names can receive payments by Western Union, not businesses.
• Payments must be picked up within 60 days of issue, or they’ll expire and be credited back to your account.
• Payments will be made in US dollars, but depending on your local Western Union agent, they may be picked up in your local currency.

These instructions will help you to sign up, and our Help Center has more info about picking up your payments and other countries where Western Union payments are available.

Posted by Deborah Chang - AdSense Payments Team

A Chitika | Select Success Story

Gao, being a long-time fan of online games, one day decided to start his own online game site. “I noticed girl names were incredibly popular, so I registered domain: AllForGirls.net November 6, 2007”. The website features free online games for girls in which he is able to include his own created games. With the help of his great production team, they often include new games to keep the site fresh and fun.

One year later, Gao started using Chitika ads on the site. He always customized his Chitika ads very nicely to match the color scheme of his very colorful website, and has had a steady income stream from Chitika for 2 years.

Before Chitika launched Select ads at the beginning of last month, Gao along with the remaining Chitika publisher network relied on Chitika Premium (search-targeted ads) for revenue. However, many including Gao were missing out on potential revenue from their non-search traffic.

With the addition of Chitika | Select ads, which display to some non-search traffic (see below for more), AllForGirls.net experienced a 97% increase in revenue. Gao did not have to make any updates to his existing Chitika ad units; if you are using Premium on your site, Select ads will automatically start to display.

So why don’t we display ads 100% of the time for maximum revenue?

User experience plays a major role in the way Chitika chooses to show ads. Striking the right balance between both user experience and revenue, is what we believe to be very important to publishers. While displaying ads 100% of the time can give a publisher a higher revenue, it can have a negative impact on your visitors. This is why Chitika Select ads, will display to your search traffic as well as a “select” portion of your non-search.

The “select” portion of your non-search is the key. How we determine this portion is how we were able to take it a step further using our click-prediction technology. Explaining to a publisher that we don’t just focus on the revenue earning aspect of the spectrum is what makes Chitika different; we are the only advertising network to provide this technology. You can read more on this here.

Are Chitika Select ads on my site(s)?

We have been rolling out Select ads slowly across the Chitika Network. Once Select ads start to appear on your site, you will see an increase in impressions as well as a new Select/Premium comparison stats graph when you login.

Submit your testimonial or story to be featured here.

If you use Plesk Panel to manage your website, you can now create a new AdSense account from Plesk to help monetize your website content. Also, your AdSense account is automatically associated with every Custom Search engine you configure, so that relevant ads are displayed above your search results. When users click on these ads, you earn revenue.

If you already have an AdSense account, there’s no need to create a new one - just configure your existing account within Plesk.

Posted by Ryan Rennaker, Account Strategist - AdSense API

In the picture above, Gui is holding his brand new iPad he received as a gift from Chitika CEO, Venkat Kolluri for putting together the data so quickly.

“I am super thankful and very excited to own my very own iPad. I also can’t wait to get into developing new apps for this thing.”

What is this iPad estimator and how was it born?
Gui Pinto was the recipient of a very early phone call from Chitika’s CTO, Alden DoRosario last Saturday morning in which he told him, “I have an idea…”.

Gui spent the next 12 hours putting together the data & the page featuring real time stats! During the duration of writing this post, there were 768,480 iPads sold, but if you click here now, it will be more than that.

The estimator gives you a breakdown of adoption by hour and by state. How did we do it? You can read more into the technical stuff here.

I know I am looking forward to more of Alden’s ideas =)

In our biggest performance overhaul to date, the link units engineering team recently completed a full rewrite of the link unit matching system. The new system is much smarter: it not only uses more sophisticated topic ranking algorithms but also continuously optimizes by learning which topics have the most appeal to the visitors of your site. The results are overwhelmingly positive — topic quality, user response rate to topics and ads, and monetization metrics have all improved in significant, measurable ways.

If you aren’t already using link units on your pages, I encourage you to give them a try. They’re space-efficient and can help provide additional AdSense revenue. Visit your ‘AdSense Setup’ tab and select ‘AdSense for content’ to get started, or learn more in our Help Center.

Posted by Jerry Krikheli - Engineering Manager for Link Units

This change is part of our efforts to provide the best possible search experience for our users, as we’ve found that faster sites create happy users. Our internal studies show that visitors tend to spend less time on sites that respond slowly, and additional recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. For these reasons, we’re now taking site speed into account in our search rankings.

Site speed is just one of over 200 signals we use to determine search ranking, and because it’s a new signal, it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. In fact, less than 1% of all search queries on google.com are affected by the site speed signal. We launched this change a few weeks back after rigorous testing. If you haven’t seen much change to your site rankings, then this site speed change possibly did not impact your site.

In general, a website would have to be particularly slow for its ranking to be affected. We look at the time it takes to load all components of a page that contribute to page speed, including images, rich media, and Javascript/HTML/CSS code.

AdSense is built to load ads quickly so there’s no need to change your AdSense setup. Even so, we are working to speed up our ads products further. In addition, we also want to give you some suggestions of things you can do on your side, like enabling compression for your site, enabling caching of images, JavaScript, and CSS, and minimizing the size of your JavaScript with Closure Tools.

If you’d like to learn more about speeding up your website, or evaluate your site’s speed, we encourage you to look at Site Performance in Webmaster Tools and try developer tools such as Page Speed, YSlow, and WebPageTest.org. Please note that at this time, the only way to determine whether your site has been affected is if you’ve seen a recent change in your search ranking.

For more information on this change, please visit our Webmaster Central blog.

Posted by Richard Rabbat, Product Manager

We’ve converted the maintenance start time for a few cities around the world:

London - 5pm Saturday
Lagos - 6pm Saturday
Bangalore - 10:30pm Saturday
Manila - 1am Sunday
Adelaide - 2:30am Sunday

If you’d like to learn more about what goes on during these maintenance periods, check out this Inside AdSense post.

Posted by Dia Muthana - Inside AdSense team

Advertisers with branding goals usually run cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM) flighted campaigns to launch something new, or remind people about their brand during strategic periods of time. In addition, flighted campaigns help advertisers get the most out of their budget. For example, instead of taking a $12,000 yearly budget and spending $1,000 per month, an advertiser might spend $3,000 per month during strategic periods, and not advertise at all (or as much) during the rest of the year. Instead of spreading budget evenly using ‘always on’ campaigns, these advertisers can make a greater impact by using high budgets in short bursts to get more impressions and frequency than they could otherwise achieve.

Flighted campaigns with direct response (DR) goals usually use CPC bidding and promote an event, like a sale or a concert. Instead of focusing on engagement and building recognition, DR campaigns strive to elicit a specific response from their target audience (e.g. purchase a concert ticket, go to a holiday sale).

Now that I’ve talked about why advertisers run flighted campaigns, let’s return to how this affects your business as a publisher. Even though revenue from flighted campaigns is not continuous, these campaigns can be very valuable. Since flighted campaigns need to garner impressions/responses in a short period of time, advertisers usually bid high in order to guarantee placement of their ads. This can mean that during these short-term campaigns, your eCPM may increase.

Flighted campaigns can be unpredictable, but there are steps you can take to ensure that you reap the benefits when they’re running on your sites.

1. Make sure to allow image ads on your sites, as many flighted campaigns use display.
2. Opt into placement targeting so advertisers can find and specifically target your sites.
3. Open above the fold ad blocks since these spots are desirable to advertisers, especially during flighted campaigns.
4. Add information about your sites to the Ad Planner Publisher Center to attract advertisers and help them understand the value of your sites.
5. Understand your users. This will help you anticipate the types of advertisers who want to target your sites and when they intend to, which can help you to monetize it more efficiently.

Posted by Lauren Weitzman - AdWords Content Specialist team

If you are interested in viewing additional webinars, you’ll find last year’s recordings in our Help Center.

Posted by Caroline Halpin - AdSense Optimization Team

During our extensive alpha testing, we found that this font performed especially well on sites catering to two specific audiences: cryptologists and carrier pigeons. Even if your site’s visitors aren’t usually comprised of these two groups, this font face can reduce ad blindness and we encourage you to test it on your sites. As a reminder, you can choose to update the font face of specific ad units, or apply your settings account-wide.

To get started with Wingdings, follow these instructions.

We’re continuing to look for ways to improve your monetization potential, and we’ll be sure to let you know of any updates right here on our blog. We’re looking forward to the positive effects this launch will have for publishers, users, and advertisers.

Posted by the Inside AdSense Team

Earlier today, Yahoo! emailed a small group of publishers participating in the Yahoo! Publisher Network self-service beta program (also known as “YPNO” or “Yahoo Publisher Network Online”), to inform them that we have decided to close the program effective April 30, 2010. This only affects our self-service platform for small publishers who syndicate our Content Match (contextual) listings.

No change for large partners/affiliate network
This decision does not affect nor impact our relationship with large direct publishers and partners in any way. As Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz has stated previously, our publisher (or affiliate) network is an important part of our business, and Yahoo! will continue to invest and innovate to ensure that our publishers realize the best value possible from our partnership.

No change to Content Match ads
Publishers participating in the self-service beta program displayed our advertisers’ Content Match ads (or text-based ads), but this made up only a small amount of total impression volume. Advertisers’ Content Match ads will continue to be displayed on our large, direct partners’ sites, as well as across relevant content on Yahoo! sites. Sponsored Search ads are not affected by this announcement at all.

Publishers with questions regarding this announcement are welcome to contact us through the YPN portal.

— The Team

1. Contextual Targeting
2. Placement Targeting
3. Remarketing

Advertisers choose a particular targeting option depending on their overall goals. You might be most familiar with contextual targeting, which enables advertisers to choose broad themes that match the content of your site. For example, if I’m marketing my cheese shop, I create a keyword list that includes terms such as “cheese,” “gourmet” “cheese,” and “delicatessen,” among others. This would allow my cheese shop ads to show up on sites about gourmet cheeses as well as next to content on other sites that mention gourmet cheeses.

At the same time, some advertisers are interested in showing their ads on specific sites because they find a match between the site’s visitors and their offerings. They can do this using placement targeting; in general, advertisers who tend to be more brand-sensitive use placement targeting because they can choose the sites where they want to show their ads.

More recently, we’ve opened up remarketing, which enables advertisers to target ads to users they’ve previously interacted with, to all AdWords advertisers. At the same time, users can continue to control the ads they see by using the Ads Preferences Manager.

To help advertisers target your sites, we recommend ensuring that there’s a clear theme to each of your pages, if you’re going to allow for placement targeting, create sections of your pages that clients can target easily. Lastly, think about your site from an advertiser’s perspective.

Posted by Joanne Liu - AdWords Content Specialist team

The category filtering feature allows you to prevent ads that fall into specific categories like ‘religion’ and ‘dating’ from appearing on your pages. You can filter categories by visiting your Ad Review Center, located under the AdSense Setup tab. Click the ‘change’ link to view available categories to filter. Your selections will be applied to ads in English, French, German, and Spanish, no matter how they’ve been targeted to your site.

We also recommend taking a look at the columns showing how much of your recent revenue and ad impressions are generated by each of the categories. This will give you an idea how applying these filters may affect your account.

Thanks for continuing to provide your feedback about category filtering. We’ll be sure to keep you posted with any additional updates. In the meantime, please feel free to visit our Help Center for more information about the feature.

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

I’m happy to say that this is one of my goals and also one of my team’s goals. My name is Lindsey Kurz, and I manage a team that helps advertisers understand how to best use AdSense sites in the Google Content Network to reach their marketing objectives. We focus on educating advertisers of all sizes on Content Network best practices, and how they can find success running campaigns on AdSense publisher sites.

You, our publishers, help our advertisers by offering high-quality inventory. My team’s job is to help advertisers understand how to make the best use of that inventory. One example of how we do this, is by helping advertisers understand how to connect with users of a site. For example, when someone’s reading an article, what kind of ad do they want to see? Chances are, they’re browsing for information, so an ad promoting how to “learn more” may perform better than an ad asking them to “buy now.” My team helps advertisers understand these differences to create the most relevant ads for your users. These ads then go through our targeting algorithms and standard ad auction to compete to appear on your pages.

Look for more posts from my team over the next few weeks. We’re excited to share with you more details about what we suggest to advertisers. We’ll talk about the specific recommendations we provide, such as advising advertisers to use a Placement Performance Report to optimize a Google Content Network campaign, along with more broad suggestions, like changing messages to reach different audiences.

Posted by Lindsey Kurz - AdWords Content Specialist Manager

The study posted the ad networks that spread the malware at the highest rate, and lo and behold, Chitika was nowhere to be seen.  The Chitika ad network appears to be safe.

I asked our CTO, Alden DoRosario, about what we can take away from this, and here’s what he said:

“The Chitika text ad units are currently one of the safest forms of ad revenue for publishers.  The text-based advertisers and the code that runs in each ad unit is written and controlled by Chitika — ensuring that no third-party code runs on your site.

“Historically, ad networks get into trouble when they take un-verified third-party code from advertisers and deploy it on their publishers’ sites.  This is very common in ad networks that run graphical ad units which need access to Flash and other scripting technologies.”

So there you have it, Chitika publishers.  Straight from the boss’s mouth – the Chitika ad network is one of the safest on the Internet.

• Are your search results hosted on your own webpage? When implementing your AdSense for search box, you have the option to display the search results either on a site hosted by Google or on your own webpage. If you choose the second option, make sure you select an existing site to host the results, such as www.example.com/searchresults. Once you’ve selected a site to display the search results, hit ‘Submit and Get Code’ and you’ll generate two sets of code:
  1. The first is for the search box, to be implemented on the site where you would like to place the search box
  2. The second piece of code has to be pasted on the results page

Please be sure not to place the two sets of code on the same page, as this will prevent the search box from working correctly. Also, note that the option to host the result on your own page is not available for Blogger sites.

• Is your AdSense for search code nested within FORM tags? A form tag is used to create an HTML form for user input, such as text fields, buttons, and checkboxes. The code you receive for your search box uses an HTML FORM to submit the search queries. In order for the AdSense for search code to work properly, it can’t be nested within another set of FORM tags on a page. To implement the AdSense for search feature on your page, please paste the code into your pages outside of any existing FORM.

Posted by Ulrike Jung - Inside AdSense Team

We’ve converted the maintenance start time for a few cities around the world:

London - 5pm Saturday
Dar es Salaam - 8pm Saturday
Chennai - 10:30pm Saturday
Singapore - 1am Sunday
Sydney - 4am Sunday

If you’d like to learn more about what goes on during these maintenance periods, check out this Inside AdSense post.

Posted by Dia Muthana - Inside AdSense team

Allowing these ad networks to compete for your display ad space means that more ads will be eligible to appear on your pages, leading to potentially higher earnings in the long run. Our system will show the ads that will generate you the most profit, whether they’re from these Google-certified ad networks or the AdWords program. As a reminder, all Google-certified ad networks are required to adhere to our standards for user privacy, ad quality, and speed. In addition, you can use the controls in your Ad Review Center to specify which ad networks can appear on your pages.

Finally, some ad networks use tools similar to Google’s interest-based advertising to show more relevant ads to users on the sites they visit. We’ll allow certified networks who comply with user privacy guidelines to show ads using these tools, but they won’t be permitted to collect data from your site for the purpose of subsequent interest-based advertising. You’ll be able to opt out of receiving ads based on user interests from these certified networks, and we have changed our requirements for third-party ad serving to reflect this. We’re dedicated to providing users with a positive experience, while helping publishers effectively monetize the ads appearing on their sites. We believe you’ll find that more competition translates into better ads and increased revenue in the long run.

We’re continuing to certify additional ad networks, so please keep in mind that you won’t see immediate changes in your earnings or ads. As we continue to add new ad networks, you’ll see them appear in your Ad Review Center. To learn more about managing your account settings and Google-certified ad networks, visit our Help Center.

Posted by Atul Bhandari - AdSense Product Manager

Posted by Siobhán McCormack - Inside AdSense Team

Chitika has always been a publisher centric advertising network, working with publishers to maximize advertising revenue and giving them choices about how to do that.

We understand that all publishers have an inner dialogue about how to maximize revenue and grow the business, but also create the greatest user experience possible.  Often times strategies to maximize revenue are perceived to be the worse options for ensuring high user experience.  Take for example putting up another ad unit.  More ads means a worse user experience, right? Well hold on.

Squidoo is uber concerned with visitor experience.  So adding a Chitika | Select ad to their page would seem to go against their philosophy of creating the highest quality user experience.  Turns out that wasn’t the case.  Here’s why:

1. Chitika and Squidoo worked together to customize the look and feel of Chitika’s ads to perfectly integrate with Squidoo’s themes.  We worked on a custom title and colors that fit both Squidoo’s metrics of quality but also ensuring performance and revenue.
   
2. Chitika’s targeting technology can decide when to show an ad or when to disappear.  Yup that’s right, we don’t show ads all the time risking your visitors experience.  We think smart impressions is more revenue and user experience.  Based upon a number of metrics our ads show selectively and that helps protect Squidoo’s most loyal visitors by insuring that we won’t show them ads.

The end result is that Squidoo is enjoying additional revenue while protecting their impressive brand and high user experience.  How could Chitika help your site increase revenue and user experience?

• Competitive Ad Filter You can enter the specific URL of an ad into the Competitive Ad Filter to prevent ads from that site from appearing on your pages. If you’d like to block ads coming from an entire domain, enter a top-level domain such as www.example.com to block all ads that link to subdirectories below that domain.

• Ad Review Center The Ad Review Center, located under the AdSense Setup tab in your account, lets you review and filter any placement targeted ads that are appearing on your pages. You can filter ads by type (text or image), or by individual ad groups and advertisers.
• Category Filtering To use the category filtering feature, you first have to enable the Ad Review Center. Category filtering allows you to block ads from up to 8 categories such as dating, politics, and weight loss, from displaying on your pages. Ads in these categories will be filtered if they’re in English, French, German, or Spanish, regardless of how they’ve been targeted to your pages.

If you still see filtered ads are appearing on your site after you’ve used these features, please take note of the following:

• Ad filters should become effective within 30 minutes, but in rare cases might take up to 48 hours to be effective. Review the information in our Help Center for more information.
• If you use both AdSense for content and AdSense for search, and wish to filter an ad from appearing in both products, make sure that you’ve entered the correct URL in question in both filters.
• If you display ads from more than one AdSense account on one page, you need to filter the URL(s) in both accounts.

That brings us to the end of our troubleshooting series for AdSense for content. Stay tuned next week for tips on troubleshooting issues with AdSense for search.

Posted by Ulrike Jung - Inside AdSense Team

Well, last week I attended SMX West in San Jose, and had the pleasure of meeting and interviewing Sasi Parthasarasy, one of the brilliant minds behind Bing, and asked him just that.  Let’s see his response:

Thanks Sasi for your candor, and your advice. You heard the man, folks: secure up those sites, and blow readers away with awesome content!

• Customized help and performance suggestions
• Newsletters
• Google market research
• Special offers
• Information about other Google products and services which may be of interest to you

If you’d like to receive emails with optimization tips that are targeted to your specific account settings and ad implementation, you’ll need to choose the category Customized help and performance suggestions. You’ll receive roughly one email per month from us with targeted performance suggestions, so you don’t have to worry about your inbox overflowing with messages from us.

In case you aren’t currently opted into this category, we’d like to recommend that you update your preferences to be able to receive Customized help and performance suggestions going forward and not miss out on valuable information on how to optimize your AdSense performance.

Posted by Annette Vorstoffel - AdSense Optimisation team

So on Monday, am I suddenly going to be showing a ton of different/strange ads on my site?
No – not at all.  We will be gradually rolling this out, starting with a very small amount of additional “Select” impressions.  As we gather more feedback and performance data, we will increase the amount of additional “Select” impressions that we show.

Why is this an opt-out instead of an opt-in?
Simply due to your feedback.  Ever since we launched Chitika | Premium 2 years ago, 90% of publisher feedback has been that you love how we monetize search traffic, but you want to also earn money from the rest of your traffic too.  Since the vast majority of you want to be able to do this, we are automatically turning it on. To give you some idea: Google shows ads for 100% of your traffic. Chitika currently shows ads for less than 30% of your traffic (about 60% of US traffic across our network). Given the huge available opportunity – this was a no-brainer that a lot of our publishers are asking for. However, in all this — please note that our core philosophy of not bombarding the user with ads still remains. We will only show ads when we really believe that the user will benefit from them — the rest of them time, the ads will continue to collapse.

For publishers who DO NOT want this new functionality, it is very easy to opt-out.  Just login to your Chitika account and go to the “My Account” tab.  The opt-out is at the bottom of the page.  [Update: We will be giving you multiple levels of control -- so you can opt-out/opt-in at an account level, or only for certain ad units.  See how to do this below.]

How does Chitika | Select choose when and when not to show an ad?
We determine when (and when NOT to) show an ad by using our new click-prediction technology. What is click-prediction technology, you ask? We have been conducting HUGE amounts of research over the past 1 year which allows us tremendous amount of insight into how users interact with ads. For example, did you know that IE users are twice as likely to click on an ad as FireFox users? These types of statistical studies are the core of this new predictive technology. This type of analysis is common in other industries such as insurance, credit cards, etc., and now Chitika is bringing that to online advertising. [Note: This new click prediction technology has been running on select publishers on parts of our UK traffic for the last 3 months -- the results have been outstanding]

Your premium ads look at the search terms used to arrive on the site – as a result you get really relevant results- what about Select, how will we know the ads are something I want on my site and/or relevant?
The Chitika | Select ads may or may not be relevant to your content – however you can be SURE that they are relevant to the user.  Remember – the Chitika | Select technology will determine the likelihood of whether an ad is a good match for that user or not.  This is how we are able to command a high eCPM – by selectively showing ads when we know that they have some value for the user.  Remember: For these new ads, what YOU see might be a lot different than what your READERS are seeing (this is similar to the “interest based” ads on Google Adsense — its targeted to each user). However, since they are targeted to the user — they command higher CPMs than untargeted ads.

What do you mean by “Image ads”?  What do these look like?
Just like Google AdSense’s image ads, these will be high-quality graphic/banner ads from major brand name advertisers.  We will only choose to show graphic/banner ads if they command high CPMs.  These are the same ads that run on top ComScore 500 publishers’ sites.

I do not want image/graphic ads on my site!  But I do want to use Chitika | Select – is that possible?
Yes – in the opt-out section, you can keep Chitika | Select switched on, but opt-out of the image ads part of the service. Our goal here is to give you the options and the controls. We understand that no single size fits all.

Can I see a breakdown showing my earnings from search (Premium) vs. my earnings from non-search (Select) traffic?
Yes.  You will be able to run reports on this that separate the 2 types of ads that are showing – this will give you an accurate read on how well each type of ad is performing for you.

Can I keep my search-only ads where they are, but add new placements for the Select ads?
Yes.  If you want to use both the current Chitika | Premum ads and Chitika | Select, you should opt-out of Chitika | Select, and then you can just add this line of code into your new ads which will enable them for Select:

ch_select = "enabled";

Or vice versa – if you want to turn all of your existing ads into Chitika | Select, but then keep 1 or 2 ad Premium, you should stay opted-in to the new Chitika | Select service.  Then you can add this line of code to the 1 or 2 ads that you want to show to search-only:

ch_select = "disabled";

What if I am using an Alternate Ad to show to my non-search traffic?
Your Alternate Ad will continue to function just like it did before.  However, Chitika | Select ads will override it whenever we feel that we can earn an eCPM yield that is similar to or greater than what you are earning on your search traffic.

Can I be assured that only family-friendly ads are displayed?
Just like Chitika | Premium ads, we do our very best to ensure that our ads are family friendly. We do not allow adult advertisers or do business with adult advertisers. Period. These ads are filtered by multiple parties using various filtering tools.  Again – all of these ads are sourced from major brand advertisers and are shown on top ComScore 500 sites, so there is little room for error.

In the rare case that an ad would somehow slip through this, you are able to block ads by merchant and keyword from your “My Account” tab in your Chitika account.  Also, you can submit any offending advertiser URL’s to our customer support team and we will have them removed immediately.

What about traffic outside the US and Canada?
Stay tuned!  With Chitika | Select technology we will be incorporating lots of new advertising partners, and we will be able to open up to more than just US and Canada traffic.  This will begin to happen slowly and ramp up as we continue to roll the service out.

So… what other questions do you have?  What other info/features/etc. would you like to see added to this?  Please share your thoughts in the comments below!

For example, an advertiser selling DVDs online may want users to click through and make purchases, while a brand advertiser for an upcoming summer blockbuster may want to generate awareness among users. Because of their campaign goals, brand advertisers tend to be more selective about the sites their ads run on, as well as where on the page their ads appear. We want to help these new advertisers compete for the portions of your ad space that are most attractive to them so that we can increase your earnings over time.

With that in mind, we’re launching a new beta advertiser feature that we believe will help accomplish this goal. The new feature enables brand advertisers to target their ads to ad units that are immediately visible when a page is loaded — in other words, the portions of the page a user can see without needing to scroll down. The ads that are immediately visible are called ‘above the fold’; those that require a user to scroll down in order to be seen are called ‘below the fold.’

In order to determine which ads are above and below the fold, we’ve implemented a statistically-driven model. The model takes into account various user experiences and situations, including different web browsers, monitor sizes, and screen resolutions, and only considers ads above the fold if they are fully on-screen when the browser window loads.

If you’ve placed your ad units above the fold, advertisers using this feature will now be able to reach your site in a new way. If you haven’t, placing new ad units above the fold will enable them to do so. We believe this feature will help attract new brand campaigns to AdSense sites, bringing more revenue to publishers over time.

Posted by Aaron Rothman - Product Manager

This upgrade to Premium ads on will allow Chitika ads to reach more visitors and directly increase your Chitika ad revenue.  We estimate Select ads could give publishers a 5 – 10% revenue increase on top of Premium ads alone.

How do Chitika | Select ads work?

Using our click-prediction technology, Chitika | Select ads will display only when there is a higher chance the ad will be clicked. The percentage of non-search traffic that will see the Select ads will vary from site to site.

FAQ’s

Can I Still Use Chitika | Select With Google AdSense?
Yes! Just like the Chitika | Premium ads you can use the new Chitika | Select ads and AdSense together on the same page.

How Can I Upgrade My Chitika | Premium Ads?
You don’t need to, it will happen automatically Monday, March 8th 2010.

Are Chitika | Select Ads PPC (Pay-Per-Click)?
Chitika | Select will always show the highest-paying ads possible. This will include PPC ads as well as CPM image/banner ads (which pay per impression, whether a user clicks or not).

Will Chitika | Select Ads look different than Chitika | Premium?
Sometimes. Similar to how Google shows image/banner ads if they determine that it is the highest paying ad for a certain user visiting the site, we will do the same. Some of your users will see ads with the Chitika | Premium format and others will see ads that look different but will pay more.

If you would rather have your Chitika ads continue to ONLY show to your search traffic, you can opt-out of Chitika | Select here.  *However by doing so, you will miss out on a potential revenue boost!

What do you think of our new Select ads?   Please comment below.

First, be aware that your AdSense reports are updated every 15 to 30 minutes, but can sometimes take up to 24 hours to update. So at times, if you don’t see the numbers you expect in your reports, be sure to check again later once your reports have been updated.

• Do you use the Allowed Sites feature? Allowed sites are websites or URLs on which AdSense publishers allow or wish to have their Google ads displayed. If you use the allowed sites feature in your AdSense account, be sure to add all the websites you’re displaying ads on, to the list of allowed sites. If you forget to add a sites where you’re displaying ads, then impressions and clicks on the sites will be shown in your reports, but advertisers won’t be charged and the clicks won’t earn any revenue.

• Do you have channels set up to track your clicks and impressions?
  • If your channel reports show more data than your aggregate reports, it might be the case that your domains or ad units are being tracked simultaneously on multiple URL or custom channels. If that’s the case, then to see your complete, accurate statistics, visit your Advanced Reports page. When you select the Aggregate Data radio button and click Display Report, you’ll see all clicks, page impressions, and earnings from your account with no duplication of data.

  • Alternatively, you may see that your aggregate reports show more data than your channel reports, even if all your pages are tracked with channels. This can occur sometimes when your page is displayed within a frame; in this case data won’t appear in your channel reports but will display in your aggregate reports.

Channel data can be a bit tricky, so make sure to pick distinctive names to differentiate between URL and custom channels — that way, you’ll know exactly what data you’re viewing. We also recommend checking out our optimization tips for channels to help you determine which ad units and placements are performing well, and how you can use this information to earn more revenue.

• If you have ad placements, have you named them accurately? Once you create channels for your ad units or domains, you can turn your custom channels into ad placements that advertisers can specifically target their ads to, using placement targeting. When entering a description for your channels to appear as ad placements, be sure to enter something informative and accurate to represent your site well.

Also, we advise you to be careful when renaming the ad placement as you will lose existing advertiser bids.

Next week, we’ll look at publisher controls and how to filter certain ads from appearing on your site.

Posted by Ulrike Jung - Inside AdSense Team

The DFP Small Business (formerly Google Ad Manager) webinar will take place on Tuesday, March 2nd. This webinar will cover how you can:

• Use DFP Small Business to sell, schedule, deliver, and measure all of your direct-sold and network-based ad inventory (including AdSense)
• Have AdSense backfill your directly-sold inventory and compete with your other ad networks
• Optimize your AdSense placements

The AdSense for search webinar will take place on Wednesday, March 3rd. In this webinar, you’ll learn how to:

• Optimize your AdSense for search performance
• Improve the relevance of your search results and ads using keywords

We encourage you to post your questions in advance of each webinar on our Google Moderator pages for DFP Small Business or AdSense for search.

Sign up for these webinars here! We look forward to seeing you soon.

Posted by Caroline Halpin - AdSense Optimisation team

As always, anyone can use the newly renamed DoubleClick Ad Planner whether or not they are a DoubleClick customer. The product remains free and open for everyone. The URL for publishers to update their profile remains the same: www.google.com/adplanner/publisher.

If you are new to Ad Planner, we invite you to learn more about claiming your site.

Posted by Wayne Lin - Product Manager, DoubleClick Ad Planner

• Have you blocked the AdSense crawler’s access to your pages? The AdSense crawler is an automated program that scans your web pages and tracks content for indexing. Sometimes we don’t crawl pages because the AdSense crawler doesn’t have access to your pages, in which case we’re unable to determine their content and show relevant ads. Here are a few specific instances when our crawler can’t access a site:

• If you use a robots.txt file which regulates the crawler access to your page. In this case, you can grant the AdSense crawler access by adding these lines to the top of your robots.txt file:

  User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*
  Disallow:

• If the sites you place the ad code on are behind a login, our crawler won´t be able to access your site. To grant access to such pages, please follow these instructions. Also, be sure to regularly check your site diagnostics tool to be aware of any blocked pages.

If you continue to have ad targeting issues or are unable to see your ads we recommend visiting the ad troubleshooter in our Help Center.

Posted by Ulrike Jung - Inside AdSense Team

Since Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick in March of 2008, we’ve been working to leverage the combined knowledge of our companies and the combined strengths of our product suite to develop an even more effective solution for ad serving and management. Today we announced the new DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) from Google, our next generation ad serving platform as well as DFP Small Business, a streamlined version of our new platform designed to meet the needs of growing publishers. The new DFP offers an even more intuitive workflow to help publishers of all sizes manage campaigns quickly and easily, while providing access to sophisticated feature set including advanced reporting, forecasting, and optimization capabilities.

Google Ad Manager publishers will automatically be upgraded to DFP Small Business in the coming weeks and we will be working closely with DoubleClick customers to upgrade them to our premium platform on a schedule that makes sense for their business. New publishers signing up for Google Ad Manager today will be automatically upgraded to DFP Small Business on the same schedule as current GAM publishers. To learn more about both versions of our upgraded ad serving platform you can visit this link.

Posted by Alexander Vogenthaler - Product Manager

We’ve converted the maintenance start time for a few cities around the world:

London - 6pm Saturday
Johannesburg - 8pm Saturday
Hyderabad - 11:30pm Saturday
Ho Chi Minh City - 1am Sunday
Brisbane - 4am Sunday

If you’d like to learn more about what goes on during these maintenance periods, check out this Inside AdSense post.

Posted by Dia Muthana - Inside AdSense team

We hope to see you there.

Posted by Siobhán McCormack - AdSense Optimisation Team

And if you’re following the lunar calendar, we’d also like to wish you a Happy Chinese New Year!

Gong Xi Fa Cai!

Posted by Dia Muthana - Inside AdSense team

When it comes to online news innovation, you’ve got to love the “HuffPost,” as the influential news and commentary site’s followers like to call it. The HuffPost (a.k.a., The Huffington Post) just introduced a new app that lets users read top HuffPo articles without having to leave their Yahoo! homepage.

With this groovy little widget, it now takes just one click to scan the most popular HuffPo stories, preview what’s latest from its bloggers, and flip through the dozens of sections. It’s impossible to do that without several articles grabbing your attention and inspiring you to comment.

“I’m excited about the new app we’ve developed for Yahoo!” says the HuffPo’s founder and political activist, Arianna Huffington. “Over 260 million people use Yahoo! email accounts and 550 million people visit Yahoo! every month—and now they can keep up with The Huffington Post without having to leave their Yahoo! homepage, simply by adding our new app.”

Yahoo! OpenID opens up a world of social media to promote your brand
Once your thoughts have been provoked, the HuffPost also has you covered there. The site accepts Yahoo! OpenID, a core element of the Yahoo! Open Strategy (Y!OS) platform. Your regular, familiar Yahoo! sign-in now works on HuffPost Social News and links it all together with Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Messenger, and the rest of your online social network—depending on the permission level you set.

Any publisher can have its own app for people to use on the Yahoo! homepage and in their My Yahoo! accounts. It’s officially known as a Yahoo! Application Platform app, but you can refer to it by the much friendlier “YAP app”—Hey, Yahoo! developers do. It’s an open environment, so you can build a YAP app yourself. Any YAP app. There’s no business deal involved, just a straightforward approval process. You can read all about it in the YDN YAP documentation. Creating a YAP app is a smart, cost effective business move for any publication wanting to get its message, its brand, and its advertisers in front of users.

For more on how you can use Yahoo! OpenID and Yahoo!’s social distribution platform on your site to create social media buzz, check out the quickstart guide.

—Chris Marlowe

We’ve sorted through and categorized your ideas, which ranged from suggestions such as additional ad format types to new payment methods, and we recently shared them with the Product Management team. Our product managers are now looking into a number of these ideas and are evaluating whether they can be incorporated within our current product roadmap. We’re focused on responding to your feedback, but it might take a little time before you see the features we choose to include because product changes require time to build and test across all the accounts and languages we support. We appreciate your patience in the meantime.

Also, we noticed a few ideas on the Product Ideas page that relate to existing features in AdSense, so we’d like to take a moment to highlight some of them here:

1. You suggested: Show a list of sites displaying ads from a specific publisher ID to prevent malicious activity.

   We recommend: Try the Allowed Sites feature to protect your account. You can enter the URLs of sites you own, and earnings from only those sites will be recorded in your account. When you opt in to this feature, we’ll also show you a list of URLs that haven’t been added to the Allowed Sites list, but where your ad code is appearing. Please keep in mind that if you create additional sites in the future and would like to earn from them, you’ll need to add the URLs to the Allowed Sites list in order to be credited for valid activity.

   To get started with this feature, visit the ‘Allowed Sites’ page under your AdSenseSetup tab. You can also find more information in our Help Center

2. You suggested: Create an index of AdSense sites so AdWords advertisers can easily find sites to target.

   We recommend: Try the Publisher Center within Google Ad Planner to provide advertisers with information about your sites. You can claim sites you own, customize their descriptions, and add categories that describe your content. In addition, you can share your Google Analytics data to provide advertisers with insight into your traffic levels. Recently, we added the ability to display a clickable badge on your site that will take interested advertisers directly to your Ad Planner profile. Any publisher can use this feature, but please note that the interface is currently only available in English.

   To claim your sites in Ad Planner, follow our instructions and visit our Help Center.

3. You suggested: Enable more flexible Custom Search options.

   We recommend: Try the Google AJAX Search API or the new Custom Search Themes feature for additional customization options. These features will allow you to control the branding of the search box and change or enhance the look and feel of your search results to match your site.

   For more information on these options, we recommend visiting the Custom Search blog and the Developer’s Guide for the Custom Search API.

Thanks again for all of your ideas and votes — stay tuned to Inside AdSense for the latest news and product updates.

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

A “referral URL” is one of many signals we use to deliver contextually relevant ads on your website. The referral URL contains information about the link a user followed to arrive at your website, whether from a search engine or another site on the Internet. Any webmaster for any site can look at referral URLs to see how users arrive at their site.

Let’s see how this works today when a user arrives at your golfing advice website from a search engine results page. Imagine that someone searches on Google for [golf shop atlanta] and clicks on a search result that takes them to your site. The referral URL that is passed to your site may look something like this: http://www.google.com/search?q=golf+shop+atlanta. I’m using Google as an example here, but the same type of information is transmitted if a user arrives at your website from another search engine.

To deliver the most relevant ad, we treat the query words [golf shop atlanta] in the referral URL as if they’re part of the content of your webpage. We can then better tailor the ad we deliver on your site. In this example, we could use the additional information from the query words to show an ad for a golf shop in Atlanta rather than for one in Chicago (depending on the other words in the page).

We’ve recently started to expand the use of the query words in referral URLs to a few hours so we can so we can continue to deliver more relevant ads. The technical way that we’re doing this is by associating the relevant query words in the referral URL with the existing advertising cookie on the user’s browser. After a short period of time (a few hours) the query words are no longer used for the purposes of matching ads. Of course, users can continue to opt out of our advertising cookie at any time here.

This allows us to deliver more relevant ads on a wider range of AdSense partner sites that a user may browse over the course of a few hours. Let’s assume the user in our example leaves your golf website and browses through to a news website that is also an AdSense partner. Since [golf shop atlanta] is in a referral URL that was visited in the past few hours, we may use those query words, along with the content of the news webpage itself, to determine the most relevant ad to show the user on the news website.

Using signals from the referral URL is just one part of our teams’ continuing efforts to deliver even better contextually matched ads on your website.

Posted by Rebecca Illowsky - Associate Product Manager

To sign up for our webinars, please visit our Help Center. Even if you’re not able to attend the live sessions, we’ll make sure to upload each webinar recording within 24 hours of the event.

Posted by Siobhán McCormack - AdSense Optimisation Team

We’re currently accepting donations from AdSense publishers with an unpaid account balance through January 31, 2010. To see what your unpaid account balance is, please visit the ‘Payment History’ page within your account. Your January earnings will post in the next few days, so feel free to refer to your ‘Advanced Reports’ page for an earnings estimate until those are finalized.

Working with our teammates at Google.org, we’ve identified Partners In Health (PIH) as the recipient of these funds. Your funds will go to provide medical aid via PIH and their Haiti-based partner organization. Any contribution you can make will help to ensure that PIH can continue their work throughout this time of great need.

Photo courtesy of PIH

You can donate a portion or all of your entire unpaid balance as of the end of January. Whether you have a balance of $0.10 or $100 in your account, we invite you to participate within the next week.

As you may expect, there are certain restrictions to donating, and all our normal policies still apply — so even if you’re donating, please don’t ask others to click on your ads in order to increase your earnings. For more information on how to participate, visit our donation form.

Posted by Elizabeth Ferdon - AdSense Payments Team

If you’re seeing irrelevant ads or public service ads (PSAs) on your pages after you’ve pasted the ad code into your HTML source code and waited the recommended 48 hrs, here are a things to check:

• Have you placed the AdSense ad code in frames separate from the main content of your website? If so, you may experience ad targeting issues. In order for our crawlers to match the ads to the content of your website, it is important to place the ad code in the same frame as the main content of your webste. If you’re familiar with HTML, and your website is talking about several different topics you could also consider implementing section targeting on your site to highlight relevant content.

• Do you have mostly dynamic content on your site? Our crawlers currently can’t derive meaning from these types of files:
  - audio and video files (.wma, .mpeg, .mov)
  - mp3 files (.mp3)
  - images (.jpeg, .bmp)
  - Macromedia Flash movies
  - Java Applets

  To receive more relevant ads, we recommend including plenty of text-based content on your site, including complete sentences and paragraphs.

• Do your pages use session IDs? A session ID is a piece of data serves as a unique identifier for a session. If your pages use session IDs, you may not receive targeted ads on those pages. Since this session ID - and therefore the URL - changes every time a different user views a page, the URL will not be indexed and will need to be crawled from scratch. Once the URL is crawled, however, the session will most likely have expired. This means that pages seen by the users are rarely in the index. You’ll need to remove the session IDs in order to show more targeted ads to your users.

We hope these tips help you resolve any targeting issues you experience with your ads. Next week, we’ll take a look at some other reasons why you may see irrelevant ads or PSAs on your site, and how you can best resolve them.

Posted by Ulrike Jung - Inside AdSense Team

First, the best way to ensure ads are served correctly is to copy and paste the code exactly as it’s provided in your account. Changing the code and manipulating ad behavior aren’t permitted by our program policies, and in most cases will prevent your ad from appearing at all.

If you’ve noticed that your ad units aren’t showing ads, here are a few things to check for:

• Did you just add the code to that page? Relevant ads should appear on your pages shortly after you add the code, but sometimes it can take up to 48 hours for ads to show. This is because our crawler has to visit your page and determine its content so we can serve targeted ads.

• Does the code on your page match the code in your account? Make sure to copy the code exactly as it appears in your account, and paste it within the body tags of your HTML code. Be sure not to make any changes to the linebreaks of the code (e.g. pasting the code all in one line) as this will break the code and prevent ads from showing entirely.
• Are you using an HTML editor? Publishers often use a design-enhanced HTML editor like Macromedia Dreamweaver or Microsoft FrontPage (aka WYSIWIG, “what you see is what you get” software). If you use such an editor, you may see errors if you paste your ad code into a WYSIWYG view such as the “Design” or “Layout” view. For the ads to function properly, you’ll have to copy and paste the ad code into the HTML source code of your webpage using the editor’s HTML view or HTML insert function. Check for any additional tags inserted by the system or changes in the linebreaks.
• Are you using a content management system (CMS)? If you have trouble implementing AdSense with a specific content management system, we recommend searching for the name of the CMS (eg. Drupal, WordPress) and ‘AdSense implementation’. You can also ask in the forum if other publishers have mastered similar problems, or contact your program provider directly.
• Are the ads inside nested frames? While you can choose where to position your ads on your pages, be sure to avoid embedding the ad code in excessive div tags or nested frames. Depending on your browser settings, implementing your ad code in this way might prevent ads from appearing correctly.
• Is JavaScript enabled in your browser? Ensure that you have JavaScript enabled in your browser, as this is necessary to view ads! If you’re having trouble seeing the ads, please also check for any conflicting JavaScript on your site that might prevent ads from showing.
• Is your page dynamically generated? If you’d like to implement AdSense ads on a dynamically generated site — for example, a site with session IDs or pages behind a login — you should take a look at this Help Center entry for more information on how to receive targeted ads.

In the next part of this series, we’ll provide tips to help you troubleshoot ad relevancy and targeting issues.

Posted by Ulrike Jung - Inside AdSense Team

Hey y’all it’s Terri from Chitika and I was fortunate enough to go attend WordCamp Boston 2010 this past weekend and I have some great tips to share with you.

First off – WordCamp was awesome. If any of you are WordPress publishers, thinking about doing more with WordPress or even just a web publisher you ought to attend the next one close to you! You can find out more about the WordCamp events at central.wordcamp.org. If you missed WordCamp Boston all the sessions will be on SlideShare and SpeakerRate soon.

Here are the top five tips I gathered at WordCamp that I thought would be great to share with you Chitika Publishers (and blog readers)

5 Online Publishing Tips

1. Post Often and Consistently
   If you have a free week don’t post 10 articles or blogs during that week if you typically post only twice a week. Pick a schedule and stick to it to create a habit. If you have time to write more – write something relevant to your website that might not be time sensitive and schedule it to post in the future or save it as a completed draft to post when you are to busy to write for your schedule.
2. Check your Spelling & Grammar
   Most of us are not English teachers – but make your 6th grade English teacher proud by proofreading. I will usually construct a post and run it through the Word or Open Office grammar and spell check then I’ll read it aloud to make sure it makes as much sense aloud as it does on screen. If you struggle with things like word choice and grammar you should definitely read the Elements of Style by William Strunk and E. B. White. There’s a free online version but I highly recommend a copy for your desk to read through at least once – pick one up on Amazon!
3. Vary Your Posts & Style
   Don’t just post text time after time – your regular readers and RSS subscribers would usually love to see different styles of posts. Video posts, audio posts, lists, stories, interviews and add some stock photos to some of your posts too! Your content feels even more fresh when you jazz it up (on top of posting regularly, see also #1).
4. Full Disclosure is Optional but Recommended
   If you are posting reviews for products or services that you may receive affiliate payments from or referral revenue it’s polite to add some text to the page disclosing this information. It’s optional but make sure to check with your legal department or regional government about what kind of disclosure laws are in place to protect bloggers and their readers. For US Publishers: How do bloggers follow the Endorsement Guides?

Want more tips?  Post a comment and we’ll make sure to address some more web publishing tips in the future!

How did PowerHomeBiz.com get started?

“We started PowerHomeBiz.com in December 1999. We saw the tremendous growth potential of the Web and knew that we wanted to start an online business. We both were scammed by work at home business opportunities advertised in magazines, and we knew that there is a huge market of people out there looking for ways to earn money from their homes. We decided to start an information resource site to help people start, run and manage a home-based business the legitimate way.”

Do you currently own any other websites?

“We have since added two other sites to our network – WomenHomeBusiness.com for women entrepreneurs; as well as Learning from the Big Boys showcasing lessons that small businesses can learn from big businesses.”

What were your first experiences with online advertising?

“We tried several CPM ad networks, but we’ve always been so disappointed with the earnings. While our traffic increased through the years, our income from these ad networks stayed at the same negligible levels – even after giving them prime “real estate” in our site.

Our mistake was in assuming that Chitika will perform just like the CPM ad networks we have joined. We joined Chitika in 2005, and we basically didn’t expect anything from it. We just joined Chitika, and promptly forgot about it. We barely displayed the Chitika ads, and if we did, we placed it in less visible pages and in less visible part of the page. As a result, income from Chitika was negligible.”

..the way Chitika emphasized that their product is compatible with Google AdSense caught our attention.”

“We were doing extremely well with Google AdSense and direct ad sales at the time we joined Chitika, and all our premium real estate were given to AdSense and to our own direct advertisers. There was no question as to which ad network we should be focusing on and giving our prime real estate.

We started thinking about Chitika when Chitika Premium was announced. Our main priority has always been Google AdSense, but the way Chitika emphasized that their product is compatible with Google AdSense caught our attention. We already know from our experience with Google Adsense that our visitors are highly responsive to ads. Plus, PowerHomeBiz.com receives a huge amount of search engine traffic. Still, Chitika remained in the backburner.”

So what changed your mind about keeping Chitika in low prominent placements?

“The turning point was when a Chitika email newsletter announced the availability of the Mega Units 500×250 and 550×250 in the summer of 2009. The newsletter also demonstrated the best practices for these new ad units, again emphasizing that these ad units are compatible with AdSense and how these units could work with AdSense on a page. I think that was the first newsletter from Chitika that I really paid attention to and read.”

The first month alone of implementing the mega units saw an increase of 450% in revenues – and that was only for a handful of our pages!”

“After reading the newsletter, we implemented the Mega Units at the bottom of a few articles to test it out. We were greatly pleased with the results. The first month alone of implementing the mega units saw an increase of 450% in revenues – and that was only for a handful of our pages! We knew that the time of ignoring Chitika was over. We are now in the process of adding the Mega Unit in all our pages.

We’re looking forward this year to seeing Chitika become a major revenue source for PowerHomeBiz.com. And we’re off to a great start – for the first half of January 2010, our unaudited earnings is already equal to what we earned from 2005 to 2008!”

Would you like to be featured as Chitika’s next Success Story? Contact us here.
______________________________________________________________________________
Read more Chitika Testimonials and Success Stories here.
View Chitika’s Mega Unit & other ad sizes.
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Google is donating $1 million to organizations on the ground that are rescuing those still trapped and providing clean water, food, medical care, shelter and support to those affected. For more information on Google’s efforts and opportunities to get involved, please visit the Google Blog.

Posted by Elizabeth Ferdon - AdSense Team

Bill receives all kinds of support questions on a daily basis here at Chitika. Today he was gracious enough to share 3 important questions that ALL types of Chitika users could benefit from.

What’s the difference between an “impression” and a “page view”?
“You may see these two terms used often and different contexts. While they have similar meanings, it’s the context that makes the difference. Page views are a measure of website traffic. In this context, the term page view represents every time a page from your site is requested by a visitor. If you have three visitors that each request five pages, this will result in fifteen page views for your site.

Impressions are a measurement of the number of ads that are shown on your site. An impression occurs any time an ad unit is displayed. If you have two Chitika ad units on your page and five users request the page, the result will be ten ad impressions since the five users each saw two ad units.”

Are “unique IP addresses” the same as “unique visitors”?
“An IP address is a basically just a numeric pointer for computers and servers on the internet to be able to find each other. For example, if you type “www.Chitika.com” into your web browser, your computer and our servers know how to talk to each other based on this numerical IP address. Therefore, when you look at the number of unique IP addresses accessing your web site, what that loosely means is the number of different machines requesting information from your site.

The area where these two terms are blurred is when either a user accesses your site from multiple machines on separate IP address - for example, at work and at home. In this case, the number of users and IP addresses are both two, but there is actually only one unique visitor. On the other hand, a home or business could have a network that uses only one IP address on the internet. In this case, if two people from inside the network access your site, the unique IP address count would only be one, but the unique visitor count should be two. Generally, web statistics are reported in unique visitors, though this number is a highly-refined estimate.”

My Chitika reports give me a breakdown of impressions, clicks, CTR, Avg CPC and eCPM for my account. What is all this stuff?
“As explained previously, an impression is counted anytime an ad is displayed to your visitor. This may happen multiple times per page view if there are multiple ad units on a page. A click is a fairly easy unit of measurement - a click occurs when your user clicks on your ad. CTR or click-through-rate is the percentage of your impressions that garner clicks. For example, if your site has 1,000 impressions in a day and results in 10 clicks, you would have a 1% CTR.

Average CPC or cost-per-click is the average amount that you are paid per click generated from the ad units on your site. This number is represented as an average of the CPCs that you get on each click for each day. Specific CPC values can fluctuate depending on the market and having the average of these values helps to illustrate the overall trends of the CPCs generated for your ads.

eCPM or effective cost-per-thousand impressions (the M is for the roman numeral M meaning 1,000) is a unit designed to help normalize the performance of a CPC ad unit. On a simple level, this number represents the amount revenue you would generate for 1,000 impressions based on your current CTR and CPC. As an example, if you had 1,000 impressions at a 2% CTR you would generate 20 clicks. If your average CPC was $0.20 for those clicks, you’d earn $4 on those 1,000 impressions - a $4.00 eCPM.”

HAVE A QUESTION? Chitika Customer Support is available 24/7, please browse our knowledgebase or submit a ticket here.

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Keyword hints remain optional. When keyword hints are provided by the publisher, our ad-matching systems will use them more often. As always, we aim to provide the most relevant ads for the user, the best value for advertisers, and the best returns for publishers. This means in some cases, keyword hints will be ignored when we have evidence that other targeting approaches perform better.

Instructions for setting keyword hints for your domains can be found here.

The AdSense for Domains team is continuing to work on additional product improvements, that we will be announcing in the coming months.

Posted by Randy Heath - AdSense for Domains

We’ve converted the maintenance start time for a few cities around the world:

Istanbul - 8pm Saturday
Sao Paolo - 4pm Saturday
Oslo - 7pm Saturday
Nairobi - 9pm Saturday
Auckland - 7am Sunday

If you’d like to learn more about what goes on during these maintenance periods, check out this Inside AdSense post.

Posted by Dia Muthana - Inside AdSense Team

Posted by Dia Muthana - Inside AdSense Team

Happy Holidays!

Posted by Dia Muthana on behalf of the Google AdSense Team

We will also be away enjoying the holidays, and will return on Monday, December 28th to reply to your support questions.

Your feedback to date has been very helpful, and we’ll spend the coming weeks developing brand new, interesting content for 2010. If you haven’t already done so, we invite you to share with us the topics you’d like to see covered in future webinars.

We’ve received great reviews from publishers who’ve attended our webinars, so if you haven’t seen one as yet, you can view the recordings of these events whenever it’s convenient for you.

Wishing you a happy holiday season and a healthy new year.

Posted by Siobhan McCormack - AdSense Optimisation Team

We take account access issues very seriously and would like to take some time to provide a few simple tips to help you protect your Google Account.

If you’re having trouble signing in to your Google Account, usually resetting your password will do the trick. To add additional security to your account, you should update your alternate address, choose a strong security question (if you have Gmail), and add a mobile number to your account so Google can text you a recovery code if you ever forget your password. Also, if you have a Gmail address, we recommend providing a current secondary email address where you can receive our password-assistance email. If you don’t have any of these set up, it will be difficult for us to verify your identify and reset your password, so please take some time to update your security options.

If resetting your password doesn’t work, you can try filling out our account recovery form. We can usually restore access in a few hours if you’re able to provide the necessary information to prove ownership.

Here are some additional tips to ensure that only you have access to your account:

• Create a strong password and security question. Your password shouldn’t be something that someone else can easily guess. The same goes for your security question. If someone that knows you can answer your security question, then it’s probably not a good question. Review these tips for suggestions.
• Don’t share your account password with anyone. It may be tempting to share your password with your friends or family, but don’t do it, especially if it’s your personal account. If you need to create an account that is accessed my several people, make sure that the account is not tied to any products that contain personal information.
• Don’t respond to messages asking for your username or password. Google will never send you an email, IM, or any other communication asking for your sign-in information, so don’t respond to any messages asking for it.
• Be cautious of fake sign-in pages. Always look for www.google.com/adsense in the URL. If the URL is different, don’t sign in on the page. If you think you may have signed in using a fake sign-in page for AdSense or any other Google product, please reset your password as soon as possible to prevent abuse of your Google services by a third party.

You can find more tips in the Google Accounts Help Center.

Posted by Diane Velasco - AdSense Policy Team

To read more about the new features and how to get started, hop on over to the Google Code Blog.

Posted by Christine Tsai - Web Elements Team

In order to be more transparent about how our system calculates earnings, we’ve added the words “Estimated” and “Finalized” next to “Earnings” throughout your account. Rest assured these terminology changes don’t reflect a change to the way your finalized earnings are calculated. It’s simply intended to give you a clearer idea of what’s our estimation of your earnings and what’s finalized.

As you may have noticed in the past, the earnings on the Overview and Advanced Reports pages may sometimes differ from the earnings listed on your Payment History page. This is because earnings on your Overview and Advanced Reports pages reflect initial estimations based on our records. We aren’t able to provide finalized earnings on these pages because they still need to be verified for accuracy, a process that takes place a few days after the end of every month. The finalized sum is then posted on your Payment History page by the 10th of the next month.

While we can’t say how much these amounts would differ for any one publisher, most publishers will not see a significant difference. Again, please keep in mind that this is only a display change, and that your finalized earnings will continue to be calculated and credited to you in the same way as before.

Posted by Elizabeth Ferdon - AdSense Payments Team