Google Data

A combination of offering users the best experience and efficiently monetizing your content is important for the long-term success of your website. With that in mind, here’s some tips to help you to achieve both of these goals:

Content: Is your site content relevant to your users? Ask yourself if the content on your site is well-researched and well-structured. Will it capture and engage your users’ attention?

Ad types: When choosing an ad type for your site, consider if it improves the user experience on your site. It’s important to be mindful of designs that are prohibited by our AdSense program policies, such as pop-ups and pop-unders, floating or static ads, or any other type of ad that could make it difficult for users to access your content. Where possible, test potential designs with focus groups or an AdSense experiment.

Ad placement: Advertising on your site should provide additional value to your users. Ads should be visible without limiting your site audience’s ability to interact with the rest of your content. For instance, if ads are visible above the fold on your site, make sure they’re not making it difficult for users to view your content. We may be less likely to display pages with obstructive above the fold advertising in our search results.

Multi-screen: Don’t forget to think about the impact of your design and ad placement on the accessibility of content across platforms. Our research indicates that users are increasingly relying on multiple digital touch-points throughout the day.

In addition to the four tips above, check out the Webmaster Quality Help Center for website quality guidelines that have been created specifically for AdSense publishers. You’ll also find insights and tools to help you understand and improve your site on the Google Webmasters website.

Did you know that sites optimized for multiple screen sizes can have an average 15% higher RPM and twice the traffic growth rate of sites that aren’t?*

If you think about how quickly you’ll leave a site where you have to pinch and zoom to find something, it’s not surprising that multi-screen optimized sites are performing better. That same behavior will most often apply to your own users too, so having a multi-screen plan is important to keeping them engaged for longer.

There’s a lot to think about when deciding on your multi-screen strategy. To help you in your decision-making, we’ve created new multi-screen guidelines. They can be found in the AdSense Help Center and cover the following topics:

Multi-Screen Starter Guide

• Why go multi-screen?
• Multi-screen success stories
• What are the common approaches? 
• How to build a multi-screen site
• Getting technical support from a multi-screen vendor

Multi-Screen Implementation Guide

• Monetization tips
• Mobile user experience tips
• Mobile search engine optimization tips

We hope you find these resources useful. Start optimizing your site today to retain and grow user loyalty. We’ll be sharing more resources and success stories in the near future – check back here soon for the latest updates from our Multi-Screen Specialist Team.

* Source:  Google internal data

Posted by Hye In Kim,  Multi-Screen Specialist
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As the World Cup launches, content consumption will increase for many websites especially those focused on news and sports. As can be seen from the statistics below, soccer fever is about to take hold:

• The World Cup is the largest, most connected global sporting event. Worldwide, it has more interest on Google Search than the Super Bowl, the Olympics, and the Tour de France combined.*

• In 2010, about 18% of searches for games, players and teams during the World Cup final were made on a mobile device. Compare that with 2014, when 63% of similar searches during a popular UEFA Champions League match were made on mobile. We’re likely to see this trend continue during this year’s World Cup.**
• Looking at a 30-day period this year, more hours of soccer content have been watched on YouTube than were broadcast during the entire 2010 World Cup—over 900 times the amount.***
• In that time, 64.7 million hours of soccer video were watched on YouTube globally.***
• 1.6 billion views of soccer content on YouTube globally.***

We’re excited to announce that wire transfer is now available as a new payment method in a number of countries. The full list of countries is available in our Help Center.  With wire transfer, your earnings are deposited directly into your bank account, offering you a fast, secure, and convenient way to receive AdSense payments. If you’re not already using our new payments system, then wire transfer will become available when your account is transitioned to the new system.

We recommend checking with your bank to learn more about receiving an international wire transfer payment. Ask them what information they need to make sure you’re set up right for wire transfer payments. You can then sign in to your AdSense account and enter the details provided by your bank. Google doesn’t charge a fee to send wire transfer payments, but you should ask your bank about any fees or commissions they may charge for wire transfers.

Payments will be made in your payment currency, which could be USD or EUR, depending on your country. If your bank account is in another currency, your payment will be converted to the currency of your bank account.

If you’re ready to start receiving your AdSense payments by wire transfer, please review the details in our Help Center.

Posted by Miki Noda- AdSense Payments Specialist
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Creating new ad units for your site can take time, especially when deciding on their look and style. Save time on this process with the new, simplified My ads tab in your AdSense account. From today, it’s quicker and easier to create new ad units, giving you more time to concentrate on optimizing your ad space.

In addition to simplifying the ad unit creation process, we’ve also refreshed the user interface for this page, making it more intuitive and easier to navigate. When choosing from the various options for your new ad units, we’ll help you in your final decision by highlighting the potential impact of your choices. Once you’ve decided on the best ad style, you can quickly implement this across your entire site rather than having to apply changes on an ad unit level.

Finally, to help enhance the look of ads on your site, we’ve made some changes to the default color palette for our text ads. The URL link will now display in a light gray replacing the green color previously associated with it.

Posted by Emma Burrows – AdSense Software Engineer
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We’ve heard from both publishers and advertisers that new, larger ad formats provide a great canvas for rich creatives and perform well on many sites. Today, we’re pleased to share two new ad sizes – 970 x 250 Billboard and the 300 x 1050 Portrait – that will help you reach more advertisers while also enhancing user experience and engagement on your site.

As with most of our ad sizes, both of these ad units can accommodate standard text ads in addition to image ads. Additionally, they can show similar-sized image ads when doing so will maximize the performance of your ad unit. In this case, a 300 x 250 ad would serve in the 970 x 250 ad unit and a 160 x 600 would serve in the 300 x 1050 ad unit.

As both of these new sizes are large ad units, you can place a maximum of one per page. As always, remember to keep a balance between your content and ads and ensure your ad placements comply with our AdSense program policies.

We’re always looking for your feedback and suggestions to help us provide you with the ad sizes you need to stay flexible to your advertiser and user needs. Stay tuned for more updates coming soon and share your feedback in the comment section below.

Posted by Alexey Petrov, AdSense Product Specialist
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Welcome to the final part of our World Cup series. Today we’ll share some AdSense-specific tips and tricks to help grow your revenue potential. We’ll cover some old but steadfast recommendations plus more advanced seasonal optimisation tips to help ensure you’re well prepared for the World Cup.

1. Increase ad coverage: Place up to three ad units, plus three link units per page. This can help increase the click rates and views on your site, and potentially boost your earnings. It’s important to remember that a good balance between content and ads is essential. Placing too many ads on a page may cause a high bounce rate and loss in revenue.

2. Use the best performing ad formats: Wider ad formats usually perform better compared to others. Some ad formats also have more advertiser demand. Typically ad formats like the 728×90 Leaderboard, the 336×280 Large rectangle, the 300×250 Medium Rectangle, and the 300×600 Large Skyscraper are the most popular formats among the advertisers and more effective in terms of potentially increasing revenue. During big sporting events, advertisers are often focusing on viral engagement. Enabling expandable ads will help you capture this opportunity.

3. Be careful with blocking controls: Review which ad categories you’re currently blocking and why you’re blocking them. Overblocking can lead to a decline in your earnings potential, especially in times of increased traffic to your site and bigger advertiser spend on categories such as CPG, Auto, Entertainment Food and Beverage and Travel.  

4. Ensure optimal ad position: Choosing the best locations to insert the ads can be challenging.  Use Google Analytics to get a heatmap on where your users are clicking. You’ll also find more new resources on the AdSense Help Center regarding the best performing ad placements for each website category. Recently we have new articles about ad placement specific to sports and travel.

That wraps up our World Cup blog series. We hope you’ve gained some new insights, inspiration and ideas on getting your site ready for the World Cup. Check back here in a two weeks when we’ll be sharing news of a fantastic Google initiative around World Cup insights.

Posted by Marta Lysiak – Inside AdSense Team
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Welcome to the fourth part of our World Cup blog series. Today, we’ll take a closer look at reaching your audience across devices. 

Is your website optimized for your mobile users? Throughout the World Cup, fans will be looking for great content, regardless of whether they’re viewing it from a desktop, tablet or mobile device. “In 2013, internet traffic from mobile devices surpassed traffic from desktop, and that figure is continuing to grow”*.

Today, approximately 60%** of online users are now multi screen users. In many instances, this means they’re online on social networks, news sites or mobile messaging apps while also watching TV. During live sporting events, this number grows further. Euro 2012 and the 2012 Olympics were good examples of this trend as illustrated below.

“Source: Smartadserver Blog – London Olympics 2012: The impressive Mobile Infographic”

With this in mind, think about whether you should be preparing additional mobile-optimized content to share with your users during events like the World Cup, especially during the opening ceremony, key matches and the finals. Looking at how your users digest your content is important. If they receive a link on their smartphone but are unable to view the content because it’s not mobile-optimized, they’ll feel frustrated at the poor experience. On the other hand, If the user is delighted with the content and their first visit to your site is a positive experience, they’ll likely come back again and again. We recently shared some best practices on driving user engagement and loyalty through smart mobile site design – take a look and see if there’s any practices you can apply to your own site. If you haven’t created a mobile-friendly site yet and would like to outsource this, take a look at Google’s recommended vendors.

If you already have a mobile optimized site, don’t forget that you can grow your earnings potential by understanding which mobile ad sizes are most effective for you. Moreover, if you’ve created an app, use Google AdMob to monetise it and grow your earnings.

Check back tomorrow for the final post in our World Cup series, when we’ll be talking about growing your site with Google AdSense.

*Source: Morgan Stanley Research
** Source: GfK, March 2014, US and UK

Posted by Barbara Sarti – Adsense Specialist
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Welcome to the third part of our World Cup series. Today, we’ll focus on taking your content viral through social media.

The 2014 World Cup in Brazil won’t just be about soccer. It’ll also be about interactions across social media. This event will see millions of people interact and share content on multiple social channels, driving the potential for your content to ‘go viral’. With this in mind, publishers should think about adapting their editorial coverage around the World Cup to generate audience buzz. Some fun examples could include discussing top ranked players or incredible game moments. 73%* of online adults now use a social networking site of some kind. So it’s essential that content on your site is easy to share and that you’ve got a strategy in place for engagement and distribution of content through your social media channels.

Users not only like to read the latest updates regarding the World Cup, but also share interesting content, comment, and interact with other users. Additionally, sports are a leading topic on many social media platforms. Sports audiences often account for some of the most engaged and passionate fans on social media. To engage your audience further, explore using Google+ Sign In  and some of our other Google+ features that will help you take your content viral.

If you’re planning to create specific content for the World Cup, don’t forget to build out a content strategy for your social media channels. Use these channels to spread your content and engagement. For instance, try hashtags and make sure they’re relevant for the season and not just promoting your site or business. Using well established hashtags can help users discover your content faster and can also allow your content to contribute to ongoing discussions. Here’s a couple of examples of some of the most popular hashtags used with World Cup content:

• #worldcup
• #worldcup2014
• #fifa
• #brazil
• #football
• #brazil2014
• #soccer
• #brasil2014

Video is another potential channel for you to create and share unique content on your site. Over 6 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube**. That’s almost an hour for every person in the world. With that much content being consumed, think about using YouTube or Google+ Hangouts On Air to distribute your content and to engage your users. For example, you could create a daily 90 second clip that highlights the best, worst and funniest moments from the various games.

In our fourth blog post tomorrow, we’ll talk about your strategy for reaching users across devices.

* Source – http://www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheets/social-networking-fact-sheet/
** Source – http://www.youtube.com/yt/press/statistics.html

Posted by Chris Jones – Audience Development Specialist
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Welcome to the second part of our World Cup series. Today, we’ll focus on the creation and promotion of related content ahead of the tournament. 

The World Cup is one of the most searched topics we’ll see in 2014. Other large-scale events such as the US Presidential elections don’t compare. At this time, sports, news, travel and outdoor sites could see an increase in traffic of up to 13%*. Take a look at the graph below which highlights the growth of site visits during last year’s Confederation Cup in Brazil.

Source: comScore 2013

As most World Cup fans will start to search for related information before the tournament begins, now is the time to start sharing relevant and related content with them. When building your content strategy and timelines, think about important dates, specific games and popular keywords. The World Cup audience will search for schedules, results, teams and player information, not to mention the viral entertainment that many advertisers will create. Fans traveling to Brazil might also search for travel and accommodation options, local directions or restaurant recommendations. Regardless of what type of website you have, ask yourself if you’re giving your users the content they need right now.

Stay tuned for the next blog post where we’ll share some best practices on using social media to reach more users.

Posted by Barbara Sarti – Inside AdSense Team
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*Google Internal data

We’re fast approaching the biggest sporting event of the year and are excited to see which team will triumph. As World Cup fever takes hold, online activities are set to increase and you could potentially reach more users and advertisers as a result. We’ve created a five-part blog series that will run every day this week. The series will focus on how to make the most of this exciting seasonal event. We’ll look closely at how World Cup events can help benefit sports, news and travel sites.However the tips we’ll cover are universal and apply to most sites and sporting events.

To get us into the World Cup spirit, let’s drop by Italy to meet the team behind NapoliSoccer.net and get inspired. Created in 2004 as an online community, NapoliSoccer.net has grown as an online community. The site has even opened a cultural association and started a newspaper over the past few years. “It’s a completely non-profit project” says Sergio Massimo, one of the managers of the website.

“Now NapoliSoccer.net has about 25,000 page views a day and 12 people dedicated to writing content, creating press reports and managing relations with local radio and TV,” Sergio continues.

From 2005, NapoliSoccer began using Google solutions. “The role that AdSense plays is very important” says Sergio “since it allows us to cover more than a half of our costs. Moreover, 70% of our total revenue comes from AdSense.”

“We started to use AdSense to secure revenue to cover the costs of our non-profit activities. AdSense was a natural choice that gave us a guarantee to keep our project alive.”

Sergio explained that the ads are relevant and that when he doesn’t want to show certain types of ads, he uses the features available in the Ad review center.

“We are using a range of other Google products” Sergio tells us ”including Gmail, which is used by all of our copywriters. Fans can also follow us on our YouTube channel and on Google+. And Google Drive is very useful for sharing documents.”

Sergio concludes by telling us that his on-going plans for the site include more integration with social media and launching a mobile app.

Stay tuned for part two tomorrow where we’ll take a closer look at content creation and promotion.

Posted by Marta Lysiak – Inside AdSense Team
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A/B testing is one of the most effective ways of ensuring your ad units are performing to their full potential. Last year we launched AdSense experiments to make A/B testing easy for your ad units. From today, you’ll be able to optimize your entire account with AdSense experiments, now available for account-level settings.

AdSense experiments let you quickly launch and analyze A/B experiments without you having to make any changes to your ad or page code. Using this feature allows you to configure your ad settings to give you the best possible performance. With account-level A/B testing, you can now also compare the performance of your account-level settings such as general or sensitive category blocking or ad-serving blocks.

If you haven’t already tried AdSense experiments to run A/B tests on your site, give it a try to make sure you’re getting the most out of your account and your ad units. You’ll find more information over on our Help Center. We’re looking forward to hearing your feedback – tell us what you think over on our AdSense+ page.

Posted by Nick Radicevic – AdSense Product Manager
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Today we’re happy to launch a new display-only format that we call magazine ads. To optimize revenue, we normally recommend that you enable both text and display for your ad units, however we recognize that the type of ads you feature on your site is also influenced by your own style preferences. To that end, we’ve created a new format allowing text advertisers to increase competition on your display-only ad units while maintaining a design aesthetic suitable for display.

If a text advertiser is the winning bidder for your ad unit, their ad will appear in the magazine ad format. This format has been designed with print magazine ads in mind, putting a big emphasis on space and typography and displaying a new look distinctive from our regular text ads. Take a look at the examples below to see how magazine ads will look in your display ad units.

If you currently have display-only enabled ads on your site, magazine ads will automatically be set up for these ad units. If you’d prefer not to show magazine ads, you can disable them through the Enhanced display option in the My ads tab in your account.

For now, when magazine ads are enabled for your display ad units, the Ad Review Center will still show you the original text ad provided by the advertiser and not the the newly-styled magazine ad. Check out our Help Center for more information. We’d love to hear if you’re using magazine ads already — share your experience and feedback over on the AdSense +page.

Posted by Yuheng Kuang – AdSense Software Engineer
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