Google Data » Google Adsense

Other sites are using my ad code. What should I do?

Jay Castro — Wed, 28 Dec 2016 19:17:00 +0000

Hello AdSense Publishers, if you are seeing sites on your performance reports or under your sites list that don’t belong to you, this post is for you!

First off, you are not under attack. Although you may feel some alarm seeing another site show up in your account, there's nothing to worry about. The most common scenario is another site has copied your site code and pasted it onto their site, also copying the ad code in the process. Since your publisher id is still in the ad code, the new site will now appear in your account.

To combat this you’ll want to make two quick changes to your account.

Verify which sites in your account are yours.

Sign in to your AdSense account.
Click Settings in the sidebar.
In the dropdown, select My sites.
In your site list, locate the site you want to verify and click the Down arrow

Next to "Verified site", turn the switch on

2. Once verified, enable site authorization. Site authorization is an optional feature that lets you identify your verified sites as the only sites that are permitted to use your Google ad code.

Click Settings in the sidebar.
In the dropdown, select My sites.
On the "Manage sites" page, click More

Click Site authorization.
Next to "Only authorize my verified sites to use my ad code", turn the switch on

Click Save. Your changes should take effect within 48 hours.

Once your sites are verified and site authorization is turned on, ads will still show on the unverified site(s), and impressions and clicks will be recorded. However, advertisers will not be charged, and you won't receive any earnings for that site. Any policy violations that occur on these sites also won’t count against you.

The URLs will still show up in your list of sites so you are aware of who else is using your ad code. The sites may also still show in your performance report in order to keep a definitive record of activity. If you are seeing the sites in your reports but don’t want to, consider setting your report type to “Verified Sites” to ensure you are only seeing data related to your verified sites. More on managing your sites here.

Post by Brandon Canniff, AdSense Support Specialist

How to optimize your Adsense ad placements for mobile users

John A.Smith — Mon, 19 Dec 2016 14:00:00 +0000

This is the final guest post from AdSense publisher Brandon Gaille. Brandon has built his small business marketing blog, BrandonGaille.com, to over 2 million monthly visitors in less than three years. He’s featured as our guest blogger to share insights and tips from his personal blogging experience to help AdSense publishers grow earnings. If you’re new to AdSense, be sure to sign up for AdSense and start turning your #PassionIntoProfit.

Every year more people are using their phones and devices to browse web pages. In 2013, mobile made up only 17% of web traffic. In 2016, this number has risen to over 38%. Within the next couple of years, mobile traffic will easily surpass 50%.

This is why you need to take time to optimize your AdSense ads for mobile traffic. Although you can easily grab a responsive AdSense ad unit, there are more ways to optimize your ad units for mobile. It may be the easiest way, but I’ve found that the easy way usually does not always produce the best results. I’ve tested the responsive ad units on my blogs against manual optimization, and the results were staggering.

The manual optimization of my ads produced a 54% increase in my AdSense revenue.

Here’s what I learned from the tests I ran:

#1 A large mobile banner at the top of the page earned the most money on my site

The highest producing location was below the title of a post and above the first paragraph. It’s important to know that AdSense amended their policy on ads above the fold on mobile devices, and you can no longer use the 300x250 ad above the fold on mobile.

#2 Hide the sidebar ads in tablets and mobile

The sidebar is going to be pushed down to the bottom of the post when it is viewed in mobile. This is essentially banishing any ads in the sidebar to no man’s land. Most premium WordPress themes will allow you to turn off ad spots in the sidebar. This will allow you to drop in an additional AdSense ad into the post to get maximum monetization from mobile.

#3 The best ad grouping was top, middle, and bottom

Out of all the mobile ad groupings, this one easily produced the most revenue for me. The grouping was made up of one 320x100 ad and two 250x250 ads. The first ad was below the title and above the first paragraph. The second ad was placed after the 6th paragraph of the post. The final ad was placed at the end of the post.

In addition to mobile optimization, I applied four AdSense optimization strategies, which resulted in an overall revenue increase of close to 300%. Whether you are making $500/month or $5000/month, a 300% increase can make a huge impact on your yearly earnings.

Go here to read all of my “5 AdSense Optimization Strategies that Will Increase Your Earnings.”

Posted By
Brandon Gaille

Brandon Gaille is an AdSense publisher. You can learn more about Brandon at BrandonGaille.com and listen to his popular blogging podcast, The Blog Millionaire.

If you’re new to AdSense, be sure to sign up for AdSense and start turning your #PassionIntoProfit.

Find out if you should go programmatic

John A.Smith — Wed, 14 Dec 2016 18:08:00 +0000

In the third part of the #SuccessStack, we take a look at programmatic ad sales. This article will give you the tools to decide whether programmatic may be the right route for you to grow your publishing business.

What is programmatic?
Originally, digital ad sales required you to go out and sell your ad space direct to advertisers. If they liked the price they agreed to the sale. If not, they may have negotiated with you. All this took time, required advanced bookings, and necessitated a lot of leg work on both sides.

Programmatic advertising takes your digital ad inventory and matches it to buyers looking for the ad space you offer, doing the selling for you. It uses software and algorithms as a go between, increasing ad revenues through a bidding system where the highest paying buyer’s ad is chosen for each space.

The easy way to try programmatic

For most publishers, the easiest and most effective way to try programmatic ad sales is to use an automated ad network like AdSense to sell their ad inventory. This means you don’t have to worry about generating direct sales or any high-touch manual optimizations of your ad sales.

The AdSense platform will find advertisers for you from AdWords and other Google advertisers and accept bids on your behalf, automatically selling your ad units for the highest possible price and placing the winning ad in that spot.

Programmatic advertising 2.0
If you’re a larger publisher who has a significant amount of direct sales or needs to manage their ads at a granular level to avoid conflict, you may need a more advanced programmatic solution.

DoubleClick Ad Exchange is for publishers looking to go beyond the basics of programmatic advertising. You’ll be able to access a wider pool of advertisers, agencies and ad networks to tap into advertising markets beyond Google advertisers. In addition to expanding demand, Ad Exchange provides publishers with advanced Programmatic Direct tools to help grow your business. But it’s important to know, you’ll also be required to manage more manual inputs and adjustments, so it’s not ideally suited for every publisher.

Consider your next step

If you’re thinking about what you should do next, you might begin with this short quiz to help you decide which is the correct next step for your business and programmatic advertising.

Ready to take the plunge?
Make sure you choose the right tool to give yourself the best possible potential earnings. To help you with this, arrange a free consultation with one of our experts who can help you to choose the right programmatic solution for your business.

Posted by Jay Castro, from the AdSense team

Three ways to grow ad revenue this holiday season

John A.Smith — Tue, 13 Dec 2016 15:26:00 +0000

A staggering $6.9 billion was spent on mobile digital ads in Q4 2015. In this second installment of the #SuccessStack, learn how you can claim your share of advertising budgets spent this quarter and grow your revenue.

Tip 1: The early bird catches the worm

Does it feel like the holiday season gets bigger and starts earlier every year? You’re not wrong. This year Black Friday set a new record with over $3 billion in online sales. The entire holiday shopping season has evolved into a truly multi-month, online affair.

Take advantage of the holiday ad spending spree by placing ads on your site. A good first step is to choose the right tool to sell and manage ads on your site. Then, make sure your available ad space is optimized and mobile friendly. Finally, when the holiday season is in full swing, you can use experiments to measure and improve your use of ad space further.

Tip 2: Tailor your content to what users are looking for

The holiday shopping season creates big opportunities for AdSense publishers. According to Luth Research*, the way people search when shopping becomes more niche as they move closer to buying an item. For example, individuals may start their shopping journey with search terms like “gadgets for men” or “laptops” but finish a few weeks later with searches for specific models or screen sizes.

To capture audience attention and increase your ad impressions, build a content strategy that taps into this insight. Try creating content that taps into each stage of the buyer journey like gift inspiration articles for those early stage “i need ideas” moments, and product comparison content for those “i want to know” moments before users make a purchase decision. To help you make the most of these moments check out our guide to help you draw the crowds to your site.

Tip 3: Use the right advertising partner

Partner with an ad network that can help you earn more during this peak advertising period. AdSense, with its access to millions of Google AdWords advertisers offers an easy, profitable and low touch advertising solution.

Already an AdSense user? Enjoy an expert consultation to walk you through DoubleClick’s suite of tools to help you manage and optimize the ad inventory on your site. It could help you grow your revenues even further this holiday season.

*Google/Luth Research, U.S. Google partnered with Luth to analyze the digital activity of its opt-in panel participants. The data was analyzed between April and Aug. 2016.

How to earn more money with AdSense by decreasing your bounce rate

John A.Smith — Mon, 12 Dec 2016 14:00:00 +0000

This is the fourth of five guest posts from AdSense publisher Brandon Gaille. Brandon has built his small business marketing blog, BrandonGaille.com, to over 2 million monthly visitors in less than three years. He’s featured as our guest blogger to share insights and tips from his personal blogging experience to help AdSense publishers grow earnings. If you’re new to AdSense, be sure to sign up for AdSense and start turning your #PassionIntoProfit.

Google Analytics defines bounce rate as the percentage of single-page sessions, which essentially means the people that left your site after seeing only a single page. When your bounce rate is high, it also means that your AdSense ads may not be seen by a large percentage of your audience.

Over the years, I've researched this topic many times over in an effort to constantly decrease the bounce rate of my sites and my clients’ sites. Through countless hours of A/B testing and deep analytics research, I was able to identify 25 tactics that consistently reduced the bounce rate.

The great thing about most of these tactics is that they usually only take a matter of minutes to incorporate, and you can start seeing results the next day.

#1 Do not use more than 7 sentences per paragraph

You never want to block too much text together. One really long paragraph can easily overwhelm your visitors and lead them to hitting the back button.

Most bloggers write their posts on a desktop or laptop computer. From a computer, the occasional 12 to 15 sentence paragraph does not look too intimidating. However, over 50% of my blog visitors are using their phones to read the posts on my site. On a phone, these long paragraphs will fill up the entire screen and add to your bounce rate.

I like to break up my paragraphs into different sizes. This can make the text of a post visually stimulating, which can turn scanners into readers.

Using an occasional single sentence paragraph will speed up the flow of article and add some nice white space.

#2 Keep your column width between 700 and 800 pixels

There have been many big name bloggers that have been considering ditching the sidebar. Although the sidebar does not get as many clicks as it once did, this is largely due to the increase in mobile traffic.

A post without a sidebar will have a column width well beyond 800 pixels. This is going to make your content look very long on a desktop computer. The ideal width for engagement is 700 pixels, which will allow between 80 and 90 characters per line.

Smashing Magazine did a study on the typographic design patterns in websites. When they looked at a segment of websites with the highest engagement, they found the majority of these sites had between 75 and 90 characters per line.

Source of image: Smashing Magazine

#3 Organize your content with headers and sub-headers

Based on reviewing heat maps of million and millions of page views, I’ve found that visitors of blog posts are made up of a mix of readers and scanners. To be precise, the results showed that 40% are readers and 60% are scanners. The readers start by reading the introduction paragraph, and the scanners scroll through the entire post. The scanners consistently stop scrolling to read each header and sub-header.

For the readers, most bloggers are pulling them into the post with a great introduction. However, the vast majority fail to create compelling headers. The easiest type of post to break into headers is the list post. For example, “13 Habits that Lead to Success.”

Each habit should be turned into a bold header and be able to stand alone as its own title. The goal here is to create thirteen compelling titles. Each title is designed to grab the reader’s attention and drive them into reading that section.

If you’ve enjoyed these three tips to decrease your bounce rate, go here to read all of the “25 Proven Ways to Decrease Your Bounce Rate.”

Posted By
Brandon Gaille

Brandon Gaille is an AdSense publisher. You can learn more about Brandon at BrandonGaille.com and listen to his popular blogging podcast, The Blog Millionaire.

If you’re new to AdSense, be sure to sign up for AdSense and start turning your #PassionIntoProfit.

How to choose the right ad tools for your site

John A.Smith — Wed, 07 Dec 2016 21:21:00 +0000

Welcome to the #SuccessStack, a new series of articles designed to help you:

Access Google’s large network of advertisers
Grow your publishing business
Earn more from the ads on your site

This first article can help you choose the right tools to sell and manage the ads on your site.

AdSense: Get started with easy access to Google’s network of advertisers
Who it’s for: Publishers looking for a smart and easy-to-use tool to optimize their ad space and revenue.

What it does: AdSense makes it easy for you to place, manage and earn revenue from ads on your site. With AdSense, Google is your advertising sales team, bringing you ads from millions of advertisers using AdWords and other Google advertising programs.

AdSense includes simple and easy controls to help you get started with earning money from ads, but it also does a lot of work behind the scenes to help you make more money. It’s a bit like an automatic car -- it removes some of the manual adjustment, allowing you to cruise along with less effort. You still need regular “tune ups” to get optimal performance, but you won’t need to shift gears all the time.

DoubleClick Ad Exchange: Control who gets programmatic access to the ads on your site with advanced features
Who it’s for: Publishers who require a more granular control over their inventory and who have the resources and expertise to manage ongoing optimizations. This product is suited to publishers with yield management expertise and those who have need for advanced features like Programmatic Direct.

What it does: DoubleClick Ad Exchange gives you real-time access to the largest pool of advertisers. This means that in addition to AdWords advertisers, you can also access major ad networks and agencies.

A major difference between DoubleClick Ad Exchange and AdSense is that AdSense does a lot of the technical settings and optimization work for you, such as automating the sale of all your ad space to the highest bidder. With DoubleClick Ad Exchange, you can control these adjustments yourself and control exactly how your inventory is sold. As an example, DoubleClick Ad Exchange allows you to choose which ad space is for public sale and which is reserved for private auctions. This increased amount of user input is necessary for you to get the best results from DoubleClick Ad Exchange. Another important distinction is that the AdSense demand is majority AdWords advertisers, whereas DoubleClick Ad Exchange pulls demand from multiple sources. You can see the full list of differences at our help center.

DoubleClick For Publishers: Scale your advertising business
Who it’s for: Publishers who are looking for a tool that has AdSense or Ad Exchange built in, along with lots of useful features to help them, schedule, deliver and measure their ad inventory regardless of how they sell it, to networks, programmatically or through their own direct sales teams.

What it does: DoubleClick for Publishers is a single platform that allows you to manage and deliver all of your web, mobile, and video advertising across all your sales channels. It doesn’t come with it’s own ads, but rather helps you scale your ads business by managing your ad sales across a variety of ad networks such as AdSense, ad exchanges like DoubleClick and direct advertising partners. You can get started with the small business version right away for free, or talk to us about integrating with the premium, paid version that is built for large organizations with sophisticated ad sales teams.

Both versions have a simple interface, lots of great tools, built-in revenue optimization, and Google powered ad delivery to provide a simple, worry-free way to potentially increase the value of your ad impressions.

Ready to get started?
You can arrange a consultation with one of our experts who can help you to choose the right solution for your business, and setup AdSense, DoubleClick Ad Exchange or DoubleClick for Publishers.

Posted by Jay Castro, from the AdSense team.

How to create better blog titles that can drive more traffic to your ads

John A.Smith — Mon, 05 Dec 2016 14:00:00 +0000

This is the third of five guest posts from AdSense publisher Brandon Gaille. Brandon has built his small business marketing blog, BrandonGaille.com, to over 2 million monthly visitors in less than three years. He’s featured as our guest blogger to share insights and tips from his personal blogging experience to help AdSense publishers grow earnings. If you’re new to AdSense, be sure to sign up for AdSense and start turning your #PassionIntoProfit.

Over the past three years, I’ve crafted titles for over 5,000 blog posts and have received over 58 million unique visitors to date. With that many titles and that much traffic, it’s allowed me to identify what types of titles get the most traffic.

The title of your page or blog post will play one of the largest roles in how much traffic you receive. From my extensive experience, a really great title can move your blog post dis and increase the number of social shares by over 300%.

The bottom line is… If you fail to write a compelling title that gets people to click, then your post is doomed to wallow in mediocrity.

Here are a few title optimization tactics that have proven to drive the most traffic.

#1 Place a number at the beginning of your title

If you have a list formatted post, then you need to be using numbered titles every single time. Titles that begin with numbers are proving to drive traffic. This is largely due to the increased consumption of users reading list posts more than any other type of blog post. A list post typically has anywhere from seven to forty key points, which are listed out numerically.
This makes it really easy for anyone to scan through the big takeaways and decide whether to dive deeper into the article. When people see the number 13 at the beginning of the title, they know they can scan through all 13 key points in a matter of seconds.

A numbered title paired with a list post will drive more clicks to your post and list style posts have one of the highest engagement rates. Posts with more clicks and higher engagement often are rewarded by becoming more discoverable to users.

Here are a couple of examples of numbered blog titles:

11 Tools to Create Share-Worthy Content
17 Incredible Social Media Statistics

I recommend crafting numbered blog post titles for more than half of your posts.

A Conductor study on headline preferences also backs up what I’ve found to be true on my blog.

#2 The odd number gets 20% more clicks than the even number

Although no one has figured out exactly why this happens, the odd numbered titles get more clicks than the even numbered titles. Here’s an example.
Odd Numbered Title: 11 Keys to Earning More Money on Adsense
Even Numbered Title: 12 Types of Ads that Convert

Before you hit publish on the blog post titled, “8 Crazy Ways to Double Your Ad Revenue,” take a moment to either add one more tip or remove the least valuable tip. This will allow you to capitalize on the extra twenty percent of clicks by having an odd numbered title.

Learn more about creating better blog titles from my blog and read all of the “17 Ways to Create Catchy Blog Titles That Drive Traffic.”

Posted By
Brandon Gaille

Brandon Gaille is an AdSense publisher. You can learn more about Brandon at BrandonGaille.com and listen to his popular blogging podcast, The Blog Millionaire.

If you’re new to AdSense, be sure to sign up for AdSense and start turning your #PassionIntoProfit.

Put your users first with the four S’: Speed, Scroll, Style, Simple

John A.Smith — Wed, 30 Nov 2016 14:00:00 +0000

We’re all consumers of web content. Yet as content creators it can be easy to forget what we need as users. But don’t worry, you’ve got this, and we’ve got you covered with just four S’.

If you’re new to AdSense, be sure to sign up today and start turning your #PassionIntoProfit.

1. Speed

We all know how frustrating it is when a page takes forever to load. We twiddle our thumbs and look from side to side. And after just three seconds, we bounce.

But somehow publishers aren’t responding to this primal need that we all know as users.

According to Google's research from the Mobile Speed Matters report, the average load time for mobile sites across the web is 19 seconds. This is a LONG time. Usain Bolt can run 200m in 19.9s - think of what your users can do with a tap and a swipe.

But how does this impact me? Well, the report also states that…

53% of mobile site visits are abandoned if pages take longer than 3 seconds to load.
Publishers whose mobile sites load in 5 seconds earn up to 2x more mobile ad revenue than those whose sites load in 19 seconds.

By now we think you’re sold on speed. So what’s next?

Understand your site’s speed with these resources

Consider one of the following quick fixes

Get our mobile web speed toolkit and...

Measure your site’s performance
Assess the different components impacting speed
Prioritize the order your site loads
Test, remeasure and repeat to improve your site speed

2. Scroll

The magic scroll. It’s an infinite, endless, perfectly loaded stream of content. There’s no need to click, to wait for a page to load, to navigate to that tiny ‘next’ with your giant thumb. It’s all right here, content, just waiting for you to consume it.

There are, of course, a few caveats before developing an infinite scroll. Like almost everything online, this isn’t a one size fits all solution.

Infinite scroll is great for ...

UGC publishers with constantly evolving content - think Tumblr, Facebook, Pinterest.
Sites with lengthy articles or tutorials. No one wants to click ‘more’ or ‘page 2’ anymore. It’s just too dang hard.
Publishers using a slideshow with pagination. Consider a lazy loaded infinite scroll instead. Users love it.
Publishers considering mobile first (aren’t we all?!).

Watch out for …

Crawler errors & SEO impact and check out this article for creating a search friendly infinite scroll.

3. Style

Style should never be an afterthought. You and your users want to interact with something that looks good and feels good.

There are two primary components to style: content style & ad style.

First: Content Style

Great websites are able to maintain a consistent style across pages and platforms. Consistency gives users a sense of familiarity when interacting with your content.

Choose a color scheme and stick to it
Choose a layout and stick to it
Choose a theme and stick to it

We can’t stress this enough - stick to it.

As the industry continues to migrate towards a mobile first perspective, consistency across device types and platforms becomes increasingly important. Responsive web design enables your site to adapt to various device sizes without changing the overall look and feel or compromising user experience.

If you're up for the challenge, check out more on responsive design.

Second: Ad Style

In the internet of yesteryear it was nearly impossible to monetize without stripping a site of what made it beautiful. The good news? It’s 2016 and now you have the ability to make a profit and maintain your site’s style.

When implementing ads think about what makes sense for you and your users.

Consider responsive ads that automatically adapt to the user’s screen size
See if native ads are right for your site. If so, you can modify to match the look and feel of your site
Add matched content units, allowing your users to interact with more relevant content

Here's a sample of a native ad design.

Most importantly use ads to complement the content of your site. Since content is king, it’s important to ensure that you give your users what they're looking for in a format that’s easy to find and navigate, this includes the ads on your site.

Place ads at natural breaks or where the user’s attention may have waned. Not only will this improve user experience but it also may encourage a higher CTR and increased audience engagement.

4. Simple

Keep it simple, folks.

This rule underlines most everything that is targeted towards consumers, but it is even more important for a mobile first audience.

When it comes to consuming digital content, we’re a generation of hungry hippos. We want headlines, snippets, concise and clear information. We want minimalist design with streamlined content and easy navigation.

Tips on keeping it simple

Make it touch friendly. What’s easier than that?
Bullet points make your content easily consumable
Be brief in sign-ups. If your site requires users to sign-up or sign-in, keep input requirements to a minimum or consider adding a Google sign-in option to speed up the process

So there you have it; the four S’ of user experience: speed, scroll, style, simple. If you’re new to AdSense, be sure to sign up today and start turning your #PassionIntoProfit.

Posted by: Sarah Hornsey, from the AdSense team

Increase your earnings by using the right keyword research techniques

John A.Smith — Mon, 28 Nov 2016 14:00:00 +0000

This is the second of five guest posts from AdSense publisher Brandon Gaille. Brandon has built his small business marketing blog, BrandonGaille.com, to over 2 million monthly visitors in less than three years. He’s featured as our guest blogger to share insights and tips from his personal blogging experience to help AdSense publishers grow earnings. If you’re new to AdSense, be sure to sign up for AdSense and start turning your #PassionIntoProfit.

Last month, my blog received a little bit over 1.7 million visitors that originated from Google organic search. More than 95% of this traffic came from long tailed keywords.

If you do not know what a long tailed keyword is, then here’s a crash course. In keyword research, there are two primary types of keywords:

#1 Head Terms

These are your one and two word phrases that get loads of searches on Google. A few examples would be cars, credit score, and real estate. They are phrases that are very broad and are usually a top level category.

#2 Long Tail Terms

Then you have the long tail phrases that are made up of three words or more. A few examples of long tailed terms would be; red convertible sports cars, how to improve a bad credit score, and luxury real estate in upper New York. These terms are more descriptive and the searcher is usually closer to making a buying decision.

If you are just looking at the top 10,000 most searched phrases, then you will see mostly header terms. However, as you can see in the chart below, the top 10,000 searched phrases only make up 18.5% of all searches. The long tail terms make up over 70%.

Additionally, Search Engine Watch published the results of a Conductor study, which found that long tailed traffic converted to sales at a rate of 250% greater than head terms.

I always tell the students of my online course that the battle for Google traffic is won with deep keyword research. It really is no different than gold prospecting. You have to dig through miles of dirt and rock to find the keyword phrases that are worth their weight in gold.

Here are the five keyword research tactics that will make your Google Analytics look like a hockey stick:

#1 Target keyword phrases that your domain name can rank for

If your website is CNN.com, then you can write about anything you want. The reason why is because their domain authority is 94 out of 100. Domain authority is a scoring system, created by Moz, that is based upon the link profile of each domain name. The more quality links you have, the higher your score is.

Having the luxury of managing over 100 blogs of my own and my clients, I was able to statistically identify what type of keyword phrases (based on number of Google results) different domain authorities can effectively rank for on Google.

When you type in a phrase to Google it will come back with a number of results. The number of results shows how many pages and posts are competing for that particular phrase. The higher the number, the harder it is to rank high enough to get traffic.

Here is the breakdown of what different domain authority sites can rank for.

Domain Authority Less Than 30 = Keyword Phrases with Less than 50,000 Google Results
Domain Authority 30 to 35 = Keyword Phrases with Less than 100,000 Google Results
Domain Authority 36 to 40 = Keyword Phrases with Less than 250,000 Google Results
Domain Authority 41 to 45 = Keyword Phrases with Less than 500,000 Google Results
Domain Authority 46 to 50 = Keyword Phrases with Less than 1,000,000 Google Results

My blog has domain authority of 44. If I spend my time writing posts on keyword phrases with less than 500,000 Google results, then I am going to consistently get high Google rankings for every post I publish. The screenshot below shows the simplicity of how to choose the right keyword phrase.

If you’d like to dive even deeper into keyword strategies, check out the “5 Long Tail Keyword Research Tactics that Every Blogger Should Master.”

Posted By

Brandon Gaille

Brandon Gaille is an AdSense publisher. You can learn more about Brandon at BrandonGaille.com and listen to his popular blogging podcast, The Blog Millionaire.

If you’re new to AdSense, be sure to sign up for AdSense and start turning your #PassionIntoProfit.

How to earn money blogging with AdSense

John A.Smith — Mon, 21 Nov 2016 14:00:00 +0000

This is the first of five guest posts from AdSense publisher Brandon Gaille. Brandon has built his small business marketing blog, BrandonGaille.com, to over 2 million monthly visitors in less than three years. He’s featured as our guest blogger to share insights and tips from his personal blogging experience to help AdSense publishers grow earnings. If you’re new to AdSense, be sure to sign up for AdSense and start turning your #PassionIntoProfit.

Blogging is one of the easiest ways to build a residual income with Google AdSense. However, most bloggers are doing it the wrong way, and that’s keeping them from growing their earnings to a whole new level. Today, I’m going to share with you the four pillars that helped me build my blog traffic to over 1 million monthly visitors in less than 18 months after my first blog post.

My blogging success story is rather unique. For most of my thirties, I was mentally and physically disabled because of damage done by a small pituitary brain tumor. I was fortunate enough to find a doctor that identified the right combination of medicine to bring me back from the depths of nowhere. My mental cognition was regained a mere months before my pregnant wife was diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer. I was able to be there for my wife. Our first son was born healthy, and my wife officially beat cancer two months later.

The fear of our health problems returning led me down the road of creating a blog. One of my top skills is reverse engineering successful systems and rebuilding them into a more productive system. Before my health was ravaged, I had built several multi-million dollar companies on the back of this unique skillset.

Before I made my first blog post, I spent six months researching the blogs that received the most traffic from Google organic search. I identified the specific tactics from over 70 high traffic blogs. Then I ranked the tactics by the most productive, and I eliminated the bottom 80%. This is what I built my blogging system upon. Within four months of launching the blog, I had surpassed 100,000 monthly visitors. Today, my blog receives over 2 million monthly visitors.

Here are the four pillars that my system was built upon:

Pillar #1 – Keyword research

Most amateur bloggers fail miserably at keyword research. The reason for this is because they are overwhelmed by all of the data, and they are usually using the wrong tools. I will be breaking down my simple system for identifying keyword phrases that serves as the topic and title for future blog posts. This will allow you to blog with a purpose. And that purpose is to create blog posts that consistently produce organic traffic.

Pillar #2 – Compelling blog titles

You can write an epic 4000 word post, and it can doomed for failure because of a poorly chosen title. The post title is a very important part of the post, and often overlooked. I’ll be revealing my Perfect Title Formula, which will allow you to craft blog headlines that drive a ridiculous amount of traffic and social shares.

Pillar #3 – Engaging content

Over the last three years, I’ve perfected my blog’s ability to engage new visitors. The average visitor spends 5 minutes reading one of my blog posts. I will be sharing the eleven techniques that I apply to my blog posts to achieve absolute engagement.

Pillar #4 – Getting High Quality Links

The key to remember here is quality over quantity. Do not waste your time chasing low quality links or adding your blog to a directory. There are two strategies that work better than everything else, and I will show you exactly how to execute them.

Over the next four weeks I’ll be sharing tips on how to increase your AdSense earnings right here on the Inside AdSense blog. In the meantime, go here to keep reading “How to Build a Blog to Over 1 Million Monthly Visitors” and find out how to apply the four pillars to your blog.

Posted By
Brandon Gaille

Brandon Gaille is an AdSense publisher. You can learn more about Brandon at BrandonGaille.com and listen to his popular blogging podcast, The Blog Millionaire.

If you’re new to AdSense, be sure to sign up for AdSense and start turning your #PassionIntoProfit.

Why (and how) you should utilize your online community

John A.Smith — Mon, 14 Nov 2016 15:00:00 +0000

Publishing experts provide even more value to their readers by using backlinks to direct them to useful sites that expand on points made, inspired the content/research, or offer alternative looks at the industry.

Friendly shout outs boost your online image, and encourage the rest of the community to also view and engage with your site.

Link up

If you have an idea for a piece of content from another author or are sharing someone else’s article on your site, it’s important to link back to the original owner. Basically, make sure to give credit where credit’s due. By including a backlink (or inbound link), the original owner’s analytics will track what portion of their online traffic came from your site. Chances are, they may even return the favor later on by linking to your shareworthy content.

Promote Yourself Indirectly

The best way to encourage other publishers to direct their readers to your site is to provide high-quality, unique content. Inbound links such as these are valuable to you because they send out organic signals to search engines about the naturally derived credibility of your site. Establishing a reputation for inspiring, timely content is your best tool for continued success and traffic.

To learn more about familiarizing your audience with your brand, check out the AdSense Guide to Audience Engagement.

Posted by Jay Castro

Audience Development Specialist

@jayciro

Global Spotlight: Converting pageviews into revenue

John A.Smith — Thu, 03 Nov 2016 13:00:00 +0000

Welcome back to our Global Spotlight on India, a nation with a population of over 1 billion people and 22 official languages (not including English) which for current AdSense publishers, this presents an opportunity to grow your audience globally.

The Global Spotlight is a series of blog posts that can help educate, inspire, and provide you with insights into how you can grow your business and share your content in emerging markets.

Our last spotlight shared insights on why you should cater to mobile first users. Now that you have a site optimized for mobile users and with high quality, relevant content, here’s how you can convert your traffic into revenue and turn your #PassionIntoProfit.

First, deliver more viewable impressions to get your ads seen. Measuring viewability is extremely important, because if an ad isn't seen, it can't have an impact, change perception, or build brand trust. Here’s a few ways to boost ad viewability on mobile devices:

Replace 320x50 ad units with 320x100
Move ads at least 150 pixels away from content to cut accidental clicks
Use page-level ads designed for mobile devices. More on page levels below

Learn more tips on boosting mobile ad viewability in this blog post.

Second, choose the right mobile ad sizes: medium rectangle (300x250), large rectangle (336x280), large mobile banner (320x100), and rectangular responsive ad units. They tend to get the best results.

Third, use page-level ads. You’ve heard this from us before haven’t you? Page-level ads are a family of ad formats that offer a new and innovative way to help you earn money from your mobile content. They’re designed to automatically show the right mobile ad format at the right time - potentially increasing your earnings without interfering with your users’ mobile experience.

There you have it, our 3-step strategy to help you expand, or start, your site in India.

Do your research

Use Google’s research tools
Understand the users in India
Apply your micro-moments strategy

Go mobile or don’t go at all. And make it fast.

Understand how mobile devices are used
Increase your page speed
Leverage Google’s mobile resources

Convert page views into revenue

Optimizing for viewability
Use the right ad sizes
Try Page-level ads

Do you want to hear more from us about successfully monetizing your content in India? We regularly host live Hangout on Air sessions to talk through best practices and ways to grow your business. Be sure to register for our next live session on November 17th.

If you’re new to AdSense, turn your #PassionIntoProfit today and sign up for Google AdSense.

Be sure to follow AdSense on Twitter to learn more tips on optimizing your account and stay tuned for more posts from our Global Spotlight series in the future!

Posted by Jay Castro, from the AdSense Team

Global Spotlight: Catering to mobile first users in India

John A.Smith — Wed, 02 Nov 2016 13:00:00 +0000

This week we are shining our AdSense Global Spotlight on India, a nation with a population of over 1 billion people and 22 official languages (not including English). For current AdSense publishers, this presents an opportunity to grow your audience globally.

The Global Spotlight is series of blog posts that can help educate, inspire, and provide you with insights into how you can grow your business and share your content in emerging markets.

Our last spotlight shared insights on how to capture the opportunity in India by sharing tips on how to research your potential audience in India. Research is an important first step because when you know what users are talking about, you can participate in the conversation.

Today we want to talk about why you should cater to mobile first users.

It’s no longer breaking news, our world has shifted to mobile. This shift has been quick, and users expectations for great mobile experiences has increased even more quickly. A website that simply loads on a mobile device is no longer enough. To keep users engaged, mobile sites must be fast and relevant. You’ve learned in our previous post that India is projected to have 570M users online by 20201, and more than half of those users will be accessing the internet via a smartphone. Since hundreds of millions of users in India will only access the internet via a mobile device, it’s important to think like a user, and think mobile first.

First, understand how users interact and use their mobile devices. The study “How People Use Their Devices” dives into three different categories of use cases:

What does device usage look like in an average day
What we do on our devices
How we search across devices

Second, increase your mobile page speed. For users in India, it’s important to reduce the size of your pages. To reduce the size of your pages, target 50 or fewer requests and 1,000 or fewer bytes to optimize load time. You can also compress and select efficient images, and prioritize download of visible content. Lastly, consider AMPlifying your site for lightning speed. These are all key in winning mobile micro-moments.

Check out the Mobile Web Speed Toolkit released by DoubleClick to help you optimize the speed of your mobile site.

Third, leverage the many resources available to go mobile.

What are you waiting for? Get out there and grow your site in India. While you’re at it, be sure to turn your #PassionIntoProfit today by signing up for Google AdSense.

Tomorrow we’ll be sharing more tips so stay tuned or check out the other posts from our Global Spotlight series! Don’t forget to mark your calendar and register for our next live Hangout on Air session on November 17th. We’ll be talking through best practices and ways to grow your business.

Posted By: Jay Castro, from the AdSense team

Footnotes

1. eMarketer, Worldwide Internet and Mobile Users: eMarketer’s Updated Estimates and Forecast for 2015–2020, October 11, 2016

Global Spotlight: India presents big opportunities for publishers

John A.Smith — Tue, 01 Nov 2016 13:00:00 +0000

More and more users from all over the world are gaining access to information online. For current AdSense publishers, this presents an opportunity to grow your audience globally. Our Global Spotlight series is designed to help educate, inspire, and provide you with insights into how you can grow your business and share your content in emerging markets.

Our last spotlight shared insights on how to capture the opportunity in Indonesia. This week, we turn our lens on India, a nation with a population of over 1 billion people and 22 official languages (not including English). Check out our last post on how and why you should create content in Hindi.

Expanding your content strategy to India may spice up your earnings. Not only does India deliciously produce over 70% of all the world’s spices, but according to eMarketer, it’s on pace to add more new mobile phone users than any other country in the world. Projections say that India will have 570M users online by 20201, and more than half of those users will be accessing the internet via a smartphone.

This explosion in online user growth has been estimated by eMarketer to result in more than a 3x growth in online ad spend in India ($700M in 2015 and forecasted to be $2.5bn by 2020)2. What does this mean for you? A big opportunity to expand your business into India.

In our next few blog posts, we’ll be sharing with you a 3-step strategy to start expanding your business to India, or building a new site for an Indian audience. The first step has 3 tips to get started.

Use Google’s research tools to create relevant content.
Learn the demographics of India’s population.
Apply Google’s micro-moments to your strategy.

If you’re new to monetization, sign up for AdSense and start turning your #PassionIntoProfit by adding AdSense ads to your site so you can focus on your content. After all, content is king.

The first tip we’d like to look at is how and why you as publisher should do research.

When you know what users are talking about, you can participate in the conversation. But the online world moves quickly, so if you want to keep the crowds coming back to your site, your content needs to move with it.

First, use Google’s research tools to create relevant content. Start with Google Trends. You can pinpoint hot topics based on user search trends.

Second, think with Google, literally. This article will help interpret the demographics of India’s population.

Third, learn about Google’s micro-moments and apply them to your strategy. Don’t let another moment pass.

What do you think?

Are you ready to grow your business in India? If so, why stop there? Around the world, people are using AdSense to help them do more of what they love. Turn your #PassionIntoProfit today and sign up for Google AdSense.

Tomorrow we’ll be sharing the second part of our 3-step strategy on how to start expanding your business to India, so stay tuned and check out the other posts from our Global Spotlight series!

Posted by Jay Castro, from the AdSense team

Footnotes:

eMarketer, Worldwide Internet and Mobile Users: eMarketer’s Updated Estimates and Forecast for 2015–2020, October 11, 2016

eMarketer, Digital Ad Spending in Asia-Pacific, by Country, 2015-2020 (billions), September 12, 2016

Global Spotlight: The untapped potential for content in Hindi

John A.Smith — Mon, 31 Oct 2016 15:00:00 +0000

More and more users from all over the world are gaining access to information online. For current AdSense publishers, this presents an opportunity to grow your audience globally. Our Global Spotlight series is designed to help educate, inspire, and provide you with insights into how you can grow your business and share your content in emerging markets.

We’re happy to continue our Global Spotlight and bring you to India, a nation with the second largest population in the world and a large percentage of the population coming online for the first time.

Think with Google published a thought provoking article titled Why Hindi Matters in the Digital Age and left us with a key takeaway:

“With nearly 500M Hindi speakers in India and around the world, businesses that invest in Hindi content today stand to gain a whole new set of consumers tomorrow.”

Today we’ll look at the untapped potential for original content that’s created in Hindi for a Hindi audience. This graphic, from the article Why Hindi Matters in the Digital Age accurately represents the opportunity to create Hindi content for Hindi speaking users.

So if you have a large user base in India or if you’re looking to grow in this strategic emerging market, catering your content to Hindi speakers is key. Check out this infographic to learn more:

Keen to start creating? Here’s three things you can do to start publishing Hindi content online:

1. Create Hindi content that is unique and provides value to your users.You know the importance of doing your research to better understand the market, so use those same tools (Google Trends in Search and YouTube) to identify trending content for Hindi speakers: Entertainment, News, Jobs/Education, Sports esp. Kabbadi & Wrestling!. You can also see a selection of high quality Hindi content from fellow publishers at hindiweb.com.

2. Get a professional translation, or have a native speaker review content.If you plan to translate your site for Hindi speakers, ensure you provide high quality and accurate translations. Avoid auto-translation as it risks a low quality user experience. Check out these Webmaster Quality Guidelines to learn more.

3. Use Devanagari script. Access up to 40 free, beautiful fonts for publishing your Hindi content and benefit from better indexing of your site. Select Devanagari script at Google Fonts to add fonts to your collection.

Learn more about this opportunity and many others by joining our live Hangout on Air session on November 17th, 2016. We’ll talk through best practices and share ways for you to grow your business. Be sure to register here. If you’re new to monetizing your content in India, start turning your #PassionIntoProfit today by signing up for Google AdSense.

In our next few blog posts, we’ll be sharing with you a 3-step strategy to start expanding your business to India, or building a new site for an Indian audience. In the meantime, check out the other posts from our Global Spotlight series.

Posted by: Jatin Nagpal, from the AdSense team

Best Practices to avoid policy violations

John A.Smith — Mon, 31 Oct 2016 13:00:00 +0000

We’re dedicated to providing additional transparency into our policy processes and hope that the recent blog posts have helped you understand specific policy triggers and the actions to take if you’ve violated a policy. To further help you stay policy compliant, here’re 8 best practices to help avoid policy violations and keep your account in good standing.

1. Don’t click on your own ads

Don’t click your own ads, or ask others to click them. These kinds of clicks won’t count toward revenue and may get you suspended. Even if you’re interested in an ad or looking for its destination URL, clicking on your own ads is prohibited. Instead, use the Google Publisher Toolbar.

2. Think like a user

Make it easy for people to find what they’re looking for. Follow the Webmaster Guidelines to provide content that’s useful, interesting, and adds value. Immerse yourself into the user experience however you can. Try to discover the emotions that guide users’ behaviors and try to uncover their needs.

3. Keep it family-friendly and legal Review our guidelines about prohibited content and be sure you understand them. If you wouldn’t want a child or grandparent to see it, don’t put it on your site. We’ve made a commitment to our users, advertisers and publishers to keep the AdSense network family-safe. A general rule of thumb when it comes to our policies is: if you wouldn’t want to share this content at a family dinner, or view it at your boss’s office, you shouldn’t place AdSense code on it.

4. Maximize content, not ads per page Create new, relevant, interesting content, and update it regularly. Also, be sure to maintain a good balance between ads and editorial content as it’s important to ensure that there’s always more content than ads on a page.

5. Avoid deceptive layoutsKeep ads away from games, slideshows, and other click-heavy content and don’t place them near images. Publishers may not use deceptive implementation methods to obtain clicks. This includes, but is not limited to: placing images next to individual ads, placing ads in a floating box script, formatting ads so that they become indistinguishable from other content on the page, formatting content so that it is difficult to distinguish it from ads and placing misleading labels above Google ad units.

6. Create unique content Your content needs to create added value for your users. Focus on making content great – not duplicating it across pages. Unique and valuable content is what keeps users coming back to publisher sites. Everything you do as a publisher should be user focused, which primarily includes developing great content.

7. Track your traffic Your traffic should be organic. Set up alerts using Google Analytics to quickly identify unusual traffic patterns. Many potential traffic quality problems can be addressed quickly by monitoring your own traffic. Traffic anomalies are often indicators of potential invalid traffic activity.

8. Follow the Code of Implementation GuideAlways follow the Code Implementation Guide and don’t try to modify the AdSense code. If you run into a problem, visit the Troubleshooting page or contact publisher support.

Thanks for taking the time to learn about Google ad network policy, processes, and best practices. Together, we can continue to make the web and advertising experience great.

Posted by: Anastasia Almiasheva from the AdSense team

Do more with Ads on AMP

John A.Smith — Wed, 26 Oct 2016 16:24:00 +0000

Cross-posted from the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Blog

Over a year has passed since the AMP Project first launched with the vision of making mobile web experiences faster and better for everybody. From the very beginning, we’ve maintained that the AMP project would support publishers’ existing business models while creating new monetization opportunities. With regards to advertising, this meant giving publishers the flexibility to use the current technology and systems they’re used to, and evolving user-first mobile web initiatives like AMP for Ads (A4A).

With a growing number of publishers embracing the speed of AMP, today we’re addressing some of the ways in which we’re helping you do more with ads on AMP.

Serve ads from more than 70+ ad tech providers

Keeping with the open source nature of the project, more than 70+ advertising technology providers have already integrated with AMP. And that list is only growing. Existing tags that are delivered via a supported ad server also work in AMP. So, you can serve ads from both directly-sold campaigns as well as third-party ad networks and exchanges so long as they have support for AMP.

Keep 100% of the ad revenue

AMP is an open source project. It does not take a revenue share. AMP is not an advertising service provider or intermediary, and publishers can monetize AMP pages the same way you monetize HTML pages, keeping 100% of the revenue you earn based on negotiated rates with ad providers.

Choose the advertising experience on your pages

You can choose to serve any number of ads per page to serve in locations that works best for your content, including the first viewport. Just remember that regular ads in AMP load after the primary content. So, unless you’re loading the lightning fast A4A ads, we recommend placing the first ad below the first viewpoint to optimize for viewability and user experience.

Take advantage of video ad support

AMP currently supports 13 different video players, ranging from Brightcove to Teads, all of which can serve video ads. If you want to use a video player that is not currently supported in AMP, place the video player inside amp-iframe. Learn more.

Differentiate yourself with rich and custom ad formats

AMP accommodates a large variety of ad formats by default, ranging from publisher custom ad units to IAB standard outstream video and in-feed native ads. We value publisher choice and support efforts to create proprietary ad formats. For example, with responsive layouts in AMP, you can offer advertisers custom ads that can dynamically span the entire width of the mobile device. Learn more about how you can adapt your ads strategy for AMP.

Maximize revenue with interchangeable ad slots

In September 2016, both YieldMo and DoubleClick announced support for multi-size ad requests on AMP pages. With this launch, you can optimize yield by allowing multiple ad creative sizes to compete for each ad slot, capturing the most advertiser demand possible on AMP pages while still protecting the user’s experience.

Plan ahead with a view into AMP’s roadmap

Transparency is important to the success of any open source project and is a key value for AMP. Accordingly, we started publishing the AMP roadmap publicly nearly 6 months ago, including milestones for ads. These roadmaps are accompanied with bi-quarterly status updates and you can also see all AMP releases here.

Over 700,000 domains have published AMP pages and a good many are monetizing them with ads. Early studies suggest that ads on AMP are more viewable and engaging than ads on non-AMP mobile pages. That’s because with AMP, you don’t have to choose between good user experiences and monetization opportunities. When balanced and optimized, you can have both.

Reach out -- we’re eager to hear your suggestions and feedback to make sure that AMP pays off for everyone.

Posted by Vamsee Jasti, Product Manager, AMP Project

Did You Receive A Policy Violation Warning?

John A.Smith — Wed, 26 Oct 2016 13:00:00 +0000

Have you received an email from adsense-adclicks-noreply@google.com with a warning that you’ve violated the AdSense policies? These warnings are usually issued in instances of mild violations that we believe can be fixed quickly.

In addition to an email, you’ll receive a notification in your AdSense account under the “Status” tab. Both the email and notification will explain where your violation occurred and how to fix it and by clicking the link provided, you’ll be sent to the page where the violation has occurred. To resolve the issue, you can either fix the content that violates AdSense policies across your site or remove the AdSense code.

Remember, your site must be compliant in order to participate in the AdSense program. When you’ve made all the necessary changes to your site, check “Resolved” on the site level violation notification in the “Status” tab of your AdSense account. You don’t need to notify us when you’ve fixed the violation; however, you do need to resolve it in a timely manner.

There are cases where ads stop appearing on your site altogether. This can happen when a publisher fails to respond to policy violation warnings, receives multiple warnings, or displays egregious violations across their site(s). Violations are categorized as egregious when we believe they can cause significant harm to advertisers, Google, users, or the overall ads ecosystem.

In these cases you’ll receive an email and a notification in your AdSense account under the “Status” tab to notify you of this change. A link will also be included to show you where the violation appears. You can resolve it by either removing the content in question or by removing the AdSense code from the affected page. It’s important to note that a very small percentage of sites have their ads disabled after receiving a policy violation warning.

Once you’ve corrected the violations across your entire site, you can submit an appeal from the “Status” tab in your AdSense account or by using the AdSense policy troubleshooter. Please bear in mind that we can only review appeals from sites that have AdSense code enabled.

Stay tuned for some best practices to help you avoid a policy violation.

Posted by: Anastasia Almiasheva from the AdSense team

The AdSense Guide to Audience Engagement is Now Available in More Languages!

John A.Smith — Tue, 25 Oct 2016 17:33:00 +0000

Thank you for your feedback on our recently launched The AdSense Guide to Audience Engagement and letting us know how it has helped you grow your online business. Now you can download the guide in 2 additional languages: Portuguese and Spanish.

Download the guide today, and like thousands of other AdSense publishers, learn how to engage with your users like never before. The guide contains useful advice and best practices that will help you drive engagement on your site, including:

Tips to help your audience become familiar with your brand
Best practices to design delightful user journeys
Ideas on how to develop content that resonates with your audience
Ways to make your content easy to consume
Reasons why you should share the love with other sites by referring to good sources.

Ready? Download your free copy of the #AdSenseGuide now in any of the following languages:

Guia do Google AdSense para engajamento com o público-alvo

La guía de AdSense para interactuar con la audiencia

Enjoy the guide and we’d love to hear your feedback on Google+ and Twitter using #AdSenseGuide.

Posted by: Jay Castro from the AdSense team

Share your feedback on AdSense and other Google publisher solutions

John A.Smith — Fri, 21 Oct 2016 15:34:00 +0000

It’s time to share your feedback! To improve our product and services, we send out a survey to a group of publishers every six months.

Your feedback and comments are important to us, and we really do read and consider everything you write. Thanks to previous suggestions, we’ve launched a number of new features to improve our services and help you grow your earnings. These include a new Optimization tab that provides tips on increasing your revenue, an improved AdSense interface for easier user navigation, and more transparency on our policies.

You may have received a survey by email over the last few weeks, if so please take the time to respond to it as we value your input.

To make sure that you're eligible to receive the next survey email, please:

Update your contact details
Update your email preferences to receive ‘occasional survey’ messages

Whether you’ve completed this survey before or you’re providing feedback for the first time, we’d like to thank you for sharing your valuable thoughts. We’re looking forward to feedback!

Posted by Susie Reinecke - AdSense Publisher Happiness Team

Learn the top triggers of policy violation warnings

John A.Smith — Wed, 19 Oct 2016 13:00:00 +0000

Today we’ll highlight some of the top triggers of policy violation warnings to help you avoid common pitfalls. If you haven’t already, download the All-In-One Policy Compliance Guide to help you understand the what's and why's of our policy processes so you can always stay one step ahead.

As a general guideline to building a strong policy compliant foundation, ensure that the pages within your site offer a unique value for users and comply with AdSense policies. Let’s get started.

1. Copyrighted Material

Google ads cannot be placed on pages that infringe on copyrighted materials. Don’t try to monetize content that isn’t yours or you don’t have permission to use.

2. Deceptive Layout

Because users come to your site for the content, it should then be easy for users of your site to distinguish ads from content at all times. Ads that blend in or that are situated too close to content and navigational icons can cause invalid clicks. AdSense will deduct clicks that are determined to be invalid and, where possible, reimburse advertisers.

3. Explicit Text

Text descriptions that include excessive use of profanity or erotic stories, jokes, or discussions are violations of AdSense policies.

4. Mislabeling

Placing ads under misleading headings like “Resources” is a policy violation. Users should not be mislead or asked to click on ads. Acceptable headers are “Advertisements or “Sponsored Links”.

5. Sexual Content

Content that’s sexually explicit – or suggestive without being explicit, such as lingerie – isn’t allowed. If you wouldn't show it in polite company, we don’t want AdSense advertisements appearing there.

6. Unnatural Attention

Drawing unnatural attention to ads by using visuals, call-outs or placements that call too much attention to ads aren’t permitted either.

7. Violent Content

Content that features bloodshed, fight scenes, and gruesome or freak accidents is not permitted by the AdSense policy.

8. Webmaster Guidelines

Webmaster Guidelines require publishers to make sure their content is original, adds value, and is intended primarily for users, not for search engines. Failure to adhere to these adds up to a violation of AdSense policy.

There you have it: eight common triggers for a potential policy violation warning. We recommend that you refer back to this blog post and use Google Search to identify if you have any violations in your content as you review your site and upcoming content.

Coming up next – what to do if you receive a policy violation warning.

Posted by: Anastasia Almiasheva from the AdSense team

Have you experienced an unauthorized access issue with your AdSense Account?

John A.Smith — Mon, 17 Oct 2016 13:00:00 +0000

Unfortunately, even for AdSense publishers, there’s always the risk of an unauthorized source compromising your secure login credentials. In these instances, you might be locked out of your AdSense account. Here’s what you can do to recover your account and avoid the same issue in the future:

For starters, these triggers can help you identify if your account has been compromised.

You’ve noticed suspicious account activity (for example: there are new users that you haven’t granted access to; the payment details have changed without your permission; your security settings have been updated; and your email notification settings have changed).
You cannot login to your AdSense account.

If you’ve found that your account has been compromised, follow these steps to resolve the issue:

Run a malware scan on your devices
Visit our Login Troubleshooter. If you’re locked out of your account, the troubleshooter will help you recover your Google Account. Once you’ve recovered your Google Account:

Change your password to something unique and unused. Here’s tips on how to create strong password.
Visit myaccount.google.com to review your security settings
Enable 2-Step-Verification.

Then, the troubleshooter will take you to the Account login issues form, which will direct you to an AdSense account issues specialists.

The specialist will start an investigation and communicate next steps (including the investigation report and reimbursement options).
For a speedy resolution, be sure to include the following with the form as accurately as possible:

Proof of your identity and address using acceptable documents.
Proof of a recent AdSense payment, such as a copy of a check, Western Union receipt or bank statement clearly showing a recent AdSense EFT deposit.
The URL of a test page of your website. This is to prove that you own and manage the domain listed in your account.

It’s important to note that the Account login issues form cannot be used to report disputes between authorized users. The administrator of the account is responsible for all user permissions. In general, it’s a best practice to remove former employees and inactive users from your account to help prevent unauthorized changes.

Unfortunately, in some cases with ongoing security concerns, account reinstatement may not be possible. The AdSense specialist team will let you know if this is the case.

We understand that compromised login credentials may be a huge problem for you and your business. Bookmark these valuable help resources to help retrieve a hijacked account:

If you have questions about this topic, join us on Twitter or Google+ for one of our #AskAdSense office hour sessions.

Posted by: Hievda Ugur, from the AdSense Team

Increase the speed of your mobile site with this toolkit

John A.Smith — Thu, 13 Oct 2016 20:30:00 +0000

Cross-Posted from the DoubleClick for Publishers blog

Last month we released a new study, "The need for mobile speed", highlighting the impact of mobile latency on publisher revenue. Simply having your site load on a mobile device is no longer enough: Mobile sites have to be fast and relevant. The study analyzed 10,000+ mobile web domains, and from the results we gained several insights about the impact of mobile latency on user experience.

Critically, the study also revealed strong correlations between page speed and the following key performance indicators:

Revenue
Bounce rate
Session duration
Viewability

It’s clear mobile speed matters to the success of publisher sites, but making mobile load times a priority doesn’t always make achieving speed easy. To help you build a faster mobile web experience, we’ve created a mobile web speed toolkit. It outlines a 4-step process to diagnose and fix mobile speed issues:

Measure your site’s performance.
Assess the different components impacting speed.
Prioritize the order your site loads.
Test, remeasure and repeat to improve your site speed.

The mobile web speed toolkit offers tactical recommendations to begin achieving mobile speed.

The relationship between page speed and publisher revenue is clearer than ever before. Small improvements to your mobile site may yield big gains for your mobile revenue, so get your copy of the mobile web speed toolkit and start making changes today.

#SpeedMatters

Posted by: Jay Castro
AdSense team

Meet the new AdSense user interface

John A.Smith — Thu, 13 Oct 2016 14:54:00 +0000

Editor's Note: This post was originally published in October 2016 and has been updated with the most recent product announcement.

Over the coming weeks, when you log in to your AdSense account, you'll be automatically taken to the new UI. You can still opt out by clicking the Back to Previous AdSense link on the left menu.

Thank you to everyone who tried the new user interface (UI) over the last few weeks. More than half of our active AdSense users decided to opt in, and nearly 90% stayed with the new UI. After listening to your feedback we’re ready to take the next step.

How will I be affected?

If you haven’t tried the new UI, you’ll be automatically opted in. You’ll still have the option to opt out.
If you’re already on the new UI, you won’t be affected. You’ll still have the option to opt out.
If you’ve tried the new UI and opted out, you’ll continue to be taken to the current interface with no changes.

The new UI remains optional over the coming weeks. We’re aiming to make the new UI the default, and deactivate the old one by early 2017. Let us know what you think by using the Send feedback link.

----

Posted October 13, 2016

The new AdSense user interface (UI) is here. Over the last year, our product team has been hard at work bringing Material Design principles to AdSense. This new UI highlights the information that’s relevant to you on a personalized homepage and streamlines navigation.

Over the next few weeks we’ll be offering the new UI to AdSense publishers.  All you’ll need to do is opt in when you log in to AdSense: 

What’s new?

A fresh new look & feel. We're adopting Material Design principles with a completely redesigned homepage and menu. We’ll roll out further improvements throughout the product soon.

A great new homepage. All the information you need, right where you need it. We've organized your homepage into a stream of interactive cards. You can pin your favorites to the top of the stream, and arrange your homepage just the way you’d like.

A streamlined new menu. We’ve brought everything together in a new left hand menu.

We’ll continue to improve and refine AdSense over the coming months. While we’re making these improvements, you’ll still be able to find all the content and features that you’re used to–right where you expect them.

Opt in through the AdSense interface to try it for yourself, and let us know what you think in the feedback tool.

Posted by: Andrew Gildfind, Daniel White & Louis Collard
From the AdSense Product Team

Infographic: Get the free All-In-One Policy Compliance Guide

John A.Smith — Tue, 11 Oct 2016 15:48:00 +0000

We’ve shared that high quality content and consistency are key ingredients to earning and maintaining the trust of online users. What about maintaining the trust of your ad networks so that you can continue to earn revenue? For AdSense, it’s important to protect the interests of everyone in the online ecosystem, including our users, our advertisers, and our publishers. This focus on maintaining a healthy balance is the reason we set strict policies about AdSense for everyone in the ecosystem to follow.

Your feedback helped us realize that some publishers may be confused by some of our policies, which is why we’re launching a series of blog posts, infographics, new notifications, access to customer support, and #AskAdSense office hours to help increase transparency about AdSense policy processes. We hope that these insights can help turn your #PassionIntoProfit and grow your business as you focus on your users and provide unique content.

We have found that there are two types of publishers who receive AdSense policy violations. The first are publishers who unintentionally violate AdSense policies. For those, we hope that increased transparency into our policy processes can decrease these unintentional violations and help our publishers play by the rules. The second are publishers who intentionally bypass our rules, ending up with a variety of violations. That’s why we work hard to maintain a policy compliant ecosystem for our publishers, advertisers, and users. In short, if you play by the rules, AdSense is here to help you grow your business.

Policy compliant sites with unique content attract advertisers who are willing to spend more money and allow users to enjoy friendly web experiences. So without further ado, here’s your All-In-One Policy Compliance Guide. Download it, print it out, and hang it at your desk for reference. In the coming weeks, we’ll dive into policy topics to provide additional context and insights.

Part 1: Top triggers of policy violation warnings
Part 2: Did you receive a policy violation warning?
Part 3: Best practices for keeping your account in good standing

As always, we’re looking forward to hearing your feedback and invite you to join the conversation with us on Twitter and Google+.

Posted by: Anastasia Almiasheva from the AdSense team

[Get the high resolution version here]

3 tips to make your content easy to consume

John A.Smith — Tue, 04 Oct 2016 14:00:00 +0000

Over the last month we’ve taken a look at what makes strong content including topics, length, and shareability. But telling a good story is only half of the process. You also have to present it in an easy-to-digest format for today’s distracted audience.

According to a Think With Google study, “67% of users will switch [to another site or app] if it takes too many steps to purchase or get desired information.” Different forms of media can greatly improve your content’s appeal, if it’s used strategically. With people giving less and less time to the things they read online, it’s up to you to keep visitors engaged and entertained. The following tips will help give your content a stronger impact.

1. Share your content visually

Whether it’s lists, infographics, images, gifs, or video, adding in dynamic elements to your story telling will keep things fresh and memorable. Visuals highlight your key points, and leave a greater impact on both loyal and new visitors alike. In fact, sites with video have been proven to encourage an extra 2 minutes of time on page compared to sites that don’t.

2. Break things up

Images can be a great way to break up long text. Unbroken, continuous text is time-consuming to read and can make visitors “check out” prematurely; no matter how interesting the topic is. By breaking up a longer content piece with related imagery, you can increase the chances of you audience staying to read more, and hopefully, fulfill a desired action on your site.

3. Make it Social

Seeing how “liked” or “shared” an article is naturally prompts visitors to share their opinion on it, too. Social proof is a powerful influencer when it comes to users engaging with your content. Ways to gain social proof include providing like actions, sharing actions, and even custom actions such as testimonials and reviews.

To learn more about familiarizing your audience with your brand, check out the AdSense Guide to Audience Engagement.

Posted by Jay Castro
Audience Development Specialist
@jayciro

Content is king

John A.Smith — Thu, 29 Sep 2016 13:00:00 +0000

Publishers are constantly faced with the question of how to balance content and ads to provide the best possible experience for your users. And as you might have found, there’s no easy one-size-fits-all approach. Every site and app is different, with different types of content, objectives, and users, which means that balancing content and ads will look different from publisher to publisher. When faced with this challenge, it’s important to ensure that you give your users what they're looking for in a format that’s easy to find and navigate, and this includes the ads on your page or app.

Here are a few tips to help you balance ads and content.

1. Content is king.
Your content is the reason users are visiting your site or app. If you think about it, your users are visiting your site for a reason, whether they are looking for a recipe, how to build a birdhouse, or trying to find out what’s happening in their town. By providing them with the information they're looking for, you satisfy their need in the moment that they need it the most. Check out this blog post to learn more about winning these micro-moments.

2. Design your site or app around the user journey.

By making your content the focal point on the page, and following standard web best practices, you can create a site that's visually appealing and easy for your users to use and navigate. Check out the AdSense Guide to Audience Engagement for best practices on designing user journeys, not just web pages.

3. Use ads to complement your site or app.
Ads should always supplement the content on your site, not the other way around. So when you’re placing ad units on your site, consider the user journey and how the ad format will complement your site and provide value for your users. If you want ads to look more natural, and match the feel of your content, consider using native ad units. For example, news and article publishers could consider using the native-style format called Matched content at the bottom of each article to direct readers to other relevant content on the same site. This strategy can help grow readership and your ad business.

4. Test, test, test and test again.

At the end of the day, data will be your source of truth. If you’re considering implementing new ad units, run an AdSense experiment to see how they perform. Also, test the different formats to see what works best for your users and your page.

Remember, content is king and it’s the most important thing to users on your site. So you should always have more content than ads on each page. For more information and best practices, head over to the AdSense Help Center or join our next #AskAdSense office hours on Twitter and Google+.

Posted by: John Brown, Publisher Policy Communications Lead

AdSense Global Spotlight: Capture opportunities in Indonesia

John A.Smith — Wed, 28 Sep 2016 12:30:00 +0000

Baca dalam Bahasa Indonesia di bawah.

More and more users from all over the world are gaining access to information online. For current AdSense publishers, this presents an opportunity to grow your audience globally. This new Global Spotlight series can help educate, inspire, and provide you with insights into how you can grow your business and share your content in emerging markets.

Today we’d like to bring you to Indonesia, an archipelago country of 17,000 islands and home to 260 million people. Indonesia is experiencing rapid internet penetration growth with approximately 100 million internet users[1] and an expected 37% new internet user growth through 2020[2]. Indonesian online ad revenue is also expected to grow aggressively - with over 40% annual growth in digital ad spend expected over the next few years[3].

Jeanny Haliman is a Strategic Partner Manager on the AdSense team with deep roots in Indonesia. She helps publishers in her home country of Indonesia grow their businesses by accelerating their success using AdSense.

“My mission is to empower my partners to pursue their passion and gain financial independence by creating content that they love.”
Here are Jeanny’s top three tips for publishers who are looking to expand into or start their business in Indonesia.

1. Optimize your site for mobile to meet the needs of Indonesian users
Indonesia is a mobile-first market where 65% of Indonesians access the internet via their smartphones more often than a desktop or tablet and urban Indonesians spend three times more of their daily online time with their smartphone rather than a desktop[4]. It’s extremely important to optimize your sites user experience and ad strategy for the large number of Indonesian users accessing content via smartphones.

Here are two resources to help you optimize your content for mobile users:

Download the #AdSenseGuide to Mobile Web Success to learn best practices on how to make the most of every mobile opportunity.
Use Page-level ads. Page-level ads are a family of ad formats that offer a new and innovative way to help you earn money from your mobile content. They’re designed to automatically show the right mobile ad format at the right time - potentially increasing your earnings without interfering with your users’ mobile experience. Implementing Page-level ads is easy. Check out this 2-minutes tutorial that will walk you through the process.

2. Audience engagement is key to increasing your presence in Indonesia
Engaging your audience is all about telling the story that users are looking for, in a unique and creative way. As publishers, it’s your role to make it easy for users to consume content. Easy to consume content creates more chances to engage with an audience, ultimately yielding greater ad impressions.

Here are two resources Jeanny shares with publishers that want to engage with an audience:

Download the #AdSenseGuide to Audience Engagement. This eBook is packed with tips to help make your content easy to consume.
Use the free AdSense content recommendation tool, Matched content, to encourage your site visitors to consume more of your content. Place the Matched content unit at the bottom of your articles and it will promote additional contextually relevant and personalized articles from your site. Check if your account is eligible for Matched content here.

3. Ensure that your site is policy-compliant
Understanding AdSense Policy will help Indonesian publishers to build a healthy and sustainable business in the long-term. Here're some tips Jeanny usually gives to her publishers:

Understand the AdSense Program Policies.
Avoid accidental clicks on your own ads and notify us if there is invalid activity in your account
Check your AdSense-registered email regularly. If you receive a policy warning email, quickly fix your policy violations. If your ads get disabled, fix your policy violations and send an appeal via the form given on the email.

Do you want to hear more from Jeanny about successfully monetizing your content in Indonesia? She regularly hosts live Hangout on Air sessions with her publishers to talk through best practices, ad placement tips, and ways to grow your business. Be sure to register your interest to receive updates on the next session. Until then, you can watch a recording of a recent Hangout on Air she hosted about Policy and Mobile Web Optimization.

Stay tuned for the next global market spotlight. In the meantime, be sure to follow us on Twitter and Google+ to hear updates and account optimization tips. Also, check out Google Indonesia on Twitter, they curate great content to grow you business in Indonesia.

Posted by: Ha Truong, from the AdSense Emerging Markets Team

----------

Semakin banyak pengguna dari seluruh dunia yang mendapatkan akses ke informasi secara online. Untuk penayang AdSense saat ini, kondisi ini menghadirkan peluang untuk menumbuhkan pengunjung situs secara global. Seri AdSense Global Spotlight baru ini dapat membantu mengajarkan, menginspirasi, dan memberi Anda wawasan tentang cara mengembangkan bisnis dan membagikan konten di pasar negara berkembang.

Pada kesempatan ini, kami ingin mengajak Anda ke Indonesia, negara kepulauan dengan 17.000 pulau dan berpenduduk 260 juta orang. Penetrasi internet di Indonesia sedang mengalami perkembangan pesat dengan pengguna internet berjumlah sekitar 100 juta orang dan pertumbuhan pengguna internet baru sampai tahun 2020 diharapkan mencapai 37% Pendapatan iklan online Indonesia juga diharapkan tumbuh secara agresif - dengan pertumbuhan tahunan dalam pembelanjaan iklan digital diharapkan mencapai lebih dari 40% dalam beberapa tahun ke depan [3].

Jeanny Haliman adalah Manager Mitra Strategis AdSense yang memiliki akar kuat di Indonesia. Ia membantu para penayang di negara asalnya, Indonesia, dalam mengembangkan bisnis dan menyukseskan monetisasi mereka menggunakan AdSense.

“Misi saya adalah memberdayakan mitra untuk mengejar cita-cita mereka dan mendapatkan sokongan finansial secara independen ketika mereka membuat konten yang mereka sukai.”
Berikut adalah tiga tips utama dari Jeanny untuk penayang yang ingin berekspansi atau memulai bisnisnya di Indonesia.

1. Optimalkan situs mobile untuk memenuhi kebutuhan pengguna Indonesia:
Indonesia adalah pasar yang didominasi pengguna seluler. 65% orang Indonesia mengakses internet lebih banyak melalui ponsel dibandingkan melalui desktop atau tablet. Masyarakat kota Indonesia juga menghabiskan waktu harian online-nya tiga kali lebih sering di ponsel dibandingkan di desktop4] Penting sekali untuk mengoptimalkan pengalaman pengguna dan strategi iklan di situs Anda untuk sebagian besar pengguna Indonesia yang mengakses konten melalui ponsel.

Berikut adalah dua sumber referensi untuk membantu Anda mengoptimalkan konten bagi pengguna seluler:

Unduh The #AdSenseGuide to Mobile Web Success untuk mempelajari praktik terbaik cara memaksimalkan setiap peluang seluler.
Gunakan Iklan tingkat laman. Iklan tingkat laman adalah jenis format iklan yang menawarkan cara baru dan inovatif untuk membantu Anda memperoleh uang dari konten seluler. Iklan tingkat laman ini didesain untuk menampilkan secara otomatis format iklan seluler yang tepat pada waktu yang tepat - berpotensi meningkatkan penghasilan tanpa mengganggu pengalaman seluler pengguna. Selain itu, iklan tingkat laman mudah diterapkan. Lihat tutorial 2 menit yang akan memandu Anda melalui prosesnya.

2. Memikat pembaca adalah kunci untuk meningkatkan kehadiran Anda di Indonesia
Konsep dasar dalam memikat pembaca adalah dengan memberikan konten yang dicari pengguna situs, dengan cara yang unik dan kreatif. Sebagai penayang, misi Anda adalah mempermudah pembaca untuk menikmati konten Anda. Hal ini dapat memikat pembaca untuk membaca lebih banyak konten di situs anda, yang pada akhirnya menghasilkan jumlah tayangan iklan yang lebih besar.

Berikut adalah dua sumber referensi yang dibagikan oleh Jeanny kepada penayang:

Unduh #AdSenseGuide to Audience Engagement. E-buku ini dilengkapi sejumlah tips untuk membantu membuat konten Anda mudah dinikmati.
Gunakan fitur rekomendasi konten AdSense gratis, yaitu Konten yang sesuai, untuk mendorong pengunjung situs menikmati lebih banyak konten Anda. Tempatkan unit Konten yang sesuai di bawah artikel Anda, yang kemudian akan mempromosikan artikel tambahan dari situs anda yang relevan secara kontekstual. Periksa kelayakan situs Anda untuk Konten yang sesuai di sini.

3. Pastikan situs Anda mematuhi kebijakan
Memahami Kebijakan AdSense akan membantu penayang Indonesia membangun bisnis yang sehat dan berkelanjutan dalam jangka panjang. Berikut beberapa tips yang biasanya diberikan oleh Jeanny kepada penayang:

Pahami Kebijakan Program AdSense.
Hindari klik yang tidak disengaja di iklan Anda sendiri dan beri tahu kami jika ada aktivitas tidak valid di akun Anda
Periksa email yang terdaftar di AdSense secara teratur. Jika Anda menerima email peringatan kebijakan, perbaiki pelanggaran kebijakan secepatnya. Jika iklan Anda dinonaktifkan, perbaiki pelanggaran kebijakan dan ajukan banding melalui formulir yang diberikan dalam email.

Apakah Anda ingin mendengar lebih banyak dari Jeanny tentang memonetisasi konten dengan sukses di Indonesia? Ia secara rutin memandu sesi Siaran Hangout bersama penayangnya untuk mendiskusikan praktik terbaik, tips penempatan iklan, dan cara mengembangkan bisnis. Pastikan untuk mendaftarkan minat Anda untuk menerima informasi terbaru tentang sesi berikutnya. Sementara itu, Anda dapat menonton rekaman Siaran Hangout terbaru yang dipandunya tentang Kebijakan dan Pengoptimalan Web Seluler.

Nantikan AdSense Global Spotlight berikutnya. Sementara itu, pastikan Anda mengikuti kami di Twitter dan Google+ untuk mengetahui informasi dan pengumuman terbaru.

Ha Truong, Dari Tim Pasar Negara Berkembang

Footnotes

eMarketer, Indonesia Internet & Social Media Metrics 2015
eMarketer, Comparative Estimates, 2016
eMarketer, Total Media, Digital and Mobile Ad Spending in Indonesia, 2015
Sample base: Indonesian consumers in 5 urban cities (Jakarta, Bodetabek, Bandung, Semarang, Surabaya) Source: Google / GfK Indonesia Digital Habits Study (2015)

Google Certified Publishing Partner Spotlight: learn about how Ezoic and SalesFrontier boosted publisher’s monetization

John A.Smith — Wed, 21 Sep 2016 16:14:00 +0000

Whether you’re just starting out with ads, fine-tuning your existing ad setup or looking for brand new revenue sources, Certified Publishing Partners are ready to help you achieve your goals. Learn about how two of our partners helped websites like yours earn more revenue through innovative approaches.

Ezoic is an automated website testing company that helps publishers to evaluate and optimize ad placements and website layouts. According to an internal study commissioned by Ezoic, SimplyPsychology.org, a popular education site, increased revenue by more than 400% and saw an 84% rise in time spent on site by optimizing their website layout. John Cole, Chief Customer Officer of Ezoic says “What Ezoic does is use analytics to make sure that the user experience is superior. We’re tackling the enormously complex task of balancing user experience, content, and monetization. And we’re doing it through data that spans all platforms.” Read more in Ezoic’s partner spotlight.

SalesFrontier, a strong partner for mobile optimization, helps nearly 200 publishers optimize their digital strategies and increase revenue. James Lan, New Media Business Department Vice President of Sanlih E-Television, says “SalesFrontier is a highly recommended Google AdSense partner that dramatically increased our market share in digital advertising. We trust their professional technical support and outstanding consultant services.” Read how SalesFrontier helped Sanlih E-Television Co., Ltd., a large media publisher, grow its mobile revenue business. Read more in SalesFrontier’s partner spotlight.

Since its launch in 2015, the goal of the Certified Publisher Partner is to find the best partners to give publishers like you the extra support to grow your website. To learn more about the program or get started, check out the Certified Publisher Partner website.

Posted by Danielle Landress, from the AdSense team

Join #AskAdSense on Google+ and Twitter

John A.Smith — Mon, 19 Sep 2016 13:00:00 +0000

We’ve expanded AdSense support to our English AdSense Twitter and Google+ pages. Join our weekly #AskAdSense office hours and speak directly with our support specialists on topics like: ad placements, mobile implementation, account activation, account suspension, ad formats, and much more.

#AskAdSense office hours will be held every Thursday morning 9:30am Pacific Daylight Time beginning September 29th, 2016. Participating is easy:

Follow AdSense on Twitter and Google+

Tweet, post, comment, or reply to AdSense on Twitter or Google+ asking your question during the office hours.

Please do not provide personally identifiable information in your tweets or comments.

If you can’t attend during our office hour times, be sure to use #AskAdSense in your tweet, post, comment or reply to AdSense and we’ll do our best to respond during our weekly office hours.

On October 27th, John Brown, Head of Publisher Policy Communications for Google, will be joining our office hours to provide transparency into our program policies. John is actively involved with the AdSense community helping to ensure that we continue to make a great web and advertising experience. You can also follow John on the SearchEngineJournal.com column "Ask the AdSense Guy" to learn more about Google ad network policies, processes, and best practices.

AdSense strives to provide many ways to help you when you need it, we’re happy to extend this to our Twitter and Google+ profiles. Be sure to follow us and we’re looking forward to speaking to you there.

Posted by: Jay Castro from the AdSense Team

AdSense help, when and where you need it

John A.Smith — Wed, 14 Sep 2016 13:00:00 +0000

Whether you need help urgently or just want to learn, Adsense provides different ways to provide help when you need it. In this post we’ll share the different ways we offer support to our AdSense partners.

Did you know you can get help on any AdSense issue from within your AdSense account using the help widget? You can find the help widget by clicking on the Help button on the upper right corner of your AdSense account. This will take you directly to informative articles related to the topic or issue you provide.

We hope that this widget will help solve your problems directly within your AdSense account, eliminating the need to switch back and forth between tasks.

Additionally, if you consistently earn more than $25 per week (or the local equivalent), you may be eligible to email the AdSense support team. If you don’t meet the earnings threshold, you can still get help through the issue-based troubleshooters in the AdSense Help Center or by using these relevant resources:

AdSense Help Center: Articles written to help you get started and grow your AdSense account
AdSense Troubleshooting: A step-by-step guide to help you solve or "troubleshoot" your issue
AdSense Help Forum: Post your questions and get answers and advice from the community
Guide to AdSense: Designed to help you understand the program before you sign up for AdSense
Optimizing AdSense: Videos created to help you earn more from your account
AdSense YouTube Channel: Video resources from a wide range of topics

The AdSense support team is here to help so you can continue to focus on creating amazing content for your audience. Use the support resources noted above when you require assistance and let us know on Twitter or Google+ how we can improve your support experience.

Posted by Melina Lopez, from the AdSense team

The secret to share-worthy content

John A.Smith — Mon, 12 Sep 2016 14:00:00 +0000

People love to share things with their friends, family, and colleagues. Presenting your users with relevant and unique content is the best way to encourage sharing and give you a competitive advantage. Content that is underscored by emotion, in particular, can help you strengthen your brand’s presence.

Here are some tips to help you get into the minds, and hearts, of your audience:

1. Be relatable

Taking the time to research what your visitors are interested in is the first step to creating shareable content. Diversify to cover multiple facets of your audience’s interests by including work, lifestyle and social topics to keep things fresh and engaging. Contextualizing your stories also increases the chances of your audience relating to and wanting to share your site.

2. Know what’s trending

Staying up-to-the-minute can require a lot of time and research. Luckily, online tools such as Google Trends can help you identify what’s important to your audience as well as offer helpful insights about people in specific regions you are trying to target. Being a thought leader means not only sharing up-to-the-minute industry news with your audience, but also offering insightful observations and predictions of what this may mean down the road. A trusted source is a followed source.

3. Increase your content’s shelf life

While timely articles are great for generating instant buzz, having content that maintains its importance over time yields higher traffic rate overall. Evergreen content is information that stays relevant no matter when it is consumed. Make sure to interlace trendier content with evergreen pieces every so often.

To learn more about familiarizing your audience with your brand, check out the AdSense Guide to Audience Engagement.

Posted by Jay Castro
Audience Development Specialist
@jayciro

[Video] Adopt these 3 key strategies to grow your online business

John A.Smith — Thu, 08 Sep 2016 13:30:00 +0000

Whether you're new to running a blog or an experienced website pro, check out this video featuring David, Oisin, and Raj from the AdSense team, to learn about the best ways to monetize your online content.

Did you know that 68% of users share online content to give people a better sense of who they are and what they care about? Now, more than ever, it’s important that your audience loves your content. In the video below, we share 3 key strategies for you to boost audience engagement and jump start your earnings using AdSense.

Relate to your users’ interests
Diversify your content strategy
Make your content easy to consume

Watch our video to get started today.

Not using AdSense yet? Once you’ve watched the video, here’s how you can get started:

Make sure your website is compliant with the AdSense program policies.
Sign up for an AdSense account by enrolling your site.
Add the AdSense ad code to your site.

The Need for Mobile Speed

John A.Smith — Thu, 08 Sep 2016 12:05:00 +0000

Cross-posted from the DoubleClick for Publishers Blog
Today, we’re excited to share insights from a new study on how mobile speed can impact user engagement and publisher revenue. As people’s expectations for mobile experiences have grown, simply loading on a mobile device is no longer enough. Mobile sites must be fast and relevant.
Unfortunately, based on our analysis of 10,000+ mobile web domains, we found that most mobile sites don’t meet this bar: the average load time for mobile sites is 19 seconds over 3G connections.¹ That’s about as long as it takes to sing the entire alphabet song!²
Slow loading sites frustrate users and negatively impact publishers. While there are several factors that impact revenue, our model projects that publishers whose mobile sites load in 5 seconds earn up to 2x more mobile ad revenue than those whose sites load in 19 seconds.³ The study also observed 25% higher ad viewability⁴ and 70% longer average sessions⁵ for sites that load in 5 seconds vs 19 seconds.
That’s why we’ve been so focused on mobile-first solutions to help publishers succeed — from our participation in the nearly year old AMP project, to our launch of a scalable native advertising solution, to our investment in products that help publishers increase revenue while minimizing latency.
Never before has mobile speed been more important.

3...2...1… gone

Slow page load times are a big blocker:

53% of visits are likely to be abandoned if pages take longer than 3 seconds to load⁶
One out of two people expect a page to load in less than 2 seconds⁷
46% of people say that waiting for pages to load is what they dislike the most when browsing the web on mobile devices⁸

We all know this first hand — if you’re looking for something on your phone, how long will you wait if the page takes more than a few seconds to load?
The three major factors that slow down mobile sites are file size, the number of server requests, and the order in which the different elements of the page are loaded. We found:

The average size of the content on mobile sites is 1.49 MB, which takes 7 seconds to load over 3G connections⁹
Mobile pages make an average of 214 server requests, and nearly half of all server requests are ad-related¹⁰

Getting up to speed

There are many tools out there to help diagnose the problem and fix it. We recommend a 3-step process to speed up mobile sites:

Assess the current performance of the site using tools like PageSpeed Insights, Mobile-Friendly Test, and Web Page Test.
Execute changes that eliminate bulky content, reduce the number of server requests, and consolidate data and analytics tags. Switch up the element order and select the minimum number of pieces to show above the fold first — styling, javascript logic, and images accessed after the tap, scroll or swipe can be loaded later.
Monitor performance after making changes and run A/B tests to regularly audit the setup of your site, flagging and removing anything that adds latency.

You should also investigate open source solutions like Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) and Progressive Web Apps.
To learn more about our study and the steps you can take to improve the experience on your mobile site, check out our guide, “The Need for Mobile Speed” [g.co/MobileSpeed]

^{1 Webpagetest.org, Sampled 11.8K global mWeb homepage domains loaded using a fast 3G connection timing first view only (no cached resources), February 2016}
^{2 NPR, “Keep Flu At Bay With A Song”, April 2009}
^{3 Google Data, Aggregated, anonymized Google Analytics and DoubleClick AdExchange data from a sample of mWeb sites opted into sharing benchmark data, n=4.5K, Global, June 2015 - May 2016}
^{4 DoubleClick for Publishers, Google Active View ad viewability for 10.7K mWeb homepage domains with >70% measurable ad viewability, Global, February 2016}
^{5 Google Data, Aggregated, anonymized Google Analytics data from a sample of mWeb sites opted into sharing benchmark data, n=3.5K, Global, March 2016}
^{6 Google Data, Aggregated, anonymized Google Analytics data from a sample of mWeb sites opted into sharing benchmark data, n=3.7K, Global, March 2016}
^{7 Akamai Technologies - 2014 Consumer Web Performance Expectations Survey}
^{8 Google Webmaster Central Blog, "#MobileMadness: a campaign to help you go mobile-friendly", April, 2015}
^{9 Webpagetest.org, Sampled 11.8K global mWeb homepage domains loaded using a fast 3G connection timing first view only (no cached resources), February 2016}
^{10 Webpagetest.org, Sampled 11.8K global mWeb homepage domains loaded using a fast 3G connection timing first view only (no cached resources), February 2016}

[Infographic] Download the #AdSenseGuide to creating content that draws crowds

John A.Smith — Tue, 06 Sep 2016 13:00:00 +0000

Big events create big opportunities for AdSense publishers. Keep your content relevant when web traffic spikes and you could grow your business. We’ve put together a guide to help you make the most of these moments and draw the crowds to your site.

Download The #AdSenseGuide to creating content that draws crowds now! We have the PDF available for you in 4 languages:

Be sure to follow us on Twitter and G+ for more helpful tips and to share your thoughts on this infographic.

New to AdSense? Sign up now and turn your passion into profit.

Posted by Jay Castro, from the AdSense team

3 easy tips to build a relationship with your audience

John A.Smith — Thu, 25 Aug 2016 14:00:00 +0000

Drawing new visitors to your site is only half of the battle. Having a plan for them to follow once they get there is the key to encouraging repeat visits and building a meaningful relationship with your readers.

To engage user-focused design for your site, it’s important to consider the following:

1. Keep It Simple

Gating desirable content can be a great way to learn more about visitors by prompting them to fill out a form or sign up for your newsletter to access it. However, roughly 67% of users will abandon an effort to obtain information or purchase something online if there are too many steps to take. Make sure your users get what they need in as few steps as possible. Matched content is another way to keep visitors from checking out too soon by increasing your odds of presenting them with content they are directly interested in.

2. Identify User Moments

People often look for inspiration and ideas while they complete a task online. Anticipating your visitors’ needs can help you set up your site to better serve them so you can capture and capitalize on these important moments. Whether they are purchasing something or just browsing, presenting this information in the right format can greatly increase the amount of time they spend on your site.

For example, if you’re an eCommerce site selling chocolates, having recommendations alongside each product such as gift boxes, complementing candy, and drink pairings can get your site visitor thinking about the holidays or gifts for their loved ones.

3. Create engaging Calls to Action

Bold “sign up” buttons and friendly prompts or reminders move visitors to take action. From bold colors and text to exaggerated size and other visual clues, there are a number of ways to make these important actions stand out on your site and even fun for users to engage with. In fact, our own AdSense team tested different campaign graphics on our marketing campaigns and saw higher implementation and engagement rates.

To learn more about familiarizing your audience with your brand, check out the AdSense Guide to Audience Engagement.

Posted by Jay Castro

From the AdSense Team

@jayciro

Optimize your content for mobile to #drawthecrowds

John A.Smith — Thu, 18 Aug 2016 14:00:00 +0000

Throughout the summer, fans are looking for great content, regardless of whether they’re viewing it from a desktop, tablet or mobile device. Did you know that 1/3 of followers used more than one screen to follow the 2012 Olympic games?[1]

With this in mind, think about whether your content is mobile-optimized and easily accessible for your users in the moments that matter. If they receive a link on their smartphone but are unable to view the content because it’s not mobile-optimized, it’s easy for them to feel frustrated with the poor user experience. On the other hand, If the users are delighted with the content and their first visit to your site is a positive one, they’re more likely to share your content and come back again.

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. Finally don't forget these 4 important tips to maximize your earnings with AdSense:

Swap out the 320x50 ad units for 320x100 for a potential RPM increase.
Place a 320x100 ad unit just above the fold or peek the 300x250 -- that is, place a small portion of the ad unit just above the fold (ATF).
Use the 300x250 ad unit below the fold (BTF) mixed in with your content.
Prevent accidental clicks on enhanced features in text ads by moving ad units 150 pixels away from your content.

Is your site mobile ready for the summer?

Download the #AdSenseGuide to Mobile Web Success to learn more. Are you new to AdSense? If so, sign up now and turn your passion into profit.

Posted by Barbara Sarti, AdSense Account Associate

[1] Google internal data

How to make the most of Matched content

John A.Smith — Wed, 17 Aug 2016 14:04:00 +0000

Matched content is a recommendation tool that allows you to promote relevant content from your site and sponsored content to your visitors. Matched content can help capture visitor attention and loyalty by showing relevant content which could increase pageviews on your site. Here’s a few tips to help you get started with Matched content.

Strategically place your ads to improve viewability.

According to a Think With Google study, “56.1% of all impressions are not seen.” So when determining the placement of your Matched content units, think about which spot(s) would improve viewability and engagement. To increase these metrics we recommend placing this unit directly below your article and either above or below your ad unit. This way readers can easily click on the next piece of content that is interesting to them. Placing it directly below the article often drives higher click-through rates (CTR) than other placements.

Since Matched content units help your users learn more about similar content, you should think about placing it at points in your website where your user will engage more with the content.

Track performance.
To determine if your placement is effective for your site, be sure to track the performance of your Matched content units. Understanding performance is key to maximizing your ad revenue and satisfying your readers. On your Performance reports tab, you’ll see an updated way to view two metric families -- the Overview metric family and the Matched content metric family:
Overview metric family

Selecting this metric family will allow you to understand how much you’re earning from your Matched content units and how these units compare to other ad units on your site. You can also review metrics such as impressions, clicks, and estimated earnings.

Matched content metric family

To get a more detailed performance of your ads and recommendations, use this metric family to view metrics like total impressions, ad impressions, ad clicks, ad revenue per thousand impressions (RPM), and recommendation clicks. Since this metric family is more specific, you should be able to use this data to optimize the ad unit itself.

To see all metric offerings and how they work, take a look at the AdSense Help Center.

By optimizing your Matched content units, you will allow your readers to learn more about topics they are interested in and potentially increase your site’s engagement rate and revenue. If you do not currently have Matched content but are looking to add the feature, determine if you’re eligible by viewing our Help Center article.

Posted by Bserat Ghebremicael
From the AdSense team

Deliver more viewable impressions to get your ads seen

John A.Smith — Tue, 16 Aug 2016 14:00:00 +0000

Viewability is a trendy word in the advertising world. This popular metric has become key for advertisers to measure the success of an ad campaign. But what is Viewability?

Viewability is the measurement of a viewable ad impression, meaning that it has appeared within a user’s browser and had the opportunity to be seen. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) defines a viewable impression as an ad that meets the following criteria:

50% of the ad’s pixels are visible in the browser window for a continuous one second.

Think with Google says “If an ad isn't seen, it can't have an impact, change perception, or build brand trust. That's why measuring viewability matters.” For AdSense publishers, this means that increased viewability may encourage greater investments from advertisers.

Global events are opportunities for advertisers to connect with larger audiences and create brand awareness. For advertisers with these goals in mind, viewability matters. Here are a few resources to help get your ads seen this summer.

See Google’s Active View in action and move towards delivering more viewable impressions this summer.

New to AdSense? Sign up now and start drawing the crowd.

Posted by Barbara Sarti, from the AdSense team

Amplify your content with social

John A.Smith — Thu, 11 Aug 2016 14:00:00 +0000

Social media is more than just vacation photos and stories about babies, it’s about sharing experiences and creating interactions with people.

Content on social media can instantly reach millions of users and create thousands of online stories. Do you remember the social media storm that Ellen DeGeneres created with a single photo? Her selfie from the 2014 Oscars started a global conversation and has since been added to Google’s 2014 web culture guide. Her content holds the win for the most retweeted tweet with more than 3M retweets, 6.8M site embeds, and even temporarily led to Twitter going down.

Big events like the Oscars create opportunities for publishers to interact with users through both original content and viral content. This summer, users will be searching, sharing, and consuming content like never before. Be sure to examine your content strategy, and find ways to spark conversations on social channels or, contribute to an existing digital conversation.

How can AdSense Publishers participate in big events? If you're new to AdSense, you can sign up now and turn your passion into profit.

Include editorial coverage around topical events.
Make sure your content is easy to consume and share.
Create a social media strategy around a big event.

Here are four tips to help jumpstart your social media strategy:

Know your audience. Trigger an emotional response from your viewers by humanizing your brand.
Be social to win on social by creating relationships with your users.
Don’t be afraid to follow the leaders and the trends. If there’s social proof behind it, do it.
Use tools to help you create great content.

More on the fourth tip, here are a few tools to help you #drawthecrowds through social channels:

Buffer is a well-known tool used by social media marketers. It helps streamline your social media management.
Pablo is a tool created by Buffer that is “the simplest way to create beautiful images that fit every social network perfectly”.
Canva is another image creating tool that can help you create visual content on a budget.
Feedly can help you organize and read relevant content in your industry to help fuel your content creation.
Google Trends is a widely used tool to help you identify key trends happening around the world.
IFTTT is a popular tool used to streamline many tasks. For example, here’s a pre-built recipe that will automate the process of tweeting each new wordpress blog post.

According to the New York Times, 68% of users share [online content] to give people a better sense of who they are and what they care about. To amplify your content this summer, be sure to create content that resonates with your audience.

New to AdSense? Sign up now and turn your passion into profit. Let us know your thoughts on Twitter @AdSense.

Posted by Barbara Sarti and Jay Castro from the AdSense team

4 steps to build a strong brand experience

John A.Smith — Tue, 09 Aug 2016 14:00:00 +0000

Exposing your audience to a rock solid brand leaves a lasting impression on your site’s visitors, and helps separate you from your competitors. To establish brand consistency across multiple touch points, it’s important to create and stick to guidelines unique to your brand.

Building a strong brand experience comes down to four things:

1. Find your voice

A brand’s voice means more than just the tone you use in your content and communications. It also applies to style, colors, and graphics. Is your brand bubbly, bright, and fun? Or is it straight to the point with clean lines and a matter-of-fact tone? Often times, the type of product or services you're selling as well as your company philosophy can help you determine an appropriate tone. There’s no secret for determining what an audience will respond best to, as all styles can be effective in their own way. So choose what works for you and your creative vision.

2. Be consistent

Once you’ve laid the groundwork for what defines your brand, it’s important to stick to these principles. This applies to your website, emails, social media posts, and any other place users come into contact with your brand. Taking the time to stick to an easy to read font, finding a color scheme that draws the eye and guides your readers, or having consistent verbiage can do wonders to further cement your brand’s presence and make it memorable.

3. Know your audience

While it’s important to decide what your brand is, it’s also important to know your audience, their interests, and how they prefer to communicate. For example, if you’re targeting busy, high-level decision makers, they may prefer something short and sweet—perhaps bullet points are the way to go. If you’re targeting creative individuals, it may be worth investing in a personalized logo and site. Highly visual assets such as videos would also be a great way to go. The more you know and cater to your intended audience, the more successful your brand will be.

To understand your users’ interests, use Google Analytics to view your bounce rates, time on pages, and pageviews—three indicators of user engagement. Understand where you stand in comparison to other sites and, if needed, improve on these rates by creating a stronger connection between your site and your audience, i.e. creating content relevant to your audience’s interests.

4. Prove your Worth

Having a particular value that you provide to your customers (not to be mistaken for price) can help separate your brand from competitors. For instance, what do you provide to your customers that is different or special? This can include everything from innovative products to great customer service and can also be an emotional value (think Kleenex being associated with comfort and support). Just make sure to deliver on any and all promises made on your site.

To learn more about how to develop your user experience, check out the AdSense Guide to Audience Engagement.

Posted by Jay Castro
From the AdSense team
@jayciro

Learn how Google’s research tools can enhance your content

John A.Smith — Mon, 08 Aug 2016 14:00:00 +0000

When you know what the world’s talking about, you can participate in the conversation. But the online world moves quickly, so if you want to keep the crowds coming back to your site, your content needs to move with it.

Google’s News Lab is Google’s effort to empower innovation at the intersection of technology and media. Its mission is to collaborate with journalists and entrepreneurs to build the future of media. An important part of that is ensuring that Google tools are available and easy-to-use for journalists around the world.

Google News Lab offers lessons on how to use Google tools relevant to publishers’ needs. Say something newsworthy at a sports event is grabbing headlines, Google tools can ensure that you’re informed. It’s then over to you to draw on this story and incorporate it into your content.

A great way to keep your finger on the pulse is Google Alerts, a tool that allows you to follow developing stories from your inbox. Simply select the topics you want to follow and have emails sent directly to your inbox any time that Google finds new results for this topic.

Google Alerts removes the need for you to keep checking back on a topic and simplifies the journalistic process by having all your information come from one reliable source. Once you’re using Google Alerts to stay informed about an event, you can ensure that the content on your site stays current and keeps users coming back for more.

If you want to take a more proactive approach, Google Trends gives you access to global data, to power insightful storytelling. One way to use this data could be to look at what users are searching globally. You can select topic areas and drill down into regions for those topics, ensuring that you can take advantage of the data relevant to you and your users to create the most timely and engaging content.

Google tools are designed to help you create great content. The more topical your content, the more likely you are to keep drawing the crowds.

Get started with Google News Lab today.

New to AdSense? Sign up now and turn your passion into profit

Posted by Jay Castro,
From the AdSense team
@jayciro

AMP your content: A preview of AMP’d results in Search

John A.Smith — Tue, 02 Aug 2016 17:05:00 +0000

Cross-posted from the Webmaster Central blog

It's 2016 and it's hard to believe that browsing the web on a mobile phone can still feel so slow with users abandoning sites that just don't load quickly. To us -- and many in the industry -- it was clear that something needed to change. That was why we started working with the Accelerated Mobile Pages Project, an open source initiative to improve the mobile web experience for everyone.

Less than six months ago, we started sending people to AMP pages in the “Top stories” section of the Google Search Results page on mobile phones. Since then, we’ve seen incredible global adoption of AMP that has gone beyond the news industry to include e-commerce, entertainment, travel, recipe sites and so on. To date we have more than 150 million AMP docs in our index, with over 4 million new ones being added every week. As a result, today we’re sharing an early preview of our expanded AMP support across the entire search results page --not just the “Top stories” section.

To clarify, this is not a ranking change for sites. As a result of the growth of AMP beyond publishers, we wanted to make it easier for people to access this faster experience. The preview shows an experience where web results that that have AMP versions are labeled with . When you tap on these results, you will be directed to the corresponding AMP page within the AMP viewer.

AMP in Search Preview

Try it out for yourself on your mobile device by navigating to g.co/ampdemo. Once you’re in the demo, search for something like “french toast recipe” or music lyrics by your favorite artist to experience how AMP can provide a speedier reading experience on the mobile web. The “Who” page on AMPProject.org has a flavor of some of the sites already creating AMP content.

We’re starting with a preview to get feedback from users, developers and sites so that we can create a better Search experience when we make this feature more broadly available later this year. In addition, we want to give everyone who might be interested in “AMPing up” their content enough time to learn how to implement AMP and to see how their content appears in the demo. And beyond developing AMP pages, we invite everyone to get involved and contribute to the AMP Project.

We can’t wait to hear from you as we work together to speed up the web. And as always, if you have any questions, please visit our webmaster forums.

Posted by Nick Zukoski, Software Engineer

Measure what kind of content is a hit or miss with the fans

John A.Smith — Mon, 01 Aug 2016 14:00:00 +0000

With the summer kicking off, it’s a great time to freshen up your content and try new things to #drawthecrowds. Google Analytics can help you measure what kind of content is a hit or miss with the fans. Here are a few simple and effective places to get started.

1. Find out where to focus
Content Groups let you bundle your offerings to analyze them more clearly. Instead of analyzing all sneakers at once, for instance, a shoe company might divide content into soccer boots, golf shoes, tennis shoes and so on. You can view and compare aggregated metrics by group, or drill down to any individual URL or page title.

Know what topics have the best AdSense CTRs (Click-through-rate)

Group content by topic (such as food, politics and sport).
Use the AdSense Pages report to view metrics.

Once you discover which topics have the best click-through rates, you could then focus on creating more content for those topics.

Know which content groups have slow-loading pages

Use Site Speed reports to look at page load performance.
Group products by type (such as shirts and shoes).

Are some pages very slow to load? You might focus on fixing uncompressed images to improve the user experience (and potentially your AdSense revenue). Check out Google’s PageSpeed tool to test the speed of your mobile site.

Content Groups are easy to set up. Learn how to create them and then follow these best practices from Google Analytics evangelist, Justin Cutroni.

2. Understand where your users enter and leave on your site The Landing Pages report can show you how engaged visitors are with your content. You can analyze individual pages or Content Groups.

Know what pages cause visitors to leave

Look for pages with high bounce rates. This usually surfaces content that isn't appealing to visitors or is irrelevant to their needs.
Try changing the headline of your article or finding different images to see how that affect bounce rates.
Look at Google Trends to see what the world is interested in, then think about how you can incorporate it into your content. Sport is sure to be high on the agenda this summer.
You may also want to analyze the page speed for pages with high bounce rates; visitors may be giving up on a very slow-loading page. Studies have shown that 74% of mobile web users are only willing to wait 5 seconds or less for a single web page to load before leaving the site.

Both Content Groups and Landing Page reports can help you find underperforming pages on your site and take action to fix them.

3. Get to know your users

Demographics and Interests data helps you understand the age and gender of your users, as well as their interests based on their online browsing and buying.

Know who your visitors are:

Click on Demographics Report; Select a demographic category.
Check the bounce rate. If it’s high, consider changing the headline or the visuals to make your pages more relevant and engaging for your target audience.

Know what your users are interested in:

Generate and analyze an Interests report.
Then shape your content based on the user interests you see. If viewers of your bakery blog are interested in a big sports event, see how you can incorporate that theme into your baking content.

To get started with the Demographics and Interests reports, you will need to enable them in your Analytics account.

The key to making your site better this summer is to jump into the data, have fun, and experiment. If you can find out what works and do more of it, you’re sure to draw the crowds. Have any ideas to share about using these reports? Add them in the comments below!

New to AdSense? Sign up now and turn your passion into profit

Posted by Jay Castro, from the AdSense team

Create relevant content to #drawthecrowds

John A.Smith — Fri, 29 Jul 2016 14:00:00 +0000

If you’re looking to #drawthecrowd to your site this summer, be sure that you’re familiar with the top-searched keywords and have a plan in place to create relevant content for it. For example, leverage Google Trends to identify the trending searches around Halloween. Using this insight, content can transition from ideas to evergreen articles that resonate with your users year after year.

If you’re looking for content ideas, think about this summer and cultural events the world will be searching to stay connected and informed about. Several big sporting events are happening this summer that will likely have a good amount of search interest considering past trends. For example, football related searches grew 180% during the soccer World Cup in 2014.[1]

When building your content strategy and timelines, think about important dates, specific games and popular keywords. Think with Google released an infographic showcasing that 70% of game-related searches happen in the month surrounding game day vs. the day itself. Their research shows that these events are more like a month-long series of digital moments–each one an opportunity to connect with fans through search, mobile, and video.

Here are a few search related resources to help you optimize your site and your content:

Regardless of what type of site you have, ask yourself if you’re providing your users with the content they need and want.

New to AdSense? Sign up now and turn your passion into profit

Posted by Barbara Sarti, from the AdSense Team

[1] https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/intl/es-419/articles/marketing-copa-america-latam.html

Videos get views: why you should embed video content on your site

John A.Smith — Tue, 26 Jul 2016 14:00:00 +0000

Video content is one of the most engaging formats for content consumption. According to Hubspot, online video now accounts for 50% of all mobile traffic.

Videos are easily consumable from desktop and mobile devices to social media platforms and email communications. Studies from the 2012 Olympics showed that 50% of users either watched Olympics related online video for the first time or watched more online video than their usual habits.

Video content can be incorporated into your content strategy in two ways:

Create, share and then embed your own original video content onto your site.
Embed public video content onto your site.

The first option may lead to greater revenue gains for your site through the use of pre-roll, mid-roll or post-roll ads. However beneficial this may sound, this option is far more resource intensive than the second and requires an upfront investment to create original video content. YouTube is a popular platform for you to upload and share your content. YouTube has over a billion users - almost one-third of all people on the Internet - and every day people watch hundreds of millions of hours on YouTube and generate billions of views.[1]

If you choose to create and monetize original video content as an additional format for your audience to consume your unique perspective, check out these resources.

YouTube Creator Hub is the destination for resources to help you make great videos, find your audience, and grow your YouTube channel.
YouTube Audio Library is a place for you to browse and download free music to use for your original videos.
Google+ Hangouts On Air can help you connect directly with your audience and then distribute your content to engage your users on your site or on YouTube after the event.
Read the article In Video Advertising, Is Longer Strong? to learn about video advertising.

The second strategy is to embed public video content directly onto your site. This strategy lets you focus on curating high quality video content rather than spending time and resources on creating it yourself.

YouTube players can be embedded in a web page using either an iframe tag or an object tag, both provided by YouTube. By appending parameters to the iframe, you can even customize the playback experience. For example, you can automatically play videos when the page loads or choose a specific video size to match the UX of your site.

We highly recommend using YouTube to embed videos on your site, here’s the five step process:

On a computer, go to the YouTube video you want to embed.
Under the video, click Share.
Click Embed.
From the box that appears, copy the HTML code.
Paste the code into your blog or website HTML.

Embedding public videos onto your site that supplement your original content is a great strategy to help meet the user demand of online video and further engage your users. If you have original content on your site and choose to use embedded videos to supplement your content, ensure that the videos themselves do not violate any policies. To learn how to correctly embed public videos please read the AdSense Program Policies.

Whichever strategy you choose, embed video content onto your site this summer. The summer of sport creates a huge opportunity for AdSense Publishers, especially in the sports category. In fact, over the last four years, sports YouTube watch time has grown 267%.[2] The 2016 Summer Olympics has already generated 30,000 hours of Olympics related content on YouTube and there’s an expectation that this year’s games will garner 3.6 billion views on YouTube alone.[3]

Big events mean big views for related videos. Invest into video to boost your traffic, draw new crowds, and further engage with your audience.

New to AdSense? Sign up now and turn your passion into profit

Posted by Barbara Sarti, from the AdSense Team

[1] https://www.youtube.com/yt/press/statistics.html
[2] Google internal data
[3] YouTube Internal Tools, 2015, +/1 one month of games

Big events cause big spikes; use them to grow your business.

John A.Smith — Thu, 21 Jul 2016 13:00:00 +0000

Across the world, users flock online to view, share and talk about big things that matter to them. From Royal Weddings to World Cups, when big events come around, they make waves online. Spotting and predicting these spikes in web traffic can give you an opportunity to grow your web business, capitalizing on the increase of users online by drawing them to your content.

Recent events and the spikes they created:

The 2012 Olympics website received 431 million online visits¹
The Royal Wedding was tweeted about 237 times per second²
The Cricket World Cup 2015 was searched for 323 million times³
Searches for the Tour De France in 2015 increased by a factor of 50 during the event⁴
There were 1.55m tweets using #supportyourteam during London 2012⁵
90 million people filled out an NBA ‘bracket’ online in 2014⁶

Big events that generate global interest, particularly sports events, have historically created surges in web traffic. By examining these trends, you can know when the spikes are coming and create the right content to capture that crowd.

What does this mean for AdSense publishers?

Understanding the spikes and when they might happen is invaluable information for an online content creator of any kind. If web traffic has increased due to interest around a particular event, it stands to reason that if publishers incorporate related content into their sites, you’re more likely to draw the crowds.

For example; say an AdSense publisher runs a food blog and a large sports event is trending. This publisher may choose to harness that spike and write a piece about food inspired by the host city or nation, or even focus on restaurants in the host city for those attending. Linking the site’s content to this trending event could lead to more traffic to this publisher’s site and could result in increased revenue.

By predicting and reacting to web traffic spikes, AdSense publishers can create relevant content and stand the best chance of drawing the crowds in a crowded marketplace.

To start learning from past spikes and how they could influence your upcoming content, take a look at Google Trends.

This tool allows you look at what users are searching for on a global scale. You can select topic areas and drill down into regions for those topics, enabling you to find data relevant to your audience. Once you’ve established the kinds of spikes certain events create, you can create relevant content and harness the insights you find to predict what spikes may happen in the future.

Whatever your site’s focus, web traffic spikes can have a huge impact of your growth. Start exploring the data now and think about how your content can adapt and take advantage of these moments.

New to AdSense? Sign up now and turn your passion into profit.

Posted by Jay Castro, AdSense Content Marketing Specialist

1 https://ssl.gstatic.com/think/docs/multi-screen-olympics_research-studies.pdf^↩
2 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/royal-wedding/8483199/Royal-wedding-facts-and-figures.html^↩
3 https://www.google.co.in/trends/story/2015_IN^↩
4 https://www.google.co.in/trends/explore#cmpt=q&q=Tour+de+France&date=1/2015+12m&geo^↩
5 https://econsultancy.com/blog/10871-60-fascinating-digital-stats-from-the-london-2012-olympics/^↩
6 https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/articles/basketball-madness-begins.html^↩

[New Resource] Are native ads right for your site?

John A.Smith — Tue, 19 Jul 2016 13:00:00 +0000

Spending on native ads is expected to grow to $21 billion in 2018, presenting a huge opportunity for publishers to enhance their user experience and tap into new revenues.

What are “Native Ads”? They’re a variety of paid ads with the goal of being “so cohesive with the page content, assimilated into the design, and consistent with the platform behavior that the viewer simply feels that they belong,” says the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB). You might recognize some of the more popular native ad formats, such as custom sponsored content, content recommendations, and in-feed ad units.

To help determine if native ads are the right fit for your site, we’ve created a quick guide that includes direction on how you can:

Search for opportunities throughout your site where native ads can unlock new ad revenue
Determine how to maximize your user experience and ad revenue before implementing native ads
Ensure allocation of time and resources needed for proper implementation

Posted by Kate Pietrelli from the AdSense Team

Use #hashtags to create trending content

John A.Smith — Mon, 18 Jul 2016 14:00:00 +0000

It’s official, #hashtags have taken over the internet. Much like memes, gifs, and audio-less fast motion cooking instructional videos, #hashtags fill up social media news feeds. However, unlike the other popular content types, what’s unique to #hashtags is that they organize conversations across the web. Even Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake had something to say about #hashtags.

#Hashtags started around 2007 on Twitter, and have rapidly grown into a common medium for users to express their feelings or interests primarily on social networks. As the summer of sport kicks off, it’s a good idea for you to consider incorporating #hashtags into your content strategy as a key ingredient to #drawthecrowds.

#Hashtags are quite simple to use and can attract new users to your content when you understand how they work. Essentially, when the pound/hash sign is used in front of a group of words it automatically turns that group of words into a searchable link. This transforms those keywords into a conversation that the entire web can participate in and follow.

The use of #hashtags can be boiled down into two main use cases:

Create your own, unique #hashtag to organize your content and start a conversation. This could be tricky because there are millions of #hashtags online, so don’t be afraid to repurpose one that exists. AdSense uses original #hashtags like #AdSenseGuide to promote our downloadable content or #AskAdSense for our Q&A sessions. We’re also using #drawthecrowds during the summer season to help AdSense publishers draw crowds to your content during big events.
Use an existing #hashtag and join in on a conversation. Use social network search options to find trending #hashtags that are relevant to your audience and join the conversation. For example, #BurningMan is a popular #hashtag used in the summer months to find news and updates about the annual event. Everyone from news publications to the thousands of people in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada will be using #BurningMan to share their perspective of the Burning Man experience. Using existing and popular #hashtags presents an opportunity for you to contribute your unique perspective to the digital conversation.

To get the most out of #hashtags, here’s a “do and don’t” list to reference as you build out your content strategy:

Use one to three #hashtags per post, any more is generally overdoing it.
Use #hashtags that are relevant to your audience or ones that your industry is using. If you’re writing an article on the food to try, you could use #hashtags like #Foodie and #Yummy so users will find you when they search for those always trending keywords.
It’s ok to be specific. In most cases, the more specific the #hashtag, the better. If you’re going to talk about do it yourself (DIY) summer projects, you’d want to use #hashtags like #diyprojects, #diyideas or #diyweddings instead of general keywords like #DIY or #DoItYourSelf. Using specific #hashtags helps users pinpoint the exact content they’re looking for.
Letters and numbers are OK to use in #hashtags.
Keep #hashtags short.

DON’T

Don’t string too many words together. #itbecomesreallyreallyhardtoread and it can take up most of your Twitter character count.
Don’t use punctuation marks or spaces, they will break the searchable link.
Don’t use the same hashtag twice in the same social post. It’s just #weird.

Now that you understand how to use #hashtags and how they can help you #drawthecrowds this summer, share with us how you’re going to incorporate them into your content strategy – we’d love to follow along.

New to AdSense? Sign up now and turn your passion into profit.

Posted by Jay Castro, AdSense Content Marketing Specialist

How creating a content calendar can help you #DrawTheCrowds

John A.Smith — Wed, 13 Jul 2016 23:00:00 +0000

In today’s fast-paced and global media landscape, timing is everything when you’re looking to draw crowds to your site. Throughout the year, there are trends and events that create opportunities for publishers to connect with audiences in the moments that matter. If you can time your content right and make it topical, you stand a much better chance of capturing the interest of a wider audience.

Let’s take a simple example. There’s no sense in a fashion blogger writing a piece on Coachella fashion when the annual music festival season is over. If that blogger could know when events relevant to fashion were approaching, she could much better plan her content. That’s where content calendars come in.

A content calendar is an essential tool for any publisher looking to harness some of the online buzz generated by big events. Though they can come in many different forms and countless templates exist, the essential components of a content calendar are the same. Big events relevant to your users are plotted on a calendar, allowing you to get a jump on your content plan.

If you know what events are approaching, you can start to think about the kind of content you can create to harness your users’ interest in them.

To get you started, we’ve pulled out a few upcoming events sure to draw the crowds over the next few months. There are 5 calendar categories for you to choose from–national holidays, sports, entertainment, travel, and news. Scroll down to take a look at what big moments are coming up, click to add them to your calendar, then start planning your content!

This initial list is just to get you started, once you get into the habit of planning your content in advance, you can start to do your own research into what upcoming events might interest your audience. Need an insight into what your users like? Google Analytics can help you get to know your audience better.

Get started and plan your year today to begin drawing the crowds! New to AdSense? Sign up now and turn your passion into profit.

Posted by Jay Castro, AdSense Content Marketing Specialist

What could be causing your CTR/RPM to be lower on mobile?

John A.Smith — Mon, 11 Jul 2016 23:25:00 +0000

Mobile is the fastest growing platform and it’s important for us to ensure that our sites are set up for long-term success. Recently, we’ve heard questions and concerns about lower than expected click through rate (CTR) and revenue per thousand impressions (RPM) for mobile inventory and we’d like to share some insights as to what may cause this.

To understand what’s happening you need to look at your performance reports. Analyzing your AdSense performance allows you to see how well your ads are performing and which devices your ad units were viewed on.

To view this report simply log into your AdSense account, click “Performance reports” and select “Platforms” from the “Report type” dropdown.

You may notice that your CTR or RPM is lower on mobile than it is on tablet and desktop. This might be caused by one or more of the following reasons:

Your site may be displaying suboptimal ad sizes
Your responsive design is using the column drop approach
You’re not focusing on optimizing for viewability

Here are three tips to increase help you identify the issues and take action to improve your mobile RPM.

If you’re not using AdSense to monetize your online content, be sure to sign up so you can start turning your passion into profit.

1) Use high-impact mobile ad formats to ensure you have optimal ad sizes throughout your site.

The 320x50 ad unit was the original mobile ad banner, but now there are a range of mobile ad sizes and formats to choose from. If you’re using 320x50 ads you should consider replacing them with 320x100 (just above the fold), 300x250 (below the fold), or a responsive ad unit. These ad sizes tend to generate higher RPMs than 320x50 ad units.

The 320x100 ad unit performs best on mobile screens and can be placed in numerous positions throughout your site. Research from Google shows the most viewable ad position is right above the fold. The 320x100 also increases the fill-rate competition because it allows the 320x50 format to compete for the same space.

The 300x250 ad unit is a popular ad size used by advertisers across the globe, resulting in a large ad supply, increased competition, and a potential increase in earnings. Research on viewability has shown that a 300x250 ad unit placed just below the fold has generated approximately a 50% viewability rate for other publishers. This ad unit could potentially help you maximize the impact of your ad space.
Responsive ad units automatically adapt to your page layout and the space available for the ad unit across desktop, tablets, and smartphones. AdSense identifies the appropriate ad size and then determines the best size for the screen.

2) Pay close attention to your ad placements, especially if you’re using a responsive design column drop layout.

Responsive websites are a great multi-screen strategy, but they present a challenge for high-impact desktop ad units that can be easily avoided. Responsive websites commonly use a column drop approach to design. This is where the entire right-hand column on a desktop screen drops down to the bottom of the page when the website is viewed on a mobile screen.

This means that a strong performing ad unit on the right-hand column of your desktop site could become an underperforming unit below the fold on mobile devices.

If this is how your site is designed, you should consider alternative ad placements, for example: moving your right-column ad units above the fold on mobile devices.

3) Focus on counting viewable impressions with Active View in your AdSense account.

Checking the Active View percent of your ads will give you a good indication of your mobile vs. tablet and desktop ad viewability. A display ad is counted as viewable when at least 50% of the ad is within the viewable space on the user’s screen for one second or more.

If you find that your Active View percent is much lower on mobile than it is on desktop, this could mean that your ads are not visible to your users and alternative ad placements may need to be tested.

There you have it, three tips to increase your mobile RPM.

Monitor your AdSense performance across devices to understand and identify potential underperforming units. If you’re using a responsive web design, make sure your ads are viewable on all devices. Finally, use Active View to track the viewability of your ads.

We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below. Also, be sure to follow us on Google+ and Twitter, we offer tips, tricks, and downloads to help you make the most of your AdSense account.

Until next time,

Posted by Paul Healy, from the AdSense team

Announcing the Certified Publishing Partner Summer Challenge

John A.Smith — Tue, 28 Jun 2016 14:00:00 +0000

Summer 2016 is a time of passion, excellence, and good-natured competition. For our Certified Publishing Partners, we’re excited to announce the launch of the Google Certified Publishing Partner Summer Challenge on July 1st.

After launching in October 2015, Google’s Certified Publishing Partner (GCPP) program encompasses close to 40 partners with proven expertise in driving innovation and growth for hundreds of thousands of publishers globally. Enabled by Google’s publisher solutions – Google AdSense, DoubleClick for Publishers, and DoubleClick Ad Exchange – each partner is trained to help publishers of various sizes and verticals optimize monetization strategies. Today, we’re launching this global contest to identify and recognize Certified Publishing Partners who have shown immense dedication and impressive expertise and several critical areas.

Customer Satisfaction Award: A partner who demonstrates outstanding overall quality of services for publishers, a key pillar of the Certified Publishing Partner program.
Mobile Champion Award: A partner who demonstrates strong strategy and implementation to help publishers capture mobile opportunities with strong user experiences and effective monetization.
Business Innovation Award: A partner who shows leadership in the publishing business, by demonstrating how they are innovators on all fronts from product to marketing to sales to support, and that their innovation has tangible impact on revenue and publisher satisfaction.

The contest will run from July 2016 through September 2016, with awards announced around October 2016. If you are one of our Certified Publishing Partners, you will receive an invitation to enter the contest. If you are interested in becoming a Certified Publishing Partner, apply here. Or, if you are interested in using the Certified Publishing Partner services, learn more about the program and find a partner here.

Posted by Sean Meng,

Global Program Lead, Google Certified Publishing Partner Program

About Google Certified Publishing Partnerships:

A Certified Publishing Partner can help when you don’t want to do it alone. Our publishing partners handle everything from setting up to optimizing and maintaining ads, so you’re free to spend more time publishing content on your site. Using Google best practices, our publishing partners are adept at maximizing performance and earnings with AdSense, DoubleClick Ad Exchange, and DoubleClick for Publishers. For more information, visit google.com/ads/publisher/partners/

Customize your ads for a better user experience across screens

John A.Smith — Mon, 27 Jun 2016 14:30:00 +0000

Users access your content from many different screens like phones, phablets, tablets, desktops, game consoles, TVs, and even wearables. The size and type of screens that people use are continually changing, so it’s important that your site, content, and ads adapt to any screen size.

Savvy publishers have responded by building a single “responsive” site instead of creating different sites for different screens. These sites use responsive design principles and a single set of HTML/CSS to control user experiences on multiple screens, streamlining publisher operations.

Adapting content to different screens though, isn’t enough. To ensure that users have seamless experiences with ads as well, many publishers are using AdSense ad units that are fully responsive.

These units automatically adapt to the size of the screen on which your site is being viewed. And if you find that our responsive ad code doesn't do everything you need, you may modify your ad code to better meet the requirements of your site. Among other things, you can:

Customize the size of ads based on the width of the screen
Specify the exact dimensions or proportions of the ad
Hide units for a particular screen width

If you’re specifying the ad unit sizes for particular screen widths, we recommend the following:

For screen widths up to 500px, use a 320x100 ad unit
For screen widths between 500px and 799px, use a 468x60 ad unit
For screen widths of 800px and wider, use a 728x90 ad unit

For more information, see our Help Center article that explains how to customize your ad code to respond to different scenarios. It also includes guidelines for those who are new to CSS media queries.

At AdSense, we’re committed to helping you make every interaction a user has with your brand, including the ads, a delightful one. Check out the Help Center for more details on these new ad units. Also, be sure to follow us on Google+ and Twitter we’d love to hear how you customize your code. Until next time.

Posted by Lea Wehbe, from the AdSense team

Four ways to boost your ad viewability on mobile

John A.Smith — Thu, 23 Jun 2016 13:00:00 +0000

What’s ad viewability and how is it measured? In this post we'll look at those questions and offer four ways to make your ads more viewable and profitable on mobile screens.

What’s viewability?

Most of us know that ads used to be measured by impressions: if a page loaded, and the ad was anywhere on that page, that counted. There was an obvious problem with this: if the ad was below the fold of the page, and the user didn't scroll down to see it, there wasn’t a chance for that ad to be seen. And ads that can’t be seen, don’t deliver results and can’t drive the impact that Advertisers are looking for.

Advertisers today want more transparency and effectiveness, and that's where ad viewability comes in. Now, by Media Rating Council and IAB standards, a display ad is counted as viewable when at least 50% of the ad is within the viewable space on the user’s screen for one second or more.

That means an ad unit on the first screen ("above the fold") will be counted as viewable if a user opens the screen for one second, but an ad below the first screen will not be counted unless the viewer scrolls down. Check out this interactive demo to see how viewability works first hand.

Why does viewability matter?

Advertisers naturally tend to bid more for viewable impressions because they have a higher chance of being seen and as a result more likely to engage an advertiser's target audience.

Smart advertisers are paying closer attention to the ads that they are paying for and are looking to ensure that the ads they buy have a chance to be seen by users. One way to track viewability is to check the Active View index in AdSense; it shows the percentage of ads that are viewable out of the total number of ads counted on the page. If one out of two ads are viewable, the rating is 50%.

Viewability helps both advertisers and publishers. It lets advertisers identify their high- and low-value inventory and adjust budgets and targets to maximize reach and ROI. As they learn which inventory has the highest viewability, advertisers can better set their advertising strategies.

For publishers like you, focusing on viewability will increase the long-term value of your inventory. If an ad unit is rarely viewed, you may learn that viewers don't scroll to that area, quickly scroll past it, or that the ad size or format may need adjustment. You can discover the most (and least) valuable spots on your pages and optimize your ad units accordingly, rather than just scattering as many ads as possible.

How do I create more viewable impressions on mobile?

While numbers vary, a viewability index of around 50% is fairly typical. In general, the higher the index, the more people are seeing your ads ― although few sites reach 100%. On smaller mobile screens, publishers should consider which ad sizes earn them the most in different placements on their pages.

Here are four ways publishers can optimize their mobile viewability:

Replace 320x50 ad units with 320x100. Revenue per thousand impressions (RPM) tend to increase when you move to the large mobile banner ad. By using the 320x100 ad unit, you allow the 320x50 ad to compete as well, doubling the fill-rate competition. The best practice is to put the ad just above the fold.
Use 300x250 ads for a potential increase in fill rates and RPMs. 300x250 is built to fit most mobile screens. It also tends to have a high fill rate (and higher RPMs) since many advertisers prefer this size. Research has shown that a 300x250 ad unit placed just below the fold could generate an approximate 50% viewability rate, helping you to maximize the impact of your ad space.
Cut accidental clicks by moving ads at least 150 pixels away from content. As you improve viewability, you can also improve the user experience and decrease spam rates by leaving room between ads and the context. 150 pixels of space is a good starting point; test and adjust to see what works best with your content.
Use page-level ads designed for mobile devices. To keep pace with the trend to mobile, Google AdSense has launched two kinds of page-level ads: anchor ads and vignettes. Both are designed to increase mobile viewability. Anchor ads, as their name implies, stick to the bottom of the page as the user scrolls. They are smooth and easily dismissed, and they are typically reserved for high RPM ads.

Vignettes are full-screen ads that appear as users move between pages on a website. These pre-loaded ads display immediately as the user leaves a page, so there's no waiting, and users can dismiss them at any time. Vignettes are reserved for the highest-paying ad impressions.

Summary

Viewability is a publisher's friend. It can help you understand the real performance of every ad to improve your strategy for ad formats and placement. It can also help you increase your revenues in a smarter way.

Viewability is still relatively new in digital advertising. More and more advertisers are taking the index into account as they allocate future budgets. If you're a publisher, it's a good idea to get ahead of the curve on viewability data and start making adjustments now. Take a look at this infographic for more best practices on how to improve the viewability of your site.

Posted by Silu Luo, from the AdSense Team

Launching AdSense Labs – the home for betas

John A.Smith — Wed, 22 Jun 2016 15:00:00 +0000

Today we're launching AdSense Labs, a new subtab under the Optimization tab, where you’ll find new experimental features you are eligible to test.

AdSense Labs is the place to find, test, and provide us feedback on new features we're working on. To learn more about this new tab, please visit the Help Center.

The first two Labs we’ll be launching are Show fewer ads and Inline ads. Not all Labs are suitable for every site, so don’t worry if you don’t see a particular Lab you were expecting.

Show fewer ads
Show fewer ads cuts down the number of ads that are shown to your users in exchange for a negligible drop in your revenue. It aims to remove at least 10% of the ads served on your site (1% or less of your revenue), by preventing low value ads from being shown to your users. To learn more about the details, visit the Help Center.

Inline ads
Inline ads are 320x100 ad units which are automatically inserted within your mobile site as a user scrolls down the page. With this new ad format you’ll no longer need to write the logic to dynamically insert ad units on your page, we'll handle all that for you. For more information on Inline ads, check out the Help Center.

We'll be adding new Labs over time for you to try out, so be sure to check out Labs tab.

We're keen to hear your ideas for more features you’d you like to test. Please leave your thoughts in the comments section.

Posted by Emma Burrows

Software Engineer

Boost your mobile performance with the right ad sizes

John A.Smith — Mon, 20 Jun 2016 11:00:00 +0000

We’re paying special attention to improving the mobile ad experience to help empower content creators, news organizations, and publishers. As mobile continues to grow, choosing high-impact mobile ads are key for businesses to generate revenue from a mobile audience.

When choosing the right mobile ad units for your business, it’s a best practice to ensure that each and every mobile impression receives the highest value possible, which can be determined by a mix of metrics like viewability, size, placement, and demand.

It’s also important to protect the user experience by choosing the right ad formats and placements for your site to engage mobile users so that you don’t interrupt their desired intent.

Start by choosing a high-impact mobile format: medium rectangle (300x250), large rectangle (336x280), large mobile banner (320x100), and rectangular responsive ad units tend to get the best results. Here’s why we recommend these formats:

Each format works well on both desktop and mobile (with the exception of the large mobile banner). This gives advertisers the opportunity to appear on a variety of screens which increases demand, upward auction pressure, and potentially even earnings. The large mobile banner will also allow 320x50 display ads to appear within this format, which increases competition. If the 320x50 ad unit wins the auction, it will always be vertically aligned to the top.
These formats are bigger and more engaging than smaller mobile units, so they'll grab user's’ attention. Here's an example of what the medium rectangle looks like placed above the fold, yet below the main content.

For additional changes for incremental revenue gains, you may want to consider trying link units. Link units are designed to be responsive, so they work with both mobile and desktop. You can add up to three link units in addition to the default limit of 3 ad units per page.

However critical mobile is to your business today, it will be more critical tomorrow. Energize your mobile strategy today by using high-impact mobile ads, they’re a great way for businesses to generate more revenue and engage your users.

Be sure to follow us on Google+ and Twitter we’d love to hear what’s working for your mobile business. Until next time.

Posted by:

Denis Rodrigues,
AdSense Account Strategist

Earn more from mobile: 3 rules and 6 best practices

John A.Smith — Wed, 15 Jun 2016 13:30:00 +0000

However important mobile is to your business today, it will become even more critical tomorrow.

That's true whether you’re blogging about your favorite sports team, building the site for your community theater, or selling products to potential customers. Your visitors simply must have a great experience when they visit your site on their mobile devices.

Research has found that 61% of users will leave a mobile site if they don’t see what they are looking for right away.

Sites that are not mobile-friendly expect users to pinch, slide, and zoom in order to consume content. It’s a frustrating experience when users expect to find the information they’re looking for right away, but are presented with obstacles to obtain that information. This is what causes users to abandon sites.

To create a mobile-friendly site, follow these three rules:

Make it fast. Research shows that 74% of people will abandon a mobile site that takes more than 5 seconds to load.
Make it easy. Research shows that 61% of users will leave a mobile site if they don’t find what they're looking for straight away.
Be consistent across screens. Make it easy for users to find what they need no matter what device they're using.

It's also important to think about your ads when you're designing or fine-tuning your mobile-friendly site. Focus on creating a flow between your content and your ads for the ultimate user experience and maximum viewability. Consult your analytics data and set events to track and understand where your users are most receptive to ads.

Here are some mobile-friendly ad best practice tips:

Swap out the 320x50 ad units for 320x100 for a potential RPM increase.
Place a 320x100 ad unit just above the fold or peek the 300x250 -- that is, place a portion of the ad unit just above the fold (ATF).
Use the 300x250 ad unit below the fold (BTF) mixed in with your content.
Prevent accidental clicks on enhanced features in text ads by moving ad units 150 pixels away from your content.
Consider using responsive ad units, which optimize ad sizes to screen sizes and work seamlessly with your responsive site.
Test your site. Pick the metrics that matter most to you – then experiment with them.

The ad experience on your site should be designed with your mobile users in mind, just like the site itself.

There are many ways to improve your users’ mobile experience on your site. Download the AdSense Guide to Mobile Web Success today, and find out more on how to make mobile a major asset to your business.

Posted by:

Chiara Ferraris

Publisher Monetization Specialist

@chiara_ferraris

[VIDEO] Understand your AdSense reporting

John A.Smith — Mon, 13 Jun 2016 13:00:00 +0000

Want to know more about AdSense Reporting? Good news: That's the topic of the fourth video in our #AdSense101 series.

Knowing how to analyze your AdSense reports is essential to improving your ad performance – they're loaded with insights and data that can help you grow your business and your strategies. AdSense reports and graphs are a quick and easy way for you to learn which of your ad units perform best or where most of your traffic is coming from.

Watch this video for more on what your AdSense reports can show you.

Stay tuned for other #AdSense101 videos and if there’s something else you’d like to learn more about let us know in the comments below.

Check out YouTube playlist #AdSense101 to learn more about...

AdSense payment process
Control the ads displayed on your site
Monetizing for Multi-Screen

Have a topic you'd like to see covered? Leave us a comment on the YouTube video page.

Posted by:

Barbara Sarti

Google AdSense team

Optimize your mobile page speed to keep users coming back

John A.Smith — Wed, 08 Jun 2016 16:00:00 +0000

Using the Internet on mobile phones is now the standard. 60% of Internet users access the Internet through their phones, 94% of American smartphone users search for local information on their phones, and 77% of mobile searches occur at places where desktop computers are available (according to the eMarketer Global Mobile Landscape 2015 report).

For publishers, this new reality means that your sites have to be mobile-friendly. It's the only way to offer your existing users a good mobile experience and to hold onto new users who are visiting your site for the first time. That said, a mobile-optimized site alone isn't enough to compete in the new multi-screen world. Optimizing performance for faster page loads and easier navigation will keep users coming back and drive your business forward in a competitive marketplace.

Slow-loading sites, broken video players and redirects were among the top frustrations reported by 570 respondents in a recent Google poll when asked about their experience browsing the Web on mobile devices.

Given the instant nature of mobile, the competition to capture the attention of users has intensified. On average, 74% of people will abandon a mobile site if it takes longer than five seconds to load, yet the average mobile page on the web still takes 6 to 10 seconds to load, according to Kinsta. Every one-second delay in page load decreases customer satisfaction by 16% and page views by 11%, according to Aberdeen Group Research.

If you want to improve your mobile site's performance, consider the following recommendations:

Render blocking resources - There’s too much external JS/CSS that needs to be loaded before the user can see anything. Load only what's absolutely needed to serve the user's query. Async everything where possible.
Browser caching - Keep resources that your page depends on on your device for as long as possible.
Optimize images - Don't send large images meant for desktop to your phone. Also use image compression tech in your CMS, which can mean up to 90% data savings.
Minify JavaScript - Trim the fat. You should consider keeping your more complex page logic secret or simplify the logic if you only need simple functions like to power a drop-down, an image gallery and/or some share buttons.

The ideal load time for a mobile site is one second. To avoid frustrating users with slow pages, optimize your critical rendering path to unblock rendering, and enable progressive rendering to do its work in the background.

A fast site leads to easier discovery, better user retention and more and longer site visits. We hope that these recommendations will move you closer to your page speed goal and give all of your users a smooth and enjoyable experience.

Be sure to follow us on Twitter and Google+ to engage in our conversation around the #MobileWeb and help our users #SeetheFullPicture on mobile phones.

Posted by: Jason Le

Google AdSense Team, South East Asia Lead

Ads on Accelerated Mobile Pages: Where Faster is Better

John A.Smith — Tue, 07 Jun 2016 14:05:00 +0000

Cross-posted from the AMP Project blog

When the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) team set out to help make mobile experiences great for everybody, the objective wasn’t just to improve a user’s engagement with content. We knew the experience people had with ads was equally important to help publishers fund the great content we all love to read.

The AMP team laid out four core principles that would guide the innovation on the AMP ads roadmap and get us to a world where ads are as fast and engaging as the content we value.

Faster is better
‘Beautiful’ matters
Security is a must
We’re better together

We recently took a moment to review the progress made and see how ads on AMP are doing. We compared ad performance on AMP and non-AMP mobile pages across 150 publishers (large corporations and small businesses in different geographic regions) on our programmatic platforms. The preliminary results are encouraging.

Compared to non-AMP pages, ads on AMP have led to:

80%+ of the publishers realizing higher viewability rates
90%+ of the publishers driving greater engagement with higher CTRs
The majority of the publishers seeing higher eCPMs (Impact and proportion of lift varies by region and how optimized the non-AMP sites are)

We have also received positive feedback from a number of publishers with varying mobile web advertising business models:

'So far, AMP has performed well against a number of metrics for advertising effectiveness and revenue. One encouraging stat is that we have seen an increase in viewability of ads within the AMP environment. As the industry moves more towards this as a measurement tool it is important we focus on optimizing for this metric. We are encouraged by the open approach to both publishers and our tech partners and look forward to what’s to come'

— Noah Szubski, Chief Product Officer, DailyMail and EliteDaily

‘It is still very early days, but AMP has performed well to date from both direct and indirect monetization sources. We've been able to extend all of our custom ad products to AMP and have enabled it within our premium ad marketplace, Concert. We see AMP as a perfect intersection of two core tenets of Vox Media - fast mobile web experiences and ads that perform. We are encouraged by all of the metrics and are looking forward to continuing to grow this important channel”

— Joe Alicata, Vice President of Revenue Products & Operations, Vox Media

“We’ve seen a 90% decrease in page latency, 96% decrease in unfilled
impressions, 65% increase in ad engagement and 32% increase in eCPM. Perceived load time improved from approximately 17 seconds to 2-3 seconds.”

— Conor Beck, Director of political news network TownHall Media

While this makes for a promising start, we’ve barely scratched the surface of what’s possible with ads in AMP. There’s much work ahead for us and the rest of the industry — including our third party ad tech partners — to make advertising experiences on the mobile web as great as content experiences with AMP. We’re both committed to and excited by that.

If you’re curious about what lies ahead for the broader AMP project, check out the AMP roadmap.

Posted by:

Craig DiNatali, Director, Global Partnerships Google

Nitin Kashyap, Product Manager, Google