AdSense for mobile content in 15 new countries

We’re excited to announce the launch of AdSense for mobile content in 15 new countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Czech Republic, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Nigeria, Philippines, Slovenia, Thailand, and Turkey.

AdSense for mobile content allows publishers to generate earnings from their mobile webpages using targeted Google ads. Just like AdSense for content, Google matches ads to the content of your site -- in this case, your mobile site. You'll earn money whenever visitors to your mobile site click on the ads they see.

For mobile websites, AdSense will automatically detect the type of phone viewing your site and deliver ads to match. For example, if someone views your site through an iPhone, we'll deliver ads specifically designed for high-end phones.

Please note that AdSense for mobile content ad units may be used in mobile websites only, not in mobile applications -- our policies don't permit placement of AdSense for mobile content ads in a mobile application. If you’re looking for an advertising solution for your mobile application, sign up for AdMob, Google’s leading mobile advertising display product.

Posted by Emanuele Brandi - Product Sales Lead

Got 2 minutes? Learn how to allow and block ads

Last week, we walked you through the Performance reports tab of the new AdSense interface. In the final two videos of this series, we wanted to highlight the key controls available in your account so that you’re empowered to make smart decisions about the ads that appear on your site. Take a look at the videos below to learn more about the ad review center and the additional features that enable you to allow and block ads:

We hope you’ve enjoyed our six videos walking you through key activities in your account, and that it has enabled you to be more comfortable with the new AdSense interface. If you haven’t started using the new interface yet, we hope you'll check out these demo videos and give it a try today!

Posted by Katrina Kurnit - Inside AdSense Team

New Interface Wednesdays: Search in Ad Review Center

We've heard that there are times when an ad appears on your site that you want to block from appearing again. How can you easily block a specific ad you've seen? If the ad is placement-targeted, you can now use the new AdSense interface to quickly search for and block that specific ad and future ad groups from a given advertiser.

To search for ads in the ad review center, first navigate to the Allow & block ads tab and click into one of the pages of the ad review center -- for example ‘Allowed’ -- for which you want to view ads. Look for the find ads box in the navigation sidebar. Here, you can search for ads based on text/url, ad type, and ad networks. For ads that are awaiting review, you can also search based on when the ads will be automatically allowed.


With recent updates we’ve made, you may also notice that when doing a keyword-based search, image ads in addition to text ads will be returned if the images contain text matching your search criteria.

Try it now! Navigate to the Allow & block ads tab and click into the Ad Review Center.

Posted by Pedro Diaz & Edouard Rosseel - AdSense Engineers

New Interface Wednesdays: Combine and Chart Feature

These features are found in the Performance Reports tab, under Custom channels. Depending on the number of channels you’re using, you might be asked to filter the list and then click Update report button. Once your selected channels are listed below the graph, you can view the combine and chart buttons.

Let’s review the combine feature first, which can be used to easily total items in your list and allow for deeper analysis. Click a few of your channels that you want to view earnings for together, then click the Combine button. The total of these channels is now shown on the graph and you can do further analysis using the view drop-down.



In contrast, the chart feature lets you visually compare the performance of up to five items. First reset your channels report by clicking the word Custom channels above the graph. From here, select a few channels in the table and then hit the Chart button. The lines in the graph represent the statistics you have chosen. Just like with the combine feature, you can now refine your report further using the view drop-down above the table.



Try it now! Navigate to the new interface and click on the Performance Reports tab, and then click Custom Channels and Update report.

Posted by Vincent Zanotti - AdSense Engineer

The ads you’ve been searching for: Introducing AdSense Custom Search Ads

Here at Google we’ve put a lot of work into displaying the best ads on search results pages, and we want your results pages to benefit too. If your site is search-focused -- for example, if your users are looking for jobs, travel, products, or local businesses -- the ads you display can now be targeted to the same search query you use to return results. This means more relevant ads for users, more revenue for publishers, and better value to advertisers. Today we’re excited to share our latest AdSense for search product: Custom Search Ads.

In addition to great targeting, Custom Search Ads are designed to fit your existing search results’ look and feel. Instead of pre-defined sizes, you can specify the precise width of each ad unit along with the number of individual ads to display, the ad layout, font size, font face, and much more. You can take a look at how some of our first publishers are using these today on LemonFree.com or eCrater.com.

With Custom Search Ads, we can rapidly develop and launch new search ad formats and extensions without requiring you to update your search code. For example, on Google’s results pages we’ve been busy testing new search ad extensions to provide users with information like locations, product images, page links, and merchant information. Two of these new formats are available today in Custom Search Ads: Ad Sitelinks and Seller Ratings. Ad Sitelinks extend the value of ads by showcasing up to 4 additional links to specific, relevant content within an advertiser’s site. Seller ratings add star ratings below a merchant’s ad aggregated from review sites across the web. These help highlight ads for merchants highly recommended by online shoppers. As new formats are developed in the future, we’ll continue to bring them to Custom Search Ads so you benefit automatically.

To get started with Custom Search Ads, sign up today! We’re currently only able to accept and support a limited number of publishers, but we’re excited to review your application and expand this program in the future.

Posted by Ben Lisbakken, Software Engineer and Michael Brandell, Product Specialist

New home page for the new AdSense interface

We’ll now be showing you earnings for today, yesterday, this month so far, and last month as well as any unpaid finalized earnings and most recent payment information. Important alerts will appear in a bar at the top to make sure you don’t miss anything critical.

We’re still working toward more improvements based on comments we’ve heard, including the ability to view your top channels from the home page. Stay tuned for many more features that you've been asking for! Please continue to send us your feedback on the new interface by joining the conversation in our forum or through the ‘Report issue’ link in the upper corner of your account.


Posted by Dan Banfield & Madhuwati Lagu - AdSense Engineers

New in-ads notice label and icon

You've probably noticed that AdWords ads appearing on your site have a special "i" icon that expands to an "Ads by Google" label in the bottom corner of the ad. Users who click this label are taken to a page where they learn more about online advertising and the ads they've seen. Giving users clear notice about the ads they see is a high priority for Google and for many in the online advertising industry at large.

We'll soon start to change our in-ads notice icon to a new icon that expands to an "AdChoices" label. These notifications were developed by the online advertising industry’s Self-Regulatory Program for Online Behavioral Advertising to more proactively give users notice and choice about the ads they see. With the change from our "i" icon and "Ads by Google" label to these new notifications, we hope to show our support for this cross-industry initiative, and to increase our users' understanding about ad choices through adoption of an icon they'll see on ads across the web.



In a few weeks, we'll begin to show the new icon and label on most ad formats across the majority of English-language sites. Over time, we’ll expand the notice to ensure that all English-language publisher sites in the Google Display Network come within the Self-Regulatory Program (until then, these sites will show the existing “i” icon and “Ads by Google” label). This will be the single most widespread rollout of the "AdChoices" label to date, and we're encouraged that others in the industry are similarly adopting it. We’re also looking at ways to increase transparency and control in other languages and countries. In the meantime, those languages and countries will continue to see the “i” and “Ads by Google” notice.

Just like before, users who click on the "AdChoices" label will be taken to a page where they can learn more about online advertising and the ads they've just seen. This page will also provide a link to the Ads Preferences Manager, where users can control the types of interest-based ads they see. Our tests of this new icon and label showed that they should not have any effect on ad performance. We think this rollout will help users better understand the ads they're seeing, and we look forward to seeing widespread adoption of this label throughout the industry.

Posted by Katrina Kurnit - Inside AdSense Team

Making the web faster for all AdSense for content publishers

At Google, we spend a lot of time working to make the web faster. Your site is no exception. And today, as part of this vision, we’re pleased to announce a major boost in speed for AdSense publishers worldwide.

AdSense ads, like any element on a webpage, usually contribute to the time the page takes to load. Last year, we ran tests that showed AdSense adding 12% on average to the time it took to load various pages from top web sites, so we set out to make this better. We’ve now developed a new ads delivery technique to improve the speed of websites that display AdSense ads, so that it doesn’t slow down your page content. We’re very happy to announce that we’ve eliminated this slowdown for the majority of websites and for a number of browsers, and are seeing pages load as much as a second faster than before.

The best part is, you don’t need to make any changes to your code or account — the faster load time has kicked into gear for everyone automatically, so your visitors will experience a noticeable improvement in the speed of your webpages!

At this time, we're deploying globally for users of Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 and will be expanding the list of browsers that benefit from this speed-up soon.

And it doesn’t stop here, as we’ll keep working to make things even faster. Continue to grow your site and AdSense inventory. We’ll be sure to keep up.

Posted by Richard Rabbat - Product Manager

New Interface Wednesdays: Bulk edit

You might have read in a previous AdSense blog post that opting in to both text and image ads increases the pool of advertisers bidding for your site inventory -- which can in turn increase the amount of revenue you make from AdSense. In the past, changing all your ad units to accept both text and image ads might have taken a lot of time. But now, the new interface allows you to easily find and edit all or some of your ad units with just a few clicks.

Simply go to the 'My ads' tab in the new interface and under 'Content,' choose the 'Ad units' page. Using the checkboxes, select the ad units you’d like to edit, or simply select the checkbox at the top of the list to select all of your ad units. Using the 'Actions' dropdown, select 'Edit ad type.' Choose 'Text & image/rich media ads' and then click 'apply ad type.' Now any ad units that can be opted into both text and image will have this set as their ad type.

We recommend opting your ad units into both text and image to increase auction pressure, ensuring you will get the highest RPM possible. Keep in mind that some units such as link units and certain ad sizes cannot contain image ads, so you will not be able to modify these ad types.


Try it now! Navigate to the new interface and click on the My ads tab, and then 'Content,' followed by 'Ad units.'

Posted by Alex Benton - AdSense Engineer

Introducing the new AdSense mobile interface

Today, we're happy to announce a new beta AdSense interface optimized for mobile devices. Now, when you visit www.google.com/adsense on your mobile browser, instead of the usual "desktop" AdSense, you'll be greeted by a simpler and faster version of AdSense. We built the AdSense mobile interface to give you quick access to the essentials in your account. You can easily check your earnings, get important alerts, and view reports (without the need for Flash) on your phone.


Just make sure you opt in to the new AdSense interface on your desktop, and then try it out! And if you prefer to use the usual interface on your mobile device, you can always switch to the desktop version (and back) through a link at the bottom of the screen.

Keep in mind the mobile interface is still in beta, so stay tuned for more features coming soon.

Want to discuss the new mobile interface with other publishers or give us your feedback? Join the conversation in our forum here.

Posted by Delwhar Hussain, Will Montgomery, Matt Clark - AdSense Engineering

New Interface Wednesdays: New My Ads Layout

This week, we would like to highlight the new inventory management features in the new AdSense interface that let you easily search for specific channels, and see all associated ad units in a single click.

To try this feature, navigate to the My ads tab. In the sidebar under the 'Content' heading, choose ‘Ad units.’ Next, open the 'Advanced filters' section. If you type in the name of the channel you want to check out, you can hover over it and see the associated ad units highlighted in yellow. You can also click on the channel name to filter down the ad unit list just to the ad units tracked by that particular channel. If you would like to edit the ad units associated with the channel or any other channel information, visit the 'Custom channels' page for the product.


Try it now! Navigate to the new interface and click on the My Ads tab, and then 'Content,' followed by 'Ad units,' and then 'Advanced filters.'

Posted by Alex Benton - AdSense Engineer

Earn additional revenue from AdSense for search

Online readers have a very short attention span. You might be able to get users to your content, but what if they can’t quickly find what they’re looking for? That’s why it’s important to make sure that the users who come to your site actually stay there.

The solution is AdSense for search. This free, easy to implement product lets you place a Google search box on your website. It provides an additional layer of interactivity for your users, while helping you generate additional earnings from ads on the customizable search results page.

Here are some of our favorite AdSense for search features:

Site search: Allow users to search directly within your site to find the information they’re looking for without leaving your site.

Vertical search: Allow your users to search across multiple sites you select, including related sites you think users might find relevant or a network of sites that you own.

Keywords: You can use keywords to make search results more relevant to your audience and your site content. For instance, if you own a website about Pilates, you can enter keywords such as “exercise,” “fitness,” “meditation,” and “pilates.” As a result, when a user searches for “equipment,” the ads that appear will be specifically related to Pilates, rather than to any other types of equipment.

Ad location: You can optimize the location of your ads on search result pages. We recommend placing ads at the top and along the right-hand side, as we’ve found that this layout increases visibility and revenue.

Are you ready to give AdSense for search a try? You can find all the information you’ll need to set up AdSense for search here, or watch the video below to learn more!

Posted by Miguel Romar - AdSense Optimization Specialist

Upcoming changes in backup ad options

We frequently review our product and feature offerings to ensure they’re as effective as possible. Based on these reviews and on feedback from our non-profit partners, we’ll gradually begin retiring public service ads (PSAs) from AdSense sites so that we can focus our efforts on developing new opportunities for these partners.

As a refresher, PSAs are unpaid ads that can appear on publisher sites when we aren’t able to serve a paid ad. This can occur for a number of reasons, such as when relevant ads aren’t available for a page, or when a publisher has exceeded the amount of time to verify their address by receiving a Personal Identification Number.

As always, we’re committed to supporting our non-profit partners, which is why we’re continuing to offer free AdWords advertising for these partners via Google Grants; the Google Grants program is just one part of our larger Google for non-profits initiative. Also, ads in the Google Grants program are unaffected by this change. They'll continue to appear on AdSense sites and you'll earn from valid clicks and impressions, just like with normal ads. To learn more about the latest in Google Grants, including recent tips, events, and clinics, visit the official Google Grants blog.

What does this mean for you as a publisher? If you’ve previously selected ‘Show public service ads’ in the ‘Backup ads’ section of the new AdSense interface (or the ‘Alternate ads or colors’ section in the old AdSense interface), you’ll begin to see that when we’re unable to serve paid ads to your pages, a blank space will appear instead of a psa. On the other hand, if you’ve opted to show non-Google ads from another URL or to show a solid color, you won’t be affected by this change; your choices will continue to be applied in cases when we aren’t able to show paid ads.

You’ll also notice that the option to select PSAs as backup ads no longer appears in your account. We’re working to provide new backup ad options, and will keep you updated with any developments right here on Inside AdSense.

If you’d like to update the settings for your backup ads at any time, sign in to your account and follow the instructions for the interface you’re using:

• New AdSense interface: Visit the My Ads page and select the ad unit you’d like to update. Then, change the settings for ‘Backup ads.’
• Old AdSense interface: Visit the Manage Ads page under the My Account tab, and click ‘Edit Ad Settings’ for the unit you’d like to change.

If you'd like to discuss this change with other publishers or provide feedback to our team, join the conversation in our Forum. We’ll be updating our Help Center entries and troubleshooters to reflect this change as well. Thanks for your patience as we complete this transition.

Posted by Yasser Abu-Ghdaib - AdSense Product Specialist

New Interface Wednesdays: Graphs right in your account

This is the first post in our ‘New Interface Wednesdays’ series. Every Wednesday for the next few months we'll highlight something new you can do in the new AdSense interface. From time to time, we’ll also share stories directly from publishers who've been using the new interface and announce additional features we’ve recently added.

For our first ‘New Interface Wednesdays’ post, we’d like to highlight the graphical reporting under the Performance Reports tab in the new interface. The new graphs make it easy to see trends in your performance. Rather than scanning rows of numbers, you can view impressions, clicks, and earnings, all in one graph.

Select the metrics you want to see by checking the boxes next to the graph. You can also hover over the graph to get detailed metrics for a specific day, just like in Google Analytics. The graph will appear for just about any type of report you run, making it easy for you to visualize performance. Above the graph, you'll find buttons to save reports that you commonly use and set a report of your choosing to be the default report with a single click. Of course, you can still export the data to a CSV to further process the data in a spreadsheet as well.


If you aren’t yet familiar with the graphs in the new interface, check them out today. Navigate to the new interface and click on the Performance reports tab.

Posted by Guillaume Ryder - AdSense Engineer

Sensitive category blocking now available in three more languages

Since our announcement last August that sensitive category blocking had been expanded to more languages, we’re excited to say the language expansion has gone even further!

This week, publishers in Thai, Turkish, and Russian-speaking countries can now block ads in sensitive categories for all supported languages. The full list of supported languages spans English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, Polish, Portuguese, and now Thai, Turkish, and Russian.

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

If you’d like to set up sensitive category blocking, sign in to your AdSense account. We recommend using the new AdSense interface, which you can access by clicking the “Try the new AdSense interface” link that appears in the upper corner of your account. Once you're in the new interface, visit the Allow and block ads tab and choose the Settings page to edit the list of sensitive ad categories you wish you display. To help you understand the impact of applying these filters, this page also shows you the percentage of revenue and ad impressions you've been receiving from each category in the last 30 days.

If you prefer to use the previous version of the AdSense interface, visit the Ad Review Center, located under the 'AdSense Setup' tab. Once you click 'change', you'll be able to see the full list of categories you can block.

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

Posted by Dan Stokeley - AdSense Product Manager

New features now available in the new AdSense interface

Since our post announcing the open beta of the new AdSense interface, we’ve been working on a few additional features, listening closely to your feedback about how we can continue to improve. We’re very excited to announce a few changes that will further enhance your AdSense account management experience:

1. We’ve changed the default metrics shown on the Home and Performance reports pages based on strong feedback that most of you prefer to view your earnings at the page level rather than by ad unit. As a result, we’ve switched back to page level metrics, and those of you who wish to see ad unit CTR and other ad unit level metrics can now do so under the Performance reports tab.
2. The Allow and block ads drop-down selector, which lets you see your blocking features by product, has been updated to call out the product name. This makes the interface a lot more clear for those of you using multiple products.
3. Ad unit impressions and queries have been renamed ‘Ad requests’ to better describe how this statistic is used for AdSense for content, AdSense for search, and other products. An ad request is recorded each time an ad unit on your site requests ads from Google's servers (for content ads) or a search query is made (for search ads). We report an ad request each time a request was sent, even if no ads were returned and public service ads, backup ads, or no ads were displayed instead.
4. Based on feedback, we’ve updated the terms found under the Ad types section of your Performance reports to include text, image, rich media, animated image, and flash. Previously, rich media ads were referred to as HTML and animated image was called dynamic image.
5. For publishers using our AdSense for games and AdSense for video products, you can now create and edit channels and see reporting for these products. Learn more about AdSense for games and AdSense for video.

Thanks again for all of your great feedback. We’ll let you know as we continue to roll out new features. In the meantime, keep the comments coming on the blog or in this Forum discussion!

Posted by Vincent Zanotti and Guillaume Ryder - AdSense Engineering

The new AdSense interface: Greater efficiency

We’ve given you a tour and covered the greater insight and control that you get with the new AdSense interface, but we couldn’t end the series without a video about the improvements in account management. The new interface lets you find features and make changes to your account more efficiently than ever. You can also get help when and where you need it with relevant help links customized to the content of each page of the interface.

We hope you learned something with our video series and are continuing to enjoy the new AdSense interface!

Posted by Katrina Kurnit - Inside AdSense

Google Apps welcomes AdSense

Google Apps is Google’s suite of cloud-based messaging and collaboration apps used by over 30 million users in small and large businesses, educational institutions, government agencies, and non-profit organizations around the world. Apps includes products such as Gmail, calendar, documents, spreadsheets and more, specifically optimized for use in organizations.

We recently launched an improvement to Google Apps that made dozens of Google services, including AdSense, available to Apps users for the first time. Before this improvement, Google Apps users had to create a separate account to sign in to AdSense; now, Apps users can access their cloud-based productivity applications along with AdSense using the same account.

For those of you who also have a Google Apps account, we're in the process of finalizing the infrastructure that will allow you to seamlessly transition your existing AdSense account and data over to your Google Apps account. For new users, if your Apps systems administrator has enabled AdSense, you can begin using this services with your existing Apps account at google.com/adsense.

If you haven’t started using Google Apps yet to manage collaboration for your business, learn more about how to lower IT costs and improve productivity at google.com/apps.

For more details, read the complete post on the Google Enterprise blog and follow all the updates on other newly available services for Google Apps users.

Posted by Jeremiah Dillon - Google Apps Team

General Category Blocking extended

Following up on our announcement that we’ve been beta-testing a new category blocking feature, we’re delighted to release the feature to all publishers in English-speaking countries. General category blocking is an important update to the new AdSense interface that offers you more controls over the ads that appear on your website. It helps you scalably prevent competitors’ ads and ads that you might not find suitable for your audience from appearing on your site. With this new control, you can opt out of receiving ads from across 170 specific categories, including finance, travel, job, and automotive.

We show the percentage of total revenue and total impressions for each category to give you insight into the categories of ads that appear on your site and the relative spend in those categories. Keep in mind that blocking categories may have a negative impact on your potential revenue so it’s important to review the % of total revenue and total impressions carefully before deciding to block a certain category.

This feature is now available to all publishers in English-speaking countries in the new AdSense interface. General category blocking will initially apply only to ads in English, regardless of the language of the site. We are working on expanding it to other languages in the future.

We hope this feature will address the feedback we’ve heard from many publishers who want a way to quickly and easily control the ads appearing on their site.

Please leave us comments on how you find the feature.

Posted by Atul Bhandari - AdSense Product Manager

AdSense for domains makes it easier to setup your domains

A common request we’ve received from publishers using AdSense for domains is to make it easier to park your currently unused/undeveloped domains with Google. We’ve listened to your feedback, and are now pleased to announce that we've simplified the process of setting up AdSense for domains.

As of today, to get your domain setup with AdSense for domains, you can simply delegate your domains’ nameserver to Google’s DNS nameserver. This is typically a single step with your registrar, and simpler than the old method of changing A records and creating CNAME records. You can still use the old method if you prefer, and domains that are already set up will continue to work.

To get started, review our instructions for delegating your nameserver to use Google’s DNS nameserver in our Help Center.

If you own any domains that you haven't yet had a chance to develop, now is a great time to sign up for AdSense for domains.

Posted by Randy Heath - AdSense for domains team