More webinars coming your way

We've just published a new webinar schedule for the next month. In our live webinars, we'll highlight changes you can make to your ad implementation in order to maximize your AdSense revenue. We're also trying something new with our upcoming webinars: we've set up open Google Moderator discussions, where you can raise questions related to the specific webinar topic or vote on questions from other participants. We'll then answer your questions live in the webinar.

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

Posted by Siobhán McCormack - AdSense Optimisation Team

Monday, February 08, 2010 at 12:02:00 PM

Donate your AdSense earnings to help Haiti

As you may have already seen, Google has made various efforts to contribute to the earthquake relief response in Haiti. We've heard repeatedly from AdSense publishers on forums about wanting to help, and today, we're pleased to let you know how you can do so with your AdSense earnings.

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



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

Photo courtesy of PIH

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

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

Posted by Elizabeth Ferdon - AdSense Payments Team

Thursday, February 04, 2010 at 3:36:00 PM

Troubleshooting tips part IIa: Ad relevance and targeting

Last week, we took a closer look at implementing your ad code, and today, we'll address some of the common issues related to ad targeting.


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

• Have you placed the AdSense ad code in frames separate from the main content of your website? If so, you may experience ad targeting issues. In order for our crawlers to match the ads to the content of your website, it is important to place the ad code in the same frame as the main content of your webste. If you're familiar with HTML, and your website is talking about several different topics you could also consider implementing section targeting on your site to highlight relevant content.
  
  
• Do you have mostly dynamic content on your site? Our crawlers currently can't derive meaning from these types of files:
  - audio and video files (.wma, .mpeg, .mov)
  - mp3 files (.mp3)
  - images (.jpeg, .bmp)
  - Macromedia Flash movies
  - Java Applets
  
  To receive more relevant ads, we recommend including plenty of text-based content on your site, including complete sentences and paragraphs.
  
  
• Do your pages use session IDs? A session ID is a piece of data serves as a unique identifier for a session. If your pages use session IDs, you may not receive targeted ads on those pages. Since this session ID - and therefore the URL - changes every time a different user views a page, the URL will not be indexed and will need to be crawled from scratch. Once the URL is crawled, however, the session will most likely have expired. This means that pages seen by the users are rarely in the index. You'll need to remove the session IDs in order to show more targeted ads to your users.

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

Posted by Ulrike Jung - Inside AdSense Team

Wednesday, February 03, 2010 at 2:13:00 PM

Troubleshooting tips part I: Implementing your ad code

Today, we're beginning a troubleshooting series to help you diagnose and solve common issues with your ads, search boxes, and account functionality. We're kicking things off with a look at how to correctly implement your ad code and an explanation of why ads may not appear on your pages at times.

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

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

• Did you just add the code to that page? Relevant ads should appear on your pages shortly after you add the code, but sometimes it can take up to 48 hours for ads to show. This is because our crawler has to visit your page and determine its content so we can serve targeted ads.
  
  
• Does the code on your page match the code in your account? Make sure to copy the code exactly as it appears in your account, and paste it within the body tags of your HTML code. Be sure not to make any changes to the linebreaks of the code (e.g. pasting the code all in one line) as this will break the code and prevent ads from showing entirely.
  
  
• Are you using an HTML editor? Publishers often use a design-enhanced HTML editor like Macromedia Dreamweaver or Microsoft FrontPage (aka WYSIWIG, "what you see is what you get" software). If you use such an editor, you may see errors if you paste your ad code into a WYSIWYG view such as the "Design" or "Layout" view. For the ads to function properly, you'll have to copy and paste the ad code into the HTML source code of your webpage using the editor's HTML view or HTML insert function. Check for any additional tags inserted by the system or changes in the linebreaks.
  
  
• Are you using a content management system (CMS)? If you have trouble implementing AdSense with a specific content management system, we recommend searching for the name of the CMS (eg. Drupal, WordPress) and 'AdSense implementation'. You can also ask in the forum if other publishers have mastered similar problems, or contact your program provider directly.
  
  
• Are the ads inside nested frames? While you can choose where to position your ads on your pages, be sure to avoid embedding the ad code in excessive div tags or nested frames. Depending on your browser settings, implementing your ad code in this way might prevent ads from appearing correctly.
  
  
• Is JavaScript enabled in your browser? Ensure that you have JavaScript enabled in your browser, as this is necessary to view ads! If you're having trouble seeing the ads, please also check for any conflicting JavaScript on your site that might prevent ads from showing.
  
  
• Is your page dynamically generated? If you'd like to implement AdSense ads on a dynamically generated site -- for example, a site with session IDs or pages behind a login -- you should take a look at this Help Center entry for more information on how to receive targeted ads.

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

Posted by Ulrike Jung - Inside AdSense Team

Thursday, January 28, 2010 at 1:44:00 PM

An update from AdSense about the response to Haiti Earthquake

We've heard from many of our AdSense publishers about your concern for the victims of the recent earthquake in Haiti. We wanted to take this opportunity to let you know about some of the efforts Google is making to help the people of Haiti respond to this catastrophe.

Google is donating $1 million to organizations on the ground that are rescuing those still trapped and providing clean water, food, medical care, shelter and support to those affected. For more information on Google's efforts and opportunities to get involved, please visit the Google Blog.

Posted by Elizabeth Ferdon - AdSense Team

Tuesday, January 19, 2010 at 11:34:00 AM

AdSense for Domains Expands Use of Keyword Hints

You asked for it, you got it! AdSense for Domains, which launched a year ago to help publishers earn revenue through ads placed on undeveloped domains, now uses optional keyword hints more often. These keywords are suggestions supplied to Google by domain owners about the types of content users are looking for when they arrive on an undeveloped domain. They are used to help our system determine the best ads to place on these domains. For example, with the domain www.rockstarsand.com, a publisher might suggest the keywords "bitumen" and "mining" so that ads may appear from advertisers offering oil extraction products.

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

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

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

Posted by Randy Heath - AdSense for Domains

Wednesday, January 13, 2010 at 12:47:00 PM

Site maintenance on Saturday, January 9

This Saturday, our engineers will be performing routine site maintenance from 10am to 2pm PDT. You'll be unable to log in to your AdSense and Ad Manager accounts during this time, but we'll continue serving ads to your pages and tracking your clicks, impressions, and earnings as usual. In addition, your ad targeting won't be affected.

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

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

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

Posted by Dia Muthana - Inside AdSense Team

Thursday, January 07, 2010 at 11:40:00 AM

Happy New Year

Wishing all our publishers a very Happy New Year!

Posted by Dia Muthana - Inside AdSense Team

Friday, January 01, 2010 at 8:05:00 AM

Happy Holidays

We'd like to send our best wishes to all our publishers around the world. Wherever you're spending this holiday season, we hope that it's filled with much love, warmth, and happiness.



Happy Holidays!

Posted by Dia Muthana on behalf of the Google AdSense Team

Friday, December 25, 2009 at 8:17:00 AM

Webinars - out with the old, in with the new

This year, the AdSense team has brought you a series of live webinars covering a range of topics, and we'd like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who attended. We hope that you're already profiting from implementing the tips featured in our webinars.

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

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

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

Posted by Siobhan McCormack - AdSense Optimisation Team

Tuesday, December 22, 2009 at 10:19:00 AM