If traffic statistics on video sites are any indication, web surfers have a growing appetite for moving pictures. One of the most interesting aspects of working on Google Video is seeing all the videos that come in, on literally all sorts of topics -- from the ...Read More

If traffic statistics on video sites are any indication, web surfers have a growing appetite for moving pictures. One of the most interesting aspects of working on Google Video is seeing all the videos that come in, on literally all sorts of topics -- from the air guitar championships to how caffeine works. With so much great content, wouldn't it be great if you could publish this content on whichever site you want?

Last week, we launched a feature on Google Video that allows you to embed Google Video content in your website. Does your site cover films? Show the trailer for Pixar's new movie "Cars" right on your website. Explore Google Video and you'll find a wide selection of content that can be displayed on your site. Here's an example:



Just look for the 'Put on site' link on the video's playback page. It's free, it's fast, and users don't have to download anything to enjoy video right from your site.



Posted by Jon Steinback - Google Video Product Marketing

eCPM is a bit of industry shorthand that seems here to stay. You've seen it listed in your AdSense reports; it means, "effective cost per thousand impressions." So how is eCPM calculated, you ask?Read More

eCPM is a bit of industry shorthand that seems here to stay. You've seen it listed in your AdSense reports; it means, "effective cost per thousand impressions." So how is eCPM calculated, you ask?

eCPM is calculated by dividing total earnings by total number of impressions in thousands. It is a great performance measure for your various ad units, so when experimenting, you can use eCPM to compare your results.



But what if your site doesn't receive enough impressions to have a large sample size? Even for smaller sites, eCPM can be a useful statistic to track ad performance.

For example, let's imagine we have two custom channels named 'Blue Skyscrapers' and 'Red Rectangles', respectively, which reflect the types of ad formats we're testing on our site. During our test, the 'Blue Skyscrapers' channel receives 370 page impressions and $1.48 in total earnings. The 'Red Rectangles' channel receives 187 page impressions and $0.97 in earnings over the same period. To make these figures more comparable we calculate eCPM -- i.e., the estimated earnings for every 1,000 impressions received. We find that eCPM for blue skyscrapers is $4.00 while the eCPM for red rectangles is $5.18.

This means if we received 1,000 impressions of blue skyscrapers, we would earn roughly $4.00. But for 1,000 impressions of red rectangles, we would earn about $5.18. Therefore, assuming that our sample size is large enough, it is to our advantage to switch to red rectangles throughout our site because they generate more revenue per impression.

Posted by Theresa Chow - AdSense Publisher Support

Tellmehowto.net is a site where users can share hints and tips on just about everything -- from do-it-yourself projects to travel and self-improvement. Set up by Dan Moore in 2002, it became part of the AdSense content network in 2004. Dan has some great optimisation feedback and would like to share his AdSense story ...Read More

Tellmehowto.net is a site where users can share hints and tips on just about everything -- from do-it-yourself projects to travel and self-improvement. Set up by Dan Moore in 2002, it became part of the AdSense content network in 2004. Dan has some great optimisation feedback and would like to share his AdSense story ...

In 2005, Dan began a full review of his site to improve ad-serving and therefore, increase AdSense revenue. A period of trial and error followed whilst Dan tried out different optimisation tips, including different placements, colours and combinations of ads. Some things worked better than others -- this period of experimentation allowed him to see what worked best for his site and his readers.



One key improvement was to make ads more visible. Dan said, "Before, I had small ads shoved away in the corner of pages. I learnt that I had to make them bigger and put them where people would see them -- at the top left of the page -- since this is where people look first."

He also tried rotating the colours of the ads, but this was not successful on his site. In fact, through experimentation he learned the most successful change was the one he least expected. "The best tip was to blend the ad into the site. Don't make it contrast with the site and therefore stand out," Dan explained.

The figures prove what an enormous impact these changes had: Following a couple of months of testing, his revenue increased from $18 to $150 per day.

"The optimisation tips are really just common sense but you don't think about it or realise what can be done until someone suggests it. In the past I read stories from publishers claiming they were making hundreds of dollars a day on AdSense but I just thought, yeah right. This proves that it really is possible and a few simple changes can have a significant impact!"

Posted by Kate Hammond - AdSense UK Product Marketing

We caught up with Mike Gutner, an optimization specialist here at AdSense, to introduce you to one of the people whose job is to make you more money.



How did you get to work this morning? ...Read More

We caught up with Mike Gutner, an optimization specialist here at AdSense, to introduce you to one of the people whose job is to make you more money.



How did you get to work this morning?

I cycled. I live in San Francisco and enjoy bicycling the 40 miles to work about once or twice a week. I cycled across the United States a few years ago and like to re-live those days of getting up at 5:30am and cycling the pre-dawn miles.

What do you do on the AdSense team?

I work on AdSense optimization. We run tests to identify the best ways in which AdSense publishers can make the most of their Google ads.

Can all publishers take advantage of these optimization tips?

Of course. We publish a tips page, which is updated regularly with best practices and optimal ways to use new features, such as link units. We also frequently post tips on this blog, including optimal implementation techniques for forums and blogs, as well as refreshers on new features like site targeting. We'll be doing more optimization-related posts in 2006 -– to stay tuned, subscribe to Inside AdSense so you can receive updates automatically! (Subscribe by entering your email address in the text box to the right of this post)

What are the top 3 tips you like to tell publishers?

1. Opt into image ads. Doing so deepens the pool of advertisements competing to appear on your site, and allows AdWords advertisers to target your site directly with CPM image ads. This can improve monetization on the site real estate you've devoted to AdSense.

2. Use custom channels to track the performance of your ad units. Then, you can see which ad units perform best and experiment with color, placement, and format changes to figure out what works best for your site.

3. Integrate ad units into the content of your site. Place ads in locations on your page with heavy eye traffic, such as within article content (wrap the text around the ad unit) and at the top of the page below the your horizontal navigation unit. Check out our heat map for more placement ideas.

Do the same optimization tips apply across all websites?

No, certain types of sites perform differently with AdSense. In general, we've seen that ads placed above the fold of the page perform best. However in some cases, Google ads perform quite well below the fold. On article pages, for example, people often want more information about the topic after they've finished reading a story. Placing an AdSense ad unit immediately following an article provides relevant links to readers who want to continue reading about the subject. The same idea applies to forums; people tend to go straight to the bottom of interesting threads to read the most recent posts, and Google ads can perform really well there.

Any other advice?

Never stop experimenting! Don't get frustrated if changes you make to your ads don't have immediate positive effects. Keep tweaking your ad colors, formats, and placement, and track how these changes perform with channels. You'll eventually find the optimal ad implementation scheme for your site.

Posted by Suzie Dewey - AdSense Publisher Support

My Google ads look funny – All I see is a list of topics displayed next to the 'Ads by Google' logo, but there aren't any actual ads.Read More

Rushabh asks: My Google ads look funny – All I see is a list of topics displayed next to the 'Ads by Google' logo, but there aren't any actual ads.

We say: Do you see something like this?



If so, you've implemented a link unit rather than a regular ad unit. While you may want to incorporate both ad units and link units into your site, make sure to select the 'Ad unit' radio button when generating your ad code in order to display regular Google ads on your site.



Bart asks: When I view my link unit, all I get is a small search box with the phrase "View ads about" next to it.



We say: You might see this happen If there is not enough text-based content on your site for us to determine its meaning, or if there is a limited inventory of ad topics relating to the content of your site. Users can then enter their own search terms into this box to view ads related to their query, and you'll receive earnings for clicks to these ads. A suggestion - you might try adding more text-based content (i.e., sentences and paragraphs) to your site to help us determine relevant topics to display.

Patti asks: Can I track link unit earnings separately?

We say: Yes, when generating your code you can use custom channels to track earnings for individual link units. Channels allow you to see how link units are performing relative to regular ad units, and can also help you experiment to determine the optimal location on your page for your link units so that you can maximize your revenue.

Posted by Theresa Chow - AdSense Publisher Support

Looking for a place where you can easily share your site content with the world? Try Google Base, Google's database of information submitted by businesses and individuals like you. In a nutshell, Google Base is a free service that helps you publish virtually any kind of information -- be it your latest riveting ...Read More

Looking for a place where you can easily share your site content with the world? Try Google Base, Google's database of information submitted by businesses and individuals like you. In a nutshell, Google Base is a free service that helps you publish virtually any kind of information -- be it your latest riveting screenplay, your physical business locations, or your famous brownies recipe.

So what's cool about Google Base for publishers? For starters, it allows you to make your content more accessible and useful. You can describe the content you upload with your own keywords and attributes so users can easily find it when they search Google Base, Froogle, Local or Google.com. For example, if you're posting a recipe, you might include attributes such as 'Meal: Breakfast', 'Main Ingredient: Eggs', and 'Servings: 4'.

The other cool feature is that you can choose to share a lot of your content, or just a little. You can post individual items by completing a simple UI form, or you can submit a bulk upload file with multiple items in standard formats including TSV, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0 and Atom 0.3 formats. This means that if you already have RSS or Atom feeds, you can easily submit your content to Google Base without much additional work. To keep yourself informed with official news and tips about Google Base, read the Google Base blog or join the Google Base Help Group.



Posted by Naureen Kabir - Google Base Support

After showing our new publishers some love recently, we realized our veteran publishers deserve recognition, too. Test your AdSense expertise with the suggestions below.

1. You're probably familiar with alternate ads ...Read More

After showing our new publishers some love recently, we realized our veteran publishers deserve recognition, too. Test your AdSense expertise with the suggestions below.

1. You're probably familiar with alternate ads, but you may want to take alternate ads a step further and try out collapsing ad units.

2. Save time with custom reports and emailable reports -- so quick and convenient!

3. Our optimization tips are great, but what's even better is testing them on your specific site -- whether it's a blog, a forum, or a site like Engineeringtalk, which really benefited from link units.

4. You know how great your site is -- get the word out to advertisers by customizing your Onsite Advertiser Sign-up landing page.

5. Integrate AdSense for search into your site even further by making sure that SiteSearch is enabled and your website is the default. Be sure to customize your search box, too, so it fits in seamlessly.

6. Add your site to Google's search results using Google Sitemaps so people can find all the great content you've created.

7. Since you're already using multiple ad units (right?), be sure you're making the most of them, including using section targeting to get the most relevant ads.

8. Once you've exhausted the AdSense resources, try more of Google's publisher tools, like Google Maps API and Blogger.

Got an expert tip for us? Let us know.

Posted by Julie Beckmann - AdSense Publisher Support

Happy Valentine's Day to all of our AdSense publishers.

Posted by The Google AdSense Team Read More

Happy Valentine's Day to all of our AdSense publishers.

Posted by The Google AdSense Team

One of our responsibilities on the AdSense engineering team is to ensure that you always receive the most relevant and valuable ads on your site. It's exciting because we deal with the entire ad targeting process from analyzing your site's content to selecting ads and determining how to best display the ads on your page. I just celebrated my 2-year AdSense anniversary last week, and it's never ceased to be a fascinating and challenging project.Read More

One of our responsibilities on the AdSense engineering team is to ensure that you always receive the most relevant and valuable ads on your site. It's exciting because we deal with the entire ad targeting process from analyzing your site's content to selecting ads and determining how to best display the ads on your page. I just celebrated my 2-year AdSense anniversary last week, and it's never ceased to be a fascinating and challenging project.

Prior to launch, any innovation in AdSense goes through three phases: analysis, implementation, and experimentation. When evaluating a new idea that might improve ad targeting, we first analyze all of our existing data. AdSense generates an amazing amount of data every day -- a record of every ad impression and click occurring on every web publisher in our network -- so identifying interesting trends is a never-ending challenge, from determining what ads perform best to identifying the most common causes of public service ads in German.

Once we believe a new idea is ready for testing, we have to implement the idea in our ad serving code using the very powerful development tools Google has provided for us. Naturally, all code designed to serve ads to our customers must pass a rigorous review and testing process before release to ensure that we continue to offer uninterrupted service. During the testing process, we typically run an experiment on a small percentage of traffic for anywhere from a few days to a few weeks. We select the experiment traffic randomly so it is as representative as possible of overall traffic; no individual site should ever see more than a small percentage of its traffic involved in an experiment. Because most targeting experiments involve adjustments to the ad-selection algorithms, they are rarely noticed by anyone outside Google. However, we occasionally run experiments that affect the format or display of ads as this is the only way we can verify whether a potential change will provide an overall benefit to publishers, advertisers, and users.

Throughout an experiment, we track a large number of metrics including clickthrough rate and cost per click, and compare this data to regular traffic collected during the same time period. This prevents external factors unrelated to the experiment -- for instance, a large new advertiser or publisher entering the system, or time considerations such as holidays, weekends, and seasons -- from significantly skewing the results.

After an experiment is complete, we consider the effects on publishers, advertisers and end users; we only release new features we believe will provide an overall benefit. Of course, once a feature is launched, we continue tracking the same metrics to make sure everything is behaving as expected, while starting to work on the next innovations in AdSense targeting.

Posted by Scott Benson - AdSense Engineering

Ever wonder what determines the order in which ads appear on your site? Then you've wondered about the Google AdWords ad ranking system. AdWords is the advertising platform thousands of advertisers use to place their ads on the Google network. Once an ad is in the AdWords system, it competes against other ads to appear on relevant pages in the AdSense network. It's through this real-time dynamic auction system that ads are ranked. Those ads with the highest ...Read More

Ever wonder what determines the order in which ads appear on your site? Then you've wondered about the Google AdWords ad ranking system. AdWords is the advertising platform thousands of advertisers use to place their ads on the Google network. Once an ad is in the AdWords system, it competes against other ads to appear on relevant pages in the AdSense network. It's through this real-time dynamic auction system that ads are ranked. Those ads with the highest Ad Rank at any given moment are displayed on your site.

So, you ask, how is Ad Rank determined? While bid price (the price advertisers are willing to pay for each click per thousand impressions) is obviously an important factor, we also calculate advertiser Quality Score to make sure the best performing ads will always appear on your site. Quality Score takes into account factors such as an ad's relevancy and click-through rate (CTR) (i.e. how likely users are to click on a given ad) because a higher CTR sometimes outweighs the benefits of a higher bid price. This ensures that your site always displays the ads representing the highest revenue potential for you.

You might also wonder: "But image ads usually take up multiple ad slots -- does this limit the amount of money that I can make?" Good question, but no -- for an image ad to appear on your site, it has to produce an effective CPM greater than the sum of the individual text ads.

For a more detailed explanation about how Ad Rank is calculated, visit the AdWords Pricing overview.



UPDATED: Image

Posted by Bismarck Lepe - AdWords Product Marketing

Often when troubleshooting targeting inquiries, we find that publishers have unknowingly blocked the Googlebots from crawling sections of their site, resulting in PSAs or mistargeted ads. With the newest release of ...Read More

Often when troubleshooting targeting inquiries, we find that publishers have unknowingly blocked the Googlebots from crawling sections of their site, resulting in PSAs or mistargeted ads. With the newest release of Google Sitemaps, you can get a report that shows you Googlebot's view of your robots.txt file.

In addition to general status updates such as the last time Googlebot downloaded your robots.txt file, this new report allows you to test specific URLs to see if your robots.txt file is blocking them from the MediaPartners Googlebot, the Google content crawler. Plus, you can test changes to your robots.txt file against other Google crawlers (e.g., search or image) or the Robots Standard. This way you can experiment with changes to see how they would impact the crawl of your site, as well as make sure there are no errors in the file, before making changes to the file on your site. Learn more about this recent release on the Google Sitemaps Blog.

Still not sure if Sitemaps can really help you? Check out the newest Sitemaps success story showcasing fellow AdSense publisher ApartmentRatings.com.

Posted by Shaluinn Fullove - Sitemaps Product Marketing

Hi Google guys - Why do my ads say "Ads by Goooooogle" instead of "Ads by Google" as I've seen on some other sites?Read More

Lisa asked: Hi Google guys - Why do my ads say "Ads by Goooooogle" instead of "Ads by Google" as I've seen on some other sites?

We say: Just as we have holiday logos for our Google homepage and "Goooooooooogle" at the bottom of our search results, we thought "Ads by Goooooogle" would be a fun alternate version of "Ads by Google" for our AdSense ad units. They are both branding features we've tested, and we found that "Ads by Goooooogle" is often more memorable for users than "Ads by Google", so you may notice either label appearing beside your ads at any given time. Currently, link units and AdSense for search ads are only labeled as "Ads by Google".

So why label our ads at all? The "Ads by Google" label helps distinguish clearly between content and ads, thus providing a more positive user experience. It also distinguishes Google ads from other ads so that when users click on Google ads, they know they can trust Google to provide high quality ads targeted to their interests. This trust provides value to both publishers and advertisers.

Lastly, by clicking on an "Ads by Goooooogle" or "Ads by Google" link, users can submit feedback about the Google AdWords and Google AdSense programs. This feedback is valuable to us as we're always working to improve our feature and product offerings.

Posted by Brian Axe - AdSense Product Management