Tag Archives: AdSense

2015 Year in Review

2015 was a year with new and exciting AdSense updates. Let’s have a look at 2015 to recap all the product enhancements launched this year.

New features for your AdSense account:

New sign-up flow: Signing up for AdSense is now faster and easier. Now, you have immediate access to your AdSense account once you sign up for AdSense.

New AdSense website and mobile apps: We announced our new AdSense website with a new design and new publisher stories. We also updated the AdSense app with a fresh new look using material design and added some new features.

New AdSense performance reports: To give you quick and easy access to these reports, we introduced a new design for AdSense reporting with a new dashboard. With the redesigned Performance reports tab, you now have more control and flexibility, allowing you to better understand your AdSense earnings and performance.

Improved transparency in payments: We've received feedback from you that you want to know more about the differences between estimated and finalized earnings. Now, you’re able to see the invalid activity deductions that cause these differences.

Matched content: To help you grow the number of pageviews on your site and increase user engagement, we launched Matched content. It’s a free content recommendation tool that promotes your content to your site visitors. Matched content generates contextually relevant and personalized article recommendations from the pages on your website. Have a look at the site management settings in your AdSense account to see if your sites are eligible to run Matched content.

Certified Publishing Partner Program: We launched a new Certified Publishing Partner program to help you earn more from your sites while also saving you time.

New features for your ads:

New mobile text ads: This new design allows for higher performance with a more beautiful and user-friendly appearance. The text ads feature elements such as a shaded background and a centered button which bring together the parts of the ad into a cohesive whole. To see these new mobile text ads, choose to show both text and display ads on your site, if you haven’t already done so.

Richer text ads: Richer text ads are a new ad format that automatically creates image ads from text ads. They compete for both your text and display, and display-only ad units and could increase your earnings.

Improved "Mute this ad" feature: With ‘Mute this ad,’ users have a way to signal that they aren’t interested in certain ads. This feature gives users additional control over ad units. It also helps us find ad placements and creatives that users may not prefer so that we can continue working hard to serve better performing ads on your site.

We’re looking forward to 2016 with lots of new features and formats to improve your AdSense experience.

As always, we’d like to thank you for sharing your feedback. Please keep sharing your thoughts and suggestions and stay tuned for more updates in 2016.

Happy New Year, and see you online in 2016!

Google AdSense Team

Not yet an AdSense user? Sign up now!

Source: Inside AdSense

Can’t log in? Here’s how to solve the five most common issues

Not being able to log in to your account can be frustrating, and it happens to most of us now and then. Every week the AdSense support team receives emails from publishers who are logged out and stumped.

With that in mind, let's look over the five most common "can't log in" scenarios and how you can clear them up and get back into action.

1. The email and password you entered don’t match

This is always the #1 login issue. Luckily, a fix is just few clicks away. If you've run out of all your memory tricks for remembering your password, visit Google's account recovery service. Enter your login address to reset your Google account password.

2. You deleted your Google Account

Your AdSense account is linked to other Google services like Gmail, Calendar, and Google+ under one Google Account. Sometimes a user decides to delete one service and deletes their entire Google Account, which cuts off access to their AdSense account as well. The good news: even if you deleted your Google Account and lost access to AdSense, your AdSense account is still active. To continue using AdSense, you'll need to recover your Google Account.

3. Your account was hijacked

Hijacking is more common in some regions than in other. If you think your account has been hijacked, you need to act fast.

First things first, visit this page and follow the instructions to alert a Hijacked Accounts specialist and prove your ownership. Be sure to provide detailed and accurate information for each of the questions. Next, contact the AdSense support team by following the steps in the Login troubleshooter. This will let us restore your access to your AdSense account.

To prevent hijacking from happening, follow these security best practices:

Enable 2-step verification
If you sign into your account from a public computer, make sure to log out when you're done
Don't share your password with others and don't write it down on paper or in documents
Use strong passwords. The strongest contain upper and lower cases, special characters, and numbers, like this: “mYvErY234Strong_pAssWord”
Change your password frequently

4. You signed into a different Google Account

If you have more than one Google Account, your AdSense account will be linked to only one of them. If you're signed in but don't see your AdSense account, you may be signed into a different Google Account. Try logging in with a different email and password.

5. Your Google Apps account is not opted in for AdSense

If your email is linked to Google Apps, the Google Apps administrator might have turned off AdSense service for the whole Google Apps account. To fix this, ask your domain administrator to grant you access for AdSense. You can contact Google Apps support if you have more questions.

Now let's hope you never need any of these. For more information, check the AdSense Help Center.

Not yet an AdSense user? Sign up now!

Posted by Kateryna Malinovska

AdSense and AdMob Support Program Manager

Source: Inside AdSense

Demystifying AdSense policies with John Brown: Five tips for a successful policy appeal (Part 5)

I’ve been posting a series to this blog relating to demystifying AdSense policies. Today we’re exploring what happens when ads are disabled from publisher sites, when to submit an appeal, and tips for making those appeals successful.

Our policies are designed to foster a healthy ecosystem which protects users, advertisers, and publishers. In 2014, the vast majority of publishers ( >98 %) did not receive a policy violation notice from us.

In order to ensure a healthy ecosystem we continuously monitor our ad network and periodically review AdSense sites. We use a combination of sophisticated, automated systems and manual reviews to identify violations.

If you’ve received a policy violation or ad serving on your website has been disabled have a look at our Help Center and review our Program Policies. You will find information on how to fix the violation and apply for an appeal.

Here are some useful tips, should you need to submit an appeal:

1. Understand the violation. If you receive a policy violation notification it will include a snippet explaining the violation. If you’d like more information you can visit our Program Policies located in the Help Center. We also encourage you to seek advice from our Forum. Our Top Contributors have a lot of policy knowledge and are often helpful in providing good advice.

2. Check your entire site. Each notification you receive will contain a link with an example of the violation. Please note, that you may have the same violation on multiple pages, so be sure to check your entire site.

3. Tell us what changes you’ll make for the future. What systems have you put in place to ensure this won't happen again? For example, tell us how you've updated your filters, hired human reviewers, or how you're now familiar with this particular policy.

4. Send URL with ad code examples. If you had a content violation, send us links to pages where you have made changes. You can simply remove AdSense ad code from pages, or as a last resort remove pages that have been flagged with violations. If you had an ad implementation violation, be sure to send us a link to the fixed page.

5. Understand the big picture. Although you might not always agree with our policy actions, they are there to protect the entire ecosystem of users, advertisers, and publishers.

Your success is important to us, and we want to see you succeed while keeping your users happy and engaged. Everyone in the digital ecosystem benefits when publishers provide engaging content and useful resources, which in turn incentivizes advertisers to bid for space on your site. We hope that these resources can provide some guidance.

Posted by John Brown
Head of Publisher Policy Communications

Source: Inside AdSense

Getting to know Active View and the world of viewability

We've had a lot of questions recently from AdSense publishers about viewability and the new Active View metrics in AdSense accounts. Active View can really help you improve your AdSense earnings, so let's take a closer look.

What are Active View and viewability?

Active View is Google’s ad viewability measurement solution. It tracks the viewability of ads served by AdSense: that is, the percentage of ads that are considered viewable out of the total number of ads measured. We use the online ad industry standard: 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.

So an ad that is (for instance) placed below the first screen on a given page won't be counted as viewable if the viewer never scrolls down. This is why viewability a good way of determining whether your AdSense ads are actually being seen by your website visitors or simply loading without a chance of catching the viewer's eye.

Why is viewability important?

The industry shift towards viewability is good for both publishers and advertisers for many reasons.

Benefits for advertisers and the advertising industry

Without viewability metrics, advertisers could be paying for ads that loaded on a page but were never seen. If you're an advertiser paying per click you might not care, but if you're paying by the impression it could be a much bigger deal.

Active View metrics help because they show advertisers what percentage of their ads are actually being seen by users and which publishers provide the highest level of viewability. This helps advertisers make smarter decisions about where they should buy ad impressions. That makes display ads both more measurable and more effective.

Benefits for publishers

Viewability metrics also help publishers understand the true performance of the AdSense ads they display. Whether the ad is being paid for by click or by impression, ads that aren't seen by the user can’t have an impact. In the long run, they won’t generate reliable ad revenue.

If publishers notice that the Active View percentage for certain ad units is lower than others, that ad position is probably underperforming and ought to be optimized. Active View can help publishers increase their AdSense earnings as they take corrective action and improve the performance of these ads.

How to improve your ad viewability

Once you become familiar with viewability statistics, there are two changes you can make to improve your results.

Change ad sizes

Vertical ad units such as 160x600 and 120x600 tend to have higher Active View percentages. This makes sense: vertical ad units are in view for longer as the user scrolls up or down the page. Other ad sizes with high viewability rates include the 120x240 and 240x400 ad units.

Change ad positions

Rethinking the position of your AdSense ad units can also help improve your viewability rates. It's not always just a matter of putting more ads at the top of the page: for example, ads positioned just above the fold tend to have higher viewability rates since they remain within view for longer as the user scrolls down. Experiment with what works best on your site.

Paying close attention to your Active View numbers will help you bring your visitors the targeted ads you want them to see and remove the uncertainty around unviewable ads. In the end, that should mean fewer underperforming ad units and a potentially a new way to achieve better revenues overall.

We think that in the long term viewability will change the way that advertisers allocate their budgets to online display. And if you're a publisher, it's a good idea to start paying attention to these new numbers and make adjustments to your ad sizes, ad units, and ad positions to improve viewability and potentially achieve better results.

To learn more about viewability and Active View, see the AdSense Help Center.

Not yet an AdSense user? Sign up now!

Posted by Paul Healy

Publisher Monetization Specialist

Source: Inside AdSense

Five useful ways to check your AdSense performance

Sometimes it's a good thing to step back and look at the basics.

With that in mind (and with the new AdSense interface now in place), we'd like to recap the big five AdSense reports you should start with to analyze your overall account performance.

Let's take a look at these reports.

1. The reporting dashboard: Get an overall summary of your performance

As the name suggests, the reporting dashboard gives you a quick summary of three main reporting metrics: estimated earnings, page views, and revenue per thousand impressions (RPM).

This report is a great way to get a quick check of your recent AdSense performance. You can switch to a wider date range, too, like the past month or year. If you see a sudden change in your results for any area, you can see a more detailed report with a click on the View report button.

2. The entire account by day report: Monitor your daily performance

To see this report, visit the Performance reports tab, click Common reports on the left-hand panel and then select Entire account by day.

Use the Entire account by day report to analyze your daily performance. Try selecting estimated earnings, impressions, CTR, and impression RPM to view them all at the same time and get a better idea of why your earnings change over time.

For example, if the drop in estimated revenue is mainly due to a drop in CTR, take a closer look at ad units and ad placement to understand what caused that CTR drop.

3. Ad units + Platforms: Check ad performance by device

To use this report, visit the Performance reports tab, click Common reports on the left-hand panel, select Ad units and then add Platforms from the top as a secondary dimension.

This combination offers a good look at how your ad units are doing on different device types. Maybe every ad is doing great across the board, or maybe some ad units are doing well on desktop but not on mobile (or vice versa).

CTR and Active View Viewable are two key metrics to check first. Active View Viewable shows how many of your total measurable impressions were truly viewable. Google considers an ad viewable if 50% of the ad is visible for at least one second*. With some impressions, for instance, the visitor may not scroll down your page to see an ad.

If an ad unit has an active view percentage below 50%, check the ad's placement and try to improve this.

Hungry to learn even more? Take it one step further by filtering the report for any individual ad unit that you would like to analyze.

4. The Platforms report: Compare platforms

The Platforms report enables you to see which devices your ad units were viewed on, for example, on desktop or mobile. You can see and compare the traffic and estimated revenue coming from any platform. If there’s a big discrepancy between these two, you might want to check the desktop ad placement and find ways to optimize it to close the revenue gap as much as you can.

5. The Sites report: Compare different domains

Manage multiple domains in your AdSense account? The Sites report can compare the overall performance of those domains.

If you have different versions of one site (like one for desktop and one for mobile), you'll see them separately. If you have a responsive site you can add Platforms as a secondary report dimension to analyze your mobile and desktop performance separately.

Start with these big five and you'll be getting a good basic view of how your site is running. Most of these reports can be found in the Common reports section under your Performance reports tab. You can also create your own reports and save them to run later.

Have a favorite report? Share it with us in the comments!

Not yet an AdSense user? Sign up now!

Posted by Cansu Özaras

Publisher Monetization Specialist