Inside AdSense

As we mentioned a few weeks ago, you can use your AdSense account to display ads on any policy-compliant sites you own. This has often sparked the question among new publishers of 'How many sites do I need to earn money with AdSense?'

We'd like to stress that it's not the number of sites you have, but the quality of those sites that will help you increase your earnings with AdSense. If you're just getting started with your first website and the AdSense program, we recommend taking the time to build up your site with plenty of original, quality content -- write about topics you're passionate about, or which you have expertise in. When designing your website, keep our Webmaster Guidelines and, most importantly, your users in mind.

Then, take advantage of our Webmaster Tools to help increase your site's visibility in the Google search index, and try out the tips our Search Quality Evaluators have provided. Once you've built up organic traffic to your site, use Website Optimizer to understand how users interact with your pages and make improvements to your layout. And of course, during all of this, experiment with AdSense optimization tips to learn which colors, formats, and placements monetize best on your site.

Finally, as we blogged about during this Newbie Fridays series, your earnings potential can go up as advertisers find that you're sending high-quality leads to their sites. This won't happen overnight, but with patience and hard work you can watch your efforts convert into a high-quality site and higher AdSense earnings. And you won't even need a hundred sites to do it :)

Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

Friday, September 12, 2008 at 1:46:00 PM

Today, we're happy to announce the release of the beta version of a new open-source browser: Google Chrome. We encourage you to download it and give it a try.

Google Chrome features a simple and intuitive user interface and an entirely new architecture designed for speed, security, and stability. You can find out more about other Google Chrome features here.

For publishers, you should see the ads on your pages continue to appear as normal in Google Chrome; we built Google Chrome so that most webmasters and site owners shouldn't have to make changes to their sites. If your site is compatible with Safari, it should also be compatible with Google Chrome, as they are both built using WebKit. If you have any questions regarding compatibility with your site, feel free to refer to our webmaster site.

To learn more about why we built Google Chrome, see our official Google blog.

Posted by Brian Rakowski - Google Chrome Product Manager

Tuesday, September 02, 2008 at 12:44:00 PM

Back in March, we announced the beta release of Google Ad Manager, our hosted ad serving and management solution for publishers with smaller direct sales teams. Today, we are pleased to announce general availability of the product -- no invitation required! Thousands of publishers in hundreds of countries already serve billions of impressions each day with Ad Manager, and we've heard from them that Ad Manager has helped increase revenue, cut serving costs, and save time managing campaigns.

Now we're excited to bring those benefits to all publishers. If you have an AdSense account, you can sign in to Ad Manager today. If not, apply for an AdSense account now. A Google AdSense account is a technical requirement for creating an Ad Manager account.

Ad Manager can help you sell, schedule, deliver, and measure both directly-sold and network-based inventory. It offers an intuitive and simple user interface, Google serving speed and reliability, and significant cost savings. Best of all, Ad Manager can be optionally integrated with Google AdSense to offer you an automated way to maximize the revenue of your unsold and network-managed inventory.

We've been busy since March; in addition to supporting thousands of new publishers on Ad Manager, we've been adding new features including:
We also continue to roll out new features for the DoubleClick Revenue Center suite of publisher solutions, including DART for Publishers (DFP), our ad serving platform for publishers with larger direct sales teams. Google Ad Manager serves as an effective complement to the DoubleClick Revenue Center by providing new opportunities for publishers of all sizes.

If you have any additional questions about Ad Manager or want to learn more, visit the Ad Manager Help Center.

Posted by Alex Vogenthaler - Product Manager, Google Ad Manager

Tuesday, August 26, 2008 at 8:05:00 AM

In the coming months, we'll be rolling out some new foundational features in AdWords for the content network. These features are intended to enhance your earning potential and the effectiveness of ads we serve to users on your sites. Some of the benefits of these features include:
You can read about these in more detail on our official Google blog. To enable these features, we'll be implementing a DoubleClick ad serving cookie on the content network. We now have a program policy that covers data usage related to the launch of these new features.

We're excited about these upcoming features that will improve the experience for users and protect privacy while creating more value for our publishers and advertisers.

Posted by Wei Yang - AdSense Publisher Support

Thursday, August 07, 2008 at 10:01:00 AM

If you're an avid Inside AdSense reader, you know that we frequently post about the latest developments in AdSense and new features you can take advantage of. However, we've heard from some publishers that they want to know more about what's happening in AdWords, and what we're doing to bring more relevant, targeted ads to AdSense sites like yours. With that, we'd like to take a moment to give you insight into a few recent AdWords developments, and what they mean for you as an AdSense publisher.

One of the main changes is the ability for advertisers to be more specific with their ad targeting through a combination of contextual targeting and placement targeting. As you may know, contextually targeted ads will appear on your pages if an advertiser's keywords match your content, while placement-targeted ads will appear if an advertiser has specifically selected your ad placement or site. Now, advertisers can target your site or placements, but can also specify keywords for them so that their ads only appear in the most relevant pages. These ads will still need to compete with the available inventory of ads for a particular placement, and so only the highest-paying, most relevant ads will appear on your pages. At the same time, you'll still be able to use your Competitive Ad Filter to prevent ads from specific URLs from appearing.

What does this mean for you, as an AdSense publisher? Your users may see more relevant ads on your pages, and advertisers who become more confident that their ads are reaching the right audience may increase their ad spend -- both of these can result in higher monetization for you. In addition, while advertisers previously could only change their bids for all ads running across multiple sites, they can now adjust their bids for individual sites. This means that advertisers can spend more of their budgets on the specific AdSense sites which perform well and generate high-quality leads for the advertiser.

With these recent improvements, we're looking forward to expanding the number of advertisers who use the AdSense content network and increasing the relevance of their ads on your sites. Not only will this increase your earnings potential through the AdSense program, but it will also strengthen the ads ecosystem that benefits publishers, advertisers, and users.

Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

Monday, July 21, 2008 at 12:20:00 PM

In addition to participating in the AdSense network, you may also be interested in having your site ranked in organic Google search. In this post, I'll highlight some important points for search optimization. While there's no a magic formula to make your site show up first on a search results page, there are some good practices when it comes to links, design, content, and the structure of your site.

First of all, as a reminder, Google organic search and AdSense are independent of each other. Displaying AdSense ads on a site won't change the ranking of the site in Google search in any way. So it follows that sites containing AdSense ads don't receive special treatment in Google search.

Ranking in Google search is based on many different algorithms, and optimization for search is a long, continuous process. For these reasons, and because the techniques might violate our guidelines, we recommend avoiding any techniques that claim to optimize your ranking very quickly or radically. If you have concerns or questions, you can consult other webmasters on a number of forums, including Google's official forum for webmaster-related issues.

We encourage you to monitor the quality of your site's backlinks -- links from any site directing to your site. To increase your site's popularity, check if other sites that discuss similar topics or have a similar reader base are aware your site exists.

Outgoing links are also important and should comply with our guidelines. When you create a link to another site, we recommend first asking yourself: "Is this link going to be useful for my visitors?" or "Is this link likely to be clicked by my visitors?". Don't participate in link schemes or buy/sell links that pass PageRank, as it is against our guidelines and may hurt your site's performance in our search results.

Here are some tips for structuring your site:
Also, adding original and compelling content on a regular basis may help Google crawl your pages regularly. It can have the added benefit of attracting links to your pages too.

Finally, design your site with your users in mind, and be patient and consistent in your efforts. To attract quality backlinks and develop your optimization strategy, it's important to keep a clear structure for your pages and regularly add organic content.

Posted by Ambroise Fensterbank - Search Quality Evaluator

Friday, July 11, 2008 at 11:41:00 AM

Following our recent testimony in front of the U.S. House Small Business Committee, we revisited Washington D.C. to deliver our first seminar for small businesses on the web -- specifically those in the Hispanic-American community. The Spanish-language seminar, co-sponsored by both the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and the League of United Latin American Citizens, focused on making the most of AdSense and other Google tools to effectively and efficiently manage a small business online. We know a number of our publishers are Hispanic small business owners, so we'd like to share the video of the event with you (in Spanish with introductory words in English):

If you're a small business owner, we also recommend taking a look at our small business resource page, available in both Spanish and English.

Posted by Carolina Shea - AdSense Publisher Support

Monday, June 16, 2008 at 10:30:00 AM

You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. That's why our publishers know how important it is to make their sites sticky to keep users on their pages longer. If you're a savvy coder, love to build cool apps and mashups, and wonder what more you can do to enhance your website with video and increase the stickiness, then we'd like to cordially invite you to attend Powered By YouTube on Thursday, July 10!

Powered By YouTube is our first-ever developer gathering focused on bringing together a wide range of developers to learn more about YouTube's APIs and Tools. You'll spend the day at YouTube's headquarters and learn how to bring YouTube to your website, share best practices, and get hands-on with the APIs. You'll also meet fellow YouTube API developers across a wide range of companies, YouTube engineers and product managers, and hopefully leave inspired to enhance your user experience with the YouTube APIs.

Some important details about the event below:

Powered By YouTube
Thursday, July 10, 2008
10:30am - 5:00pm
YouTube headquarters at 901 Cherry Ave. San Bruno, CA 94066
Cost: Free!

Registration is extremely limited, so we encourage you to register now if you're interested.

Hope to see you there! And if you're interested in staying up-to-date on what's going on in the world of YouTube APIs and syndication, check out our blog.

Posted by Christine Tsai - YouTube APIs & Tools Team

Thursday, June 12, 2008 at 10:53:00 AM

Have you ever wanted to poll your website visitors on their interests or ask them for feedback on your site content? Now, using a Google Docs spreadsheet, you can create a simple form, collect responses from your visitors in an online spreadsheet, and publish the results on your website -- in a few easy steps. All of the data will be kept in your secure, password-protected spreadsheet.


Here's how it works:

Create a new spreadsheet, build your survey form, and invite users to fill out the form. You can send out an email to people you'd like to fill out the survey (maybe to a mailing list you have), or generate some HTML code that allows you to embed the survey directly on your web page.


Your visitors won't need to sign in to Google Docs to fill out the form. Responses are automatically added to your spreadsheet, and you can receive notifications by email when submissions occur. You can even keep a closer eye on responses by adding the Google Docs forms gadget to your iGoogle homepage.

Finally, in your spreadsheet, you can create graphs and charts showing the results, and then publish those charts back on your site as gadgets. As the responses trickle in, the published charts will update automatically.


Check out the Google Docs Help Center for more detailed instructions on how to create your own live survey. I hope you'll be better able to get feedback from visitors to your site using this tool.

Posted by Andrew Chang - Google Docs Marketing Manager

Wednesday, May 14, 2008 at 1:53:00 PM

Have you heard of iGoogle, Google's personalized homepage? Well, tens of millions of users have, and with a just a little bit of effort you can share that traffic.

iGoogle allows users to bring together their favorite content and services from around the web by adding feeds and gadgets to their Google homepage. Let's start with the basics of what feeds and gadgets are, and how you can create them for your own site:

Once you have a feed or gadget -- and for those of you who already do -- you can start promoting it. As a first step, make sure to submit your feed or gadget to the iGoogle directory. Promotion can help new readers find your content and deepen engagement with your existing readers every time they visit their iGoogle page -- all of which can lead to more traffic for you site.

Don't stop there, though. Gadgets and feeds are ranked in the directory according to popularity, so make sure to feature your gadget or feed prominently on your site. One easy way to do so is with the ‘Add to Google’ button. Simply fill out some basic information, insert a small snippet of HTML into your site, and you’ll be ready to go.

Want to find out more about how to raise awareness of your feed or gadget? Take a look at our step-by-step guide.

Posted by Matt Ghering - iGoogle Product Marketing

Monday, April 28, 2008 at 1:52:00 PM

When we talk about optimization in AdSense, we usually focus on testing different formats, colors, and locations for your ad units. But it's just as important, if not more so, to optimize your site's content to make it as user-friendly as possible. Which homepage design do your users respond most to? Which headline or graphic will entice your users to spend more time reading your articles? Knowing the answers can help you implement the most user-friendly elements, increasing user loyalty and engagement. And as we've noted, more engaged, more frequent users means more eyes on your AdSense ads.

You can determine the answers to the questions above (and more) by using Google Website Optimizer, a free tool available through Google AdWords. It lets you try out different layouts and content for your site and conduct either an A/B test or a multivariate test to track how different content affects your users. To learn more about Website Optimizer, just visit their informational site to find out everything you need to know before getting started. If you don't yet have an AdWords account, sign up here to access Website Optimizer.

Finally, we encourage you to attend a free online seminar about Website Optimizer. Your host will be Tom Leung, Product Manager for Website Optimizer, and the guest presenter will be Bryan Eisenberg from FutureNow, Inc. Tom and Bryan will introduce Website Optimizer, share best practices for testing, and discuss some of the top elements to test on any webpage. Here are all the details:

What: Website Optimizer: What Should I Test?
When: Tuesday, March 11th, 2008
Time: 9:00 - 10:00 am PST
Register to attend.

Best of luck with optimizing your site, your ad units, and beyond.

Updated AdWords URL for accuracy

Posted by Katie Mandel and Jon Stona - AdSense/AdWords Product Marketing

Thursday, February 28, 2008 at 12:41:00 PM

Following our recent series of referrals announcements, we're happy to announce that you can now earn $5 per referral for Google Apps.

With Google Apps, we've taken Google's most powerful communication and collaboration tools, and packaged them together so businesses, schools and other organizations can work more effectively while spending less time and money on IT systems. Google Apps provides customized email addresses (powered by Gmail), Google Calendar, Google Talk, Docs & Spreadsheets and Page Creator, all for free. Best of all, everything is hosted by Google, so there's no hardware or software to download, install or maintain.

So how do these referrals work? Just visit the AdSense Setup tab in your AdSense account and click the link for Referrals. Select the Google Apps option and then choose how you want the referral ad to look on your site. (The Google Apps referral ads are available in English right now, but we'll be adding more languages soon.) Copy the code provided into the design of your web pages, and voila!

You will be credited $5 when someone clicks the referral ad from your site and signs up for Google Apps with a domain that has not already been signed up for the service. That person's domain must then have one or more Google Apps email accounts in use for four consecutive weeks. It's that simple.

If you're new to AdSense referrals, you might want to check out our referrals optimization tips.



Posted by Jack Chou - AdSense Publisher Support

Monday, April 02, 2007 at 5:21:00 PM

Today we're excited to announce that in addition to AdSense, AdWords, Firefox with Google Toolbar, and Google Pack, you can now refer your users to Google Checkout through AdSense.


Checkout gives your users a faster, safer, and more convenient way to shop online. OK, that sounds great for them, but what do you get out of it? Well, every time you refer a user to Google Checkout, you make a little money. It's a simple process that includes all of three steps:
It's that simple. Please note that Checkout referrals are currently only available for U.S. publishers, and Google Checkout is currently only available for buyers with a U.S. credit card. We hope to make both Checkout and Checkout Referrals available in more countries soon.

If you're not convinced, why not try it out yourself? It costs nothing to sign up (actually, you'll even get a $10 bonus) and it'll make shopping online a little easier. And remember, if you're still figuring out how to improve the performance of your referrals, take a peek at our optimization tips for referrals.

You can get started with Checkout referral ads by visiting the AdSense Setup tab in your account. We think your users will thank you for showing them Google Checkout, and your wallet will like having some extra money for you to spend at all of those great Google Checkout stores.

Posted by Jack Chou - AdSense Publisher Support

Thursday, March 22, 2007 at 10:17:00 AM

We recently caught up with Peter Clee, a publisher who has seen success with both AdSense and AdWords. Peter's main site, LondonNet.co.uk, was launched in the summer of 1996 and offers a guide to arts, entertainment, city info, and news about London. Peter also runs www.hotelgenie.com and www.myflatincannes.com. We'd like to share some of Peter's insights with you about monetising his sites with AdSense and his experience using AdWords to attract visitors.

Inside AdSense: How does AdSense impact your business?
Peter Clee: It has reinforced our view that creating good, relevant content is what we, as publishers, should be all about. AdSense is a stress-free and rapid way to support new sections and features on your site, ensuring you have a degree of monetisation before you even consider additional revenue streams. If a section works well with AdSense you quickly learn it is worth investing more time and energy into expanding its content. Additionally, with future redesigns of the site we will be thinking of how to incorporate AdSense-friendly ad positioning from the get-go.

IA: What problems have you faced in the past in monetising your site?
PC: Over the last eleven years we have had time to build up a portfolio of revenue streams across the site. I guess the important thing is not to get too disheartened when a new method flops. I’d say about one in ten of our ‘really great ideas’ actually pays off, one in five really flops, and the rest do somewhere in the middle. The key is to nurture your winners and improve your near things, while quietly disposing of the failures. Thankfully, AdSense has proved to be a winner from the moment we implemented it onto our sites.

IA: What has been your overall experience with AdWords?
PC: It’s particularly useful for supporting new, smaller sites such as www.myflatincannes.com to create a web presence and readership. With a more established site such as LondonNet.co.uk, it's great at boosting strategic parts of the site and attracting new readers to key revenue generating areas. Also, the system is easy to set up and operate. To maximise your returns you need to make regular checks to ensure your bid positions and keywords are working effectively.

IA: How exactly do you use AdWords to achieve your goals?
PC: We research a cluster of relevant keywords and test the predicted and actual bid ranges. Then we spend time to fine-tune their effectiveness, where appropriate, using the conversion measures. Like most things it takes a little time to fine tune and maximise your returns.

IA: Would you recommend AdWords to other publishers?
PC: Absolutely. It’s a major weapon in the web marketer’s arsenal.

If you'd like to learn more about advertising with Google AdWords, visit the AdWords homepage to get started.

Posted by Alan Carbery – AdSense UK Optimisation Team

Monday, March 19, 2007 at 3:45:00 PM

As active web publishers, we know you're working to build quality traffic so the world can see the great content you've created. Since many of you rely on listings in search engines for this traffic, we often receive email from publishers who have concerns about their site's listing on Google.com.

We'd like to let you know that to protect the integrity of our search results, your participation in AdSense won't affect your site's ranking or listing in the Google index. Since AdSense is separate from Google.com search results, our team is unable to provide publishers with any information about a site's Page Rank or status in the Google index.

However, if you do have questions about your site's ranking or listing on Google.com, we encourage you to visit Webmaster Central. There, you can navigate to pages with information about how Google crawls and indexes pages, how to improve a site's ranking, or why a site is no longer visible in the index. In addition, Google's webmaster tools can provide you with comprehensive information about your site, including queries for which your site appears in Google.com search results, potential indexing problems, and much more.

If you have questions or feedback about the resources on Webmaster Central, you might also find the discussions in the Google Webmaster Help Group useful, as Google employees monitor and contribute to the group.

Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

Wednesday, February 28, 2007 at 2:47:00 PM

If you're looking for an easy way to add some interactivity to your site, we've got just the tool for you. The AJAX Search Wizards allow you to add a video, news, and local search results to your web page without writing any code. Just tell us how you want the widget to display and what searches to automatically execute, and the wizard will generate the code for you to copy and paste into your web page.

Our newest wizard generates a news bar that scrolls through recent news headlines. Here, we've customized it to show Google News search results for Google, Apple, and Microsoft:

The news bar is also available in a vertical orientation for you to use in a column or sidebar. You can easily change the look-and-feel of the our wizard-generated code just by adding some CSS or editing the JavaScript. Also, check out our video bar wizard to easily add Google videos to your site and try our map search wizard to add a searchable Google map to your site.

The AJAX Search API allows you to interact programmatically with Google search results including Google web, video, news, and blog searches. If you're a developer, take a look at the documentation to see how you can integrate dynamic Google search into your website in other creative ways.

Finally, let us know if you find these wizards useful, and we may just feature your site on our community samples page.

Posted by Peter Deng - Google AJAX Search API Team

Tuesday, February 20, 2007 at 7:44:00 AM

Does your site have a feed? If not, you may be missing out on a substantial number of repeat visitors. An increasing number of users are using feed readers to keep up to date with their favorite websites. You've worked so hard to create that quality content, and feeds can help you grow your audience as well as let your current readers take your site with them wherever they go.

Google Reader and the Google Personalized Homepage are examples of feed readers that allow your users to keep track of updates to your site -- and starting today, it's now possible to track the number of users subscribed to your site via these two feed readers.

Here are just a few examples of AdSense sites which also offer feeds:
There are many resources online to help you implement feeds on your site. You may wish to start with sites for Atom and RSS, the two standards compatible with most feed readers. Many popular CMS and blogging platforms like Blogger.com already have feed functionality built in, so your site may even have a feed without you knowing it.

In order to provide the best experience for your users, the Google Reader team has also put together some tips for feed publishers. This document covers feed best practices, common implementation pitfalls, and various ways to promote your feeds. Whether you're creating your feeds from scratch or have been publishing them for a long time, we encourage you to take a look at our tips to make the most of your feeds. If you have any questions, please get in touch.

Posted by Nick Baum - Google Reader Product Manager

Friday, February 16, 2007 at 6:09:00 AM

If you're a participant in the AdSense Help Forum or if you read AdSense blog posts on Google Groups, you've probably noticed that Google Groups has a completely new look. But it's not just the colors and the layout that have changed; there are also a number of exciting new features you can take advantage of.

First, we've added more customization options for Group owners. As the owner of a Group, you now have the ability to change the look and feel of your pages by specifying a color scheme and logo. You can also collaborate with your members by creating web pages together -- members can then view and edit the pages.

In addition, Group members can interact with each other in new ways. You can now upload and share files such as photos and word documents with other members. Want to let other members know more about you? Create a profile complete with a bio, a picture, and a quote.

The new version of Google Groups is available in more than a dozen languages -- visit today to join or create your own Group.

Posted by Griff Hazen - Software Engineer

Tuesday, January 30, 2007 at 9:24:00 AM

As webmasters (and web users), you know that images can liven up text-heavy pages and help engage readers. Maybe you keep a personal blog and you'd like to share a holiday photo album. Or maybe you manage a knitting tutorial site, and you'd like to post photos with step-by-step captions. Well, Picasa Web Albums can help you do all of these things. Just upload photos to your own Picasa Web Albums page, then embed a link to that album on your site. Because your photos will be stored on a Google server, you can let us worry about hosting your files while you concentrate on creating a great looking gallery that will enrich your site.

After signing up and creating a web album, simply click the Embed in Blog/MySpace link in that album. Just like with AdSense, you'll then need to copy and paste the provided HTML into your site's source code. Republish your site, and the cover photo of that album will appear on your site, already linked to your web album. When embedding your photos, please keep the AdSense image guidelines from last month in mind.



Your Picasa Web Albums account is free and comes with 250 MB of storage space -- enough room to store about 1000 photos (at 1600 pixels each). It's also possible to upgrade and order additional space (up to 250GB) as your photo storage needs grow. And unlike some other photo sharing sites, Picasa Web Albums retains the quality of your images so you and your site's visitors can download those same high resolution photos off the web and to their computers.

Finally, you can now also upload video into any web album -- a nice touch to really make your content come alive. And while you can't currently customize the look of your Picasa Web Albums page to match your site, we hope you'll find that its clean, uncluttered look complements your site's design.

Need help using Picasa Web Albums? Visit Picasa Support.

Posted by Beth Campbell - Picasa Product Marketing

Wednesday, January 03, 2007 at 11:42:00 AM

We've heard it time and time again: as publishers, you want to give your users a relevant search experience on your websites. You want the power of Google search, and you want to make it your own. And then, of course, you want to make money from this search engine, not spend time and money building it. Well, here's news you can use -- now you can do all this with Google's Custom Search Engine (CSE).

With CSE, you can create a highly customized and (free) tailored search experience for your users that reflects your knowledge and expertise. You place this search engine on your site and, if you've got an AdSense for search account, you can link your CSE to it and make money from the resulting traffic. In a few simple steps you can create a CSE that looks and feels like your own, prioritizes or restricts content based on what you specify, as well as open your search engine index to trusted members of your community so they can contribute to its comprehensiveness and relevance.

Here's an example from Macworld. In the first screenshot, you'll notice a search box in the upper righthand corner of the page. After performing a search with the query [macbook], the search results page shown in the second screenshot appears. The search results are integrated smoothly with the site layout and the Macworld publisher earns revenue from clicks on the ads in the "Ads By Google" section.





It's easy to build a CSE -- no Ph.D. in computer science required. Here's how it works:
You can check out a few more CSEs in action by visiting our featured examples page. You'll see some created by industry experts, bloggers, educators and techies. We're continuing to add customization and advanced features to the CSE too. We hope you'll try it out and let us know what you think.

Posted by Jennifer Hyman - CSE Product Marketing Manager

Tuesday, November 28, 2006 at 10:40:00 AM