AdSense: Behind the scenes - Meet Debby

Do you ever wonder who’s helping you optimize your webpages? Who works hard to ensure your payments get to you on time? Who works with our product and engineering teams to deliver the products and features that you want?

Over the next few weeks you’ll find out just that! We’re kicking off a video series where you’ll meet some of our AdSense team members. You can hear their stories, learn more about their role in AdSense, and listen to the tips they have to offer.

In the first video, Debby, a member of the AdSense Optimization team talks about her favorite websites, what she likes about working for Google, and the Google products that she recommends every publisher try.



Posted by Dia Muthana - Inside AdSense Team

AdSense Facts & Fiction Part I: Placement targeting

Fiction: Targetable placements are difficult to set up and don’t do anything for my site

Fact: It only takes seconds to convert your custom channels into targetable placements. This simple change can help increase your visibility to advertisers, and boost your revenue.

Advertisers already take advantage of contextual targeting to have their ads appear next to your content. They also have the option to selectively target sites they know are relevant to their ads -- when you’ve created targetable placements, advertisers can dig even deeper and find the most relevant sections of your site to place their ads.

If you’re not familiar with channels, check out our Help Center for steps on how to change your custom channels into targetable placements.

When writing the description of your channel, keep in mind things an advertiser might like to know. For example:

• What kind of content does this channel reflect?
  
• Is the channel on a specific section of your site (e.g. a forum section, blog section, etc.)?
  
• Are your ads above-the-fold (ATF)? In other words, can a user see them without needing to scroll down the page?
  
• Who is your target audience (gender, interests, income level, etc)?

Your description may resemble something along the lines of: “This is a 300x250 ATF ad unit on the football section of a sports blog. My audience is 75% male, age 18-35, earning between $50,000-$80,000 per year.”

To see the impact that placement targeting has on your site, check out this YouTube video on generating reports that break out your contextual and placement targeted revenue.

You can further increase your visibility to advertisers by taking full advantage of DoubleClick AdPlanner, a media planning tool that allowed advertisers to find their audiences across the web. Take a look at our earlier blog post to find out more.

With these small changes, you make it easier for advertisers to find your site, increase your placement targeting potential, and open the door to generating more revenue.

Posted by Rishan Mohamed - Inside AdSense team

Site maintenance on Saturday, May 8

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 account 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:

London - 5pm Saturday
Alexandria - 8pm Saturday
Hyderabad - 10:30pm Saturday
Jakarta - 12am Sunday
Perth - 1am Sunday

To learn more about what goes on during these maintenance periods, check out this Inside AdSense post.

Posted by Dia Muthana - Inside AdSense team

Bridging the gap: Branding campaigns

In the last post in our "Bridging the Gap" series, lets explore how advertisers build tailored campaigns to promote their businesses.

My team and I work mostly with medium-sized businesses that try to be as efficient as possible with their online ad spend. In the past, we found that direct response campaigns (which ask users to make a purchase or sign up for a newsletter) were more common than pure branding campaigns. However, I've seen firsthand that advertisers are slowly but surely beginning to understand the value of online advertising as an extremely cost-efficient, effective and measurable branding mechanism.

As publishers, this means that you'll have more opportunities to capitalize on the increased ad competition that brand campaigns bring. Below I'll explain what types of brand campaigns we see, how advertisers select publishers to include in brand media plans, and how you can ensure that your sites make it in.

Types of Branding Campaigns
The most important difference between direct response and brand campaigns is that brand campaigns aren't focused on driving direct conversions. The goals of online "pure brand" campaigns are very similar to offline ads: reach a specific audience with a sticky message that builds recognition, favor, and/or credibility of the brand. Another type of brand campaign called "brand response" aims to reach a targeted audience and elicit some form of action. Common types of brand response goals include increased searches on brand terms, unique visitors to the advertiser's site, and user interaction on site.

To achieve these goals, most brand campaigns have the following characteristics:

• CPM pricing
  
• Flighted dates (specific, short period of time for an advertising campaign)
  
• Display ads
  
• Placement targeting* (Brand advertisers, especially pure brand advertisers want to ensure that they reach a specific audience by targeting certain sites)

*Though placement targeting is the traditional method for branding, we are seeing a lot of successful brand response campaigns running both placement AND contextual targeting.

Building a Media Plan
When advertisers choose sites to include in the media plan for a brand campaign, they consider much more than 'will it convert?' The top things on their minds as they choose sites to target are:

• Does it have a high composition of their target audience?
  
• Is it aesthetically pleasing?
  
• Does it have highly visible, above-the-fold inventory?
  
• Does it accept image, flash and video ads?
  
• What is the average CPM?

Boost Your Chances of Being Included in a Brand Media Plan
As mentioned, brand campaigns are great for publishers because advertisers are willing to pay a premium for sites they want to show on. This means more revenue for you.

One of the best ways to maximize the chances of being included in a media plan is to update your site information in the Ad Planner Publisher Center. Google Ad Planner is the media planning tool advertisers use to select inventory on the content network. Ad Planner allows advertisers to filter sites by audience composition, accepted ad formats and sizes, reach, unique visitors and daily pageviews.

Other important steps you can take:

• Accept image and video ads
  
• Provide above-the-fold, premium placement ad slots
  
• Open up real estate on your homepage
  
• Opt to receive placement targeted ads

Posted by Claire Kemerling - AdWords Content Specialist team

Bridging the gap: The value proposition - how and why we pitch the Google Content Network to advertisers

I sell the Google Content Network, Google's ad network of over one million publishers to advertisers of all sizes, as a great way to reach customers in all stages of the buying cycle. Content advertising is great for demand generation, for getting the news out about a new product, or about an upcoming sale.

How do I pitch the Content Network? To many of my advertisers, the Content Network can be tricky to navigate. The network's reach is vast and with hundreds of thousands of sites, it can be difficult to choose the most relevant sites. The key here is finding the body of traffic that is already somewhat interested in their products/services. This is always my focus when pitching Content advertising to customers.

There are many industries or "verticals," into which our advertisers are grouped. Part of my job is to share Technology industry information with our advertisers and guide them to Technology websites. For instance, I work with some clients who sell smart phone accessories like skins, covers, faceplates, and chargers. But where should they place ads on the vast Content Network? It's my team's job to point the in the right direction. In this case, I'd recommend several types of websites and also recommend some types of sites to exclude because they may be less relevant. Advertisers may want to target sites with gadget reviews or online publications about technology. Well-targeted and relevant people will see the cell-phone ads there.

I always pitch the network as a place where advertisers can engage with their target audience at the moment of relevance. Once the ads are in front of the right eyes, it's a great way for advertisers to engage with their customers online.

Posted by Sharon Park - AdWords Content Specialist team

Create your AdSense account within your hosting control panel

Website owners who use Plesk, a commercial web hosting automation program, to manage their hosting and website services can now easily configure AdSense. As announced on the Google Blog, Parallels Plesk Panel now offers out-of-box integration with Google Services for Websites.


If you use Plesk Panel to manage your website, you can now create a new AdSense account from Plesk to help monetize your website content. Also, your AdSense account is automatically associated with every Custom Search engine you configure, so that relevant ads are displayed above your search results. When users click on these ads, you earn revenue.

If you already have an AdSense account, there’s no need to create a new one - just configure your existing account within Plesk.

Posted by Ryan Rennaker, Account Strategist - AdSense API

Information about AdSense ads and site speed

Earlier today, our Websearch team announced that we now consider the speed it takes for a website to load when ranking it in Google search results on google.com. As an AdSense publisher and website owner, you may have questions about this change, so we'd like to take a minute to give you more details.

This change is part of our efforts to provide the best possible search experience for our users, as we've found that faster sites create happy users. Our internal studies show that visitors tend to spend less time on sites that respond slowly, and additional recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. For these reasons, we're now taking site speed into account in our search rankings.

Site speed is just one of over 200 signals we use to determine search ranking, and because it's a new signal, it doesn't carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. In fact, less than 1% of all search queries on google.com are affected by the site speed signal. We launched this change a few weeks back after rigorous testing. If you haven't seen much change to your site rankings, then this site speed change possibly did not impact your site.

In general, a website would have to be particularly slow for its ranking to be affected. We look at the time it takes to load all components of a page that contribute to page speed, including images, rich media, and Javascript/HTML/CSS code.

AdSense is built to load ads quickly so there's no need to change your AdSense setup. Even so, we are working to speed up our ads products further. In addition, we also want to give you some suggestions of things you can do on your side, like enabling compression for your site, enabling caching of images, JavaScript, and CSS, and minimizing the size of your JavaScript with Closure Tools.

If you'd like to learn more about speeding up your website, or evaluate your site's speed, we encourage you to look at Site Performance in Webmaster Tools and try developer tools such as Page Speed, YSlow, and WebPageTest.org. Please note that at this time, the only way to determine whether your site has been affected is if you've seen a recent change in your search ranking.

For more information on this change, please visit our Webmaster Central blog.

Posted by Richard Rabbat, Product Manager

Site maintenance on Saturday, April 10

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:

London - 5pm Saturday
Lagos - 6pm Saturday
Bangalore - 10:30pm Saturday
Manila - 1am Sunday
Adelaide - 2:30am 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