Two new ways to optimize AdSense on your website

Publishers frequently ask for new ways to increase the relevancy of the AdSense ads shown on their sites. Today, we're pleased to announce two features to help you display highly targeted ads to your users in new and exciting ways.

AdSense for Search Ads Only

You may remember that last year, we introduced the Custom Search element to help you easily bring Google search results and ads to your site. More recently, we introduced data rendering to give you even more control over how the results are shown to your users.

We understand that some of you may have your own, non-Google search results that you'd like to monetize. In the past, this typically meant that you weren't able to use AdSense for search ads. Now, with AdSense for search ads only, publishers can now include AdSense for search ads on their pages and pair them with their own, homegrown search results.

By adding just a few lines of JavaScript to your page, you can display AdSense for search ads above, beside, or below your own search results. You can pick the size, shape and number of ads displayed in each block, and you can even adjust the style of the ads to better fit the look and feel of your site. For instance, check out how seamlessly MerchantCircle has integrated AdSense for search ads only above and next to their search results.

AdSense for Ajax

Whether your site offers your own search results or not, if you have dynamic content, you may be interested in delivering your AdSense for content ads with AdSense for Ajax. With traditional AdSense for content, ads refresh only when a page is reloaded. This works great -- but isn't optimal when your site relies heavily on Ajax, which allows visitors to navigate a lot of content without actually leaving a single page. Also, sites that generate a lot of dynamic content that isn't crawlable are difficult to target accurately.

Here's where AdSense for Ajax comes in. With AdSense for Ajax, your AdSense for content ads will refresh whenever there's a context change - regardless of whether the page reloads or not. Travel site trip.com has taken advantage of this by showing relevant ads based on the selected tab. Try clicking on the "Hotels" tab. The page doesn't reload, yet the Ads by Google have refreshed to show ads more relevant to hotels than flights.

In addition to the ads refreshing, you might wonder why the subject of the ads changed since the crawlable content on the page didn't change much when the tab changed. The second benefit of AdSense for Ajax is that it allows you to provide hints about your site's uncrawlable content with each refresh.

Both of these AdSense features can be easily added to most sites by just copying and pasting a few lines of JavaScript code, which will help you show highly relevant ads to your visitors.

Sound right for your site? Please sign up to try out AdSense for Ajax or AdSense for search ads only today!

Posted by Adam Feldman, Product Manager and Michael Brandell, Product Specialist

Join us for an AdSense for search webinar this week

We’re hosting a live webinar to share our tops tips on optimizing AdSense for search on Wednesday 19th May at 5pm GMT.

You can register for this webinar through our Help Center.

In this webinar we'll cover:

• Implementing and customizing AdSense for search
  
• Optimizing your search results using AdSense for search performance
  
• Improving your search results using keywords
  
• Custom Search Engine advanced features

You can already start asking questions related to this topic on our Google Moderator page and we'll do our best to address them during the webinar.

Posted by Posted by Caroline Halpin - AdSense Optimization team

Live AdSense webinars available in six languages

The AdSense team is hosting a new series of live online webinars this summer. These webinars will focus on AdSense for Search, important technical tips, and best practices for optimizing ad placements, formats and colors on your site. Our first webinar is:

1. AdSense Optimisation Best Practices
   Wednesday 12th May at 5pm GMT

In this webinar we'll guide you through how you can implement AdSense on your site for optimal results. We'll cover:

• Optimizing your AdSense for Content implementation by choosing the right placements, ad formats and colour palettes
  
• Tracking the results of your changes via channels
  
• Improving the user experience and generating additional revenue with AdSense for Search

You can sign up for our webinars through our Help Center. These webinars are also available in German, French, Italian, Spanish and Russian. Just change the language drop-down to see what's available in your market.


Prior to the webinar, you can start asking questions related to this topic and vote on others’ questions in our Google Moderator. We'll answer as many questions as possible during the live event. If you're not familiar with Moderator, please check out our Google Moderator Help.

Posted by Caroline Halpin and Miguel Romar - AdSense Optimization 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

Additional publisher resources: Using Webmaster Tools

In the second part of our ‘Additional Publisher Resources’ video series, Deborah Chang will explain how website owners can use Google’s Webmaster Tools to ensure that their site is properly indexed in Google’s search engine. Webmaster Tools is a powerful tool where publishers can gather information on what sites on the web link to them, under what keywords they’re site is likely to be found, and how they can improve their sites’ load times.



Posted by Matthew Carpenter-Arevalo - Inside AdSense team

Additional publisher resources: Navigating DoubleClick Ad Planner

In an effort to help our publishers navigate the array of Google products, we’re happy to announce the first part of our ‘Additional publisher resources’ video series. In these videos we aim to provide an introduction to other Google products that are of interest to AdSense publishers. We’ll cover topics such as how to maximize your site’s visibility to advertisers, how to ensure your site is properly indexed in Google’s search engine, how to make your site more interactive for users and how to gather information on your site’s traffic.

In the first part of our video series the AdSense team’s own Vijay Vachani will walk through the ins and outs of the DoubleClick Ad Planner. Vijay will explain how advertisers find information about your site through the Ad Planner, and how you can take advantage of the features available in the Ad Planner’s ‘Publisher Center”.



Posted by Posted by Matthew Carpenter-Arevalo - 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