Introducing the Google Display Network

We’re always focused on improving AdSense by bringing more advertisers to your sites, giving you more control over the ads that appear on your sites, and giving you more transparency into how much revenue you’re earning. Over the past year, much of our focus has been on attracting more display advertisers and display advertising spend to your sites. We’ve added new advertisers and introduced options that help these advertisers reach your sites. At the same time, advertisers have continued to run ads on YouTube and our own properties. To make our display media offerings clearer to advertisers and agencies so that we can continue to bring more display spend to your sites, we’re creating a new umbrella name for all these properties, the Google Display Network.

The Google Display Network will comprise all of the sites where advertisers can buy ads through Google, including the over one million AdSense and DoubleClick Ad Exchange partners as well as YouTube and Google properties such as Google Finance, Gmail, Google Maps, and Blogger. As an AdSense publisher you’re already part of the Google Display Network. We’re not making any changes to how AdSense works, so no action is required on your part. If you use AdSense for search, your AdSense for search ad space won't be part of the Google Display Network. Advertisers will continue to be able to purchase ads on your search results pages in the same way they always have.

While this new name reflects our significant investment to bring more display advertising to your sites, we want to make sure you know that we are still committed to delivering relevant text ads. If you receive text ads on your sites today, rest assured that you will continue to do so. The Google Display Network offers all ad formats - text, image, rich media, and video ads - enabling advertisers to unleash their creativity and engage visitors on your websites in various ways. If you haven’t opted into receiving image ads, we encourage you to do so in order to benefit from the investments we’ve made.

We’re working hard to offer the best display advertising solutions, and we look forward to continuing to introduce new features on the Google Display Network that help advertisers reach their goals and that help our AdSense publishers earn more revenue.

Posted by Neal Mohan, Vice President of Product Management

AdSense Facts & Fiction Part II: Electronic Funds Transfer

Fiction: Google doesn’t support Electronic Funds Transfer in my country because they don’t like me!

Fact: There are many factors we have to consider when launching EFT in new countries. In the meantime, please know that we’re always working towards expanding our payment options for publishers in all regions.

Where we can provide in-country EFT depends on a number of factors. Whenever we launch Electronic Funds Transfer, our fastest payment method, in a new country, we hear a number of requests to launch it in even more countries. Don’t worry -- we hear you! We’d like to launch EFT in as many countries as possible, but there are many things that we need to take into consideration before launching it, including legal and banking restrictions.

We’re working constantly to overcome the hurdles to launch EFT in more countries, so thanks for being patient with us. We also know that you are the local experts -- if there are payment methods that we don’t offer, but would work well for you otherwise, please leave us a comment! We’d love to have good suggestions from those who know best.

Posted by Posted by Elizabeth Ferdon - AdSense Payments 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

Join us for a top tech tips webinar this week

This Wednesday, May 26th at 5pm GMT, we’re hosting a live webinar to share some top tech tips with you.

To register for this webinar, please visit our Help Center.

The topics we’ll cover in this webinar are:

• How to determine which ad variations perform best for you
  
• How to use HTML/CCC to wrap text around ad units
  
• How to ensure your best-performing ad units are defined first in your ad code
  
• Using Google Analytics to better understand your users and make your ad implementations more effective
  
• Using Webmaster Tools to increase the index and rank of your site

Prior to the webinar, you can post your questions on our Google Moderator page and we'll address them during the webinar.

Posted by Caroline Halpin - AdSense Optimization team

The AdSense revenue share

Today, in the spirit of greater transparency with AdSense publishers, we’re sharing the revenue shares for our two main AdSense products — AdSense for content and AdSense for search.

As you may already know, AdSense is comprised of several products. The most popular are AdSense for content, which allows publishers to generate revenue from ads placed alongside web content, and AdSense for search, which allows publishers to place a custom Google search engine on their site and generate revenue from ads shown next to search results. Since AdSense for content and AdSense for search offer publishers different services, the revenue shared with publishers differs for each of these products.

AdSense for content publishers, who make up the vast majority of our AdSense publishers, earn a 68% revenue share worldwide. This means we pay 68% of the revenue that we collect from advertisers for AdSense for content ads that appear on your sites. The remaining portion that we keep reflects Google's costs for our continued investment in AdSense — including the development of new technologies, products and features that help maximize the earnings you generate from these ads. It also reflects the costs we incur in building products and features that enable our AdWords advertisers to serve ads on our AdSense partner sites. Since launching AdSense for content in 2003, this revenue share has never changed.

We pay our AdSense for search partners a 51% revenue share, worldwide, for the search ads that appear through their implementations. As with AdSense for content, the proportion of revenue that we keep reflects our costs, including the significant expense, research and development involved in building and enhancing our core search and AdWords technologies. The AdSense for search revenue share has remained the same since 2005, when we increased it.

We also offer additional AdSense products including AdSense for mobile applications, AdSense for feeds, and AdSense for games. We aren’t disclosing the revenue shares for these products at this time because they’re quickly evolving, and we're still learning about the costs associated with supporting them. Revenue shares for these products can vary from product to product since our costs in building and maintaining these products can vary significantly. Additionally, the revenue shares for AdSense for content and AdSense for search also can vary for major online publishers with whom we negotiate individual contracts.

Of course, we can’t guarantee that the revenue share will never change (our costs may change significantly, for example), but we don’t have any current plans to do so for any AdSense product. Over the next few months we’ll begin showing the revenue shares for AdSense for content and AdSense for search right in the AdSense interface.

We hope this additional transparency helps you gain more insight into your business partnership with Google. We believe our revenue share is very competitive, and the vast number of advertisers who compete to appear on AdSense sites helps to ensure that you’re earning the most from every ad impression. Additionally, when considering different monetization options, we encourage you to focus on the total revenue generated from your site, rather than just revenue share, which can be misleading. For example, you would receive $68 with AdSense for content for $100 worth of advertising that appeared on your site. If another ad network offers an 80% revenue share, but is only able to collect $50 from ads served on your site, you would earn $40. In this case, a higher revenue share wouldn’t make up for the lower revenue yield of the other ad network.

We’re continually working on helping you improve the returns from your site while giving you more control and insight into AdSense. For example, we continue to improve our technology so that we can deliver even better matched ads and attract even more advertisers to your websites. Additionally, we recently began providing more granular ways to find and review the ads on your site, as well as the ability to filter more ads by category. We’re also focused on finding other ways to make AdSense better for you. As you may remember, last December, we asked for your ideas and feedback on how we can make AdSense better. We received more than 600 suggestions and 35,000 votes, and we’ve been reviewing them all.

Keep an eye on this blog for updates about the new features we’re building to help you maximize your advertising revenues.

Posted by Neal Mohan, Vice President, Product Management

Category filtering available in 13 languages

If you're an international publisher who's been waiting for category filtering, we're happy to let you know that we're continuing to expand the feature's availability worldwide. It's currently available in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, and Arabic. In addition, we're beginning to roll this out in beta for Chinese, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, and Russian -- although we're not able to add additional publishers to the limited beta at this time, we're working to make category filtering more widely available in these languages soon.

With category filtering, you can prevent ads from up to 11 specific categories from appearing on your pages. Ads in these categories will be filtered if they're in any of the supported languages, regardless of how they've been targeted to your pages. To start using category filtering, sign in to your AdSense account and visit your Ad Review Center, located under the 'AdSense Setup' tab. Once you click 'change', you'll be able to view the full list of categories you can filter. In addition, you can see the percentage of revenue and ad impressions you've been receiving from each category in the last 30 days; this information can help you understand the impact that applying filters might have.

To learn more about category filtering, please visit our Help Center.

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

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