Policy Refresher: content and copyright

For the next segment of our policy refresher series, we’re talking about a topic content creators really care about -- content and copyright.

A major benefit of the Internet is that it puts incredible information and entertainment at our fingertips. It’s important to remember, however, that if somebody else created it, you need their permission to show Google ads next to it. We’ve created a video to explore examples of content and copyright:

Still have questions? Submit your questions in this post via Google Moderator (please note: for privacy reasons, we won’t be able to respond to account-specific questions). We’ll be holding a Google Hangout on Air series covering this topic in more detail - check out the full schedule and don’t forget to register.

Posted by Pamela Malone - AdSense Policy Team @ Google Adsense Blog

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Exciting new fonts in AdSense

An important element of a user’s experience on your site is how they rate its overall appearance. You’ve been asking for more customization options in our ad units so that they complement the design of your site. Today, we’re pleased to let you know that we’ve added five new font options for you to choose from when customizing your ad units.

We looked at a combination of your requests for specific fonts together with popularity and recent adoption levels on the web when deciding on which new fonts to add. Here’s the full list:

• Open Sans

• Open Sans Light

• Roboto Light

• Ubuntu Light

• Lora

You can customize your fonts directly in your account in a few quick steps. We hope you enjoy experimenting with them and would love to hear your feedback on which fonts work best on your site.

Posted by Alan Oursland - AdSense Software Engineer @ Google Adsense Blog

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Choose AdSense: Make Money from Content

Not using AdSense yet?

In the last ten years, AdSense has helped over 2 million partners grow their businesses. Be sure to tune in on Wednesday September 11, at 11:00AM, when we’ll be hosting a special 10th Anniversary Hangout on Air  for prospective publishers. If you haven’t yet signed up for Google AdSense or would like to learn more, you should join us. We’ll demonstrate how AdSense helps you earn money from your website, allowing you focus on creating great content. Learn how AdSense: 

• Earns you extra revenue 
• Shows your users relevant and useful ads
• Lets you control which ads show up on your site
• Helps you understand what’s working and what’s not with robust reporting tools

Several publishers will also be joining us to share their AdSense experiences. Hear why they chose AdSense and how it’s helped them grow. 

Join this event page to live stream the Hangout on Air on September 11 from 11:00am - 12:00pm PDT.

Posted by Bola Akinsanya - AdSense Strategic Partnerships Team @ Google Adsense Blog

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Achievement Unlocked: monetizing online games with TrueView and AdSense

With every new plot planted and zombie zapped to bits, the online games industry is changing the way we interact with entertainment. Online games publishers work with us to grow their gaming empires across all screens, from distribution and downloads through to in-game advertising. We’ve also recognized a growing advertiser demand to reach highly engaged games audiences. So we were especially excited to announce at Europe’s Game Developer Conference: we’re launching the TrueView video ad format across our games monetization platforms.

TrueView creates a better ad experience for gamers, and higher monetization for publishers

We all know how important it is to create a gamer-friendly ad experience, which is why we’re bringing one of our most successful ad formats to games: the skippable video ad. TrueView Instream skippable video ads drive a lot of advertiser demand on YouTube, the Ad Exchange, and AdSense for video. Following on Susan Wojcicki’s beta announcement earlier this year, we’re now making TrueView video ads available to all games publishers on AdX, AdSense for games, and select mobile publishers on AdMob. During the beta, we found that in general TrueView video ads contributed to lower abandonment rates and greater monetization compared to normal instream video ads.

The rise of gamer-friendly ad formats like TrueView can drive even better monetization for games - which is great news for game publishers, but perhaps not for the zombies.

Posted by Rebecca Illowsky and Allen Huang - Product Managers, Games Monetization @ Google Adsense Blog
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More control over advanced ad format features

We’re always looking for innovative ways to improve our ad formats, to help you earn more revenue from your content. We’ve been steadily rolling out new features to maximize the performance of your ad units, including a clickable arrow icon on our text ads, serving similar-sized display ads and most recently, the introduction of favicons to our text ads.

These enhancements are designed to improve the performance of your ads, but we know that sometimes you may prefer not to include them. Based on your requests for more control over the ways ads are served on your site, we’re happy to let you know that you can opt out of the following advanced ad format features:

• Similar-sized display ads: Showing smaller but higher performing display ads in larger ad units.
• Enhanced text ads: Displaying text ads with performance-enhancing features such as product images, favicons, or clickable arrow icons, etc. 
• Expandable ads: Displaying rich media ads that can expand beyond the original size of the ad unit, following a user-initiated action. 
• Enhanced display ads: Showing display ads with performance-enhancing features such as mouseover highlights, etc.
• Animated display ads: Showing non-static display (e.g., image) ads, such as ad creatives created using Adobe Flash or animated GIF formats.

Before opting out of any of these enhancements, remember that they have been created to improve the performance of your ad units and disabling them may have a negative impact on your revenue. It’s also important to note that all opt outs apply on an account level and not just on individual ad units.

You can opt out of any of these features in a few short steps. We hope that having more control over these features will be helpful when deciding on the look of your ads. Tell us what you think on our Google+ page.

Posted by Nick Radicevic - AdSense Product Manager @ Google Adsense Blog

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Stay on top of AdSense program policies with new notifications in your account

Our AdSense program policies are defined to ensure we all preserve a healthy ecosystem for users, advertisers and other publishers, and compliance with these policies is an absolute must for every publisher. We’ve heard your requests for more accessible information on policy issues and we’re happy to tell you that we are launching an additional policy notifications feature directly in your AdSense account. This will help you to quickly understand and address any potential policy issues.

Going forward, if our system detects a policy violation, you’ll receive both an email and an account notification with a link to view more details. Under the Policy violations section on the home tab, you can quickly access important information including details on each violation, the issue ID and an example of the violation on your site. The page will also include details on the action you need to take to resolve the violation.

We’ll be gradually rolling out this new feature over the coming weeks to all publisher accounts.  We hope that it helps you quickly identify and resolve any potential issues so you can focus on growing your business with AdSense. Please remember that as before, you'll need to ensure all of your sites comply with our policies. In addition to checking your account for any notifications, be sure to regularly review your sites for compliance with our policies.

Thanks for your continued feedback and suggestions on how we can continue improving AdSense for you. Please continue to share them on our AdSense +page and if you’d like more details on this new feature, visit our Help Center.

Posted by Matt Goodridge - AdSense Product Manager @ Google Adsense Blog

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The Mobile Buyer and Seller Relationship

The mobile advertising industry continues to evolve at a rapid pace - as new technologies have created new ways for publishers to grow and engage with their audience, new ways for advertisers to reach their customers have also emerged. With new opportunities aplenty for both buyers and sellers, how have they engaged with each other to shape the mobile ads ecosystem?

Based on aggregate data from across our network, we took a look at the economics behind the mobile ads ecosystem in a study: The Mobile Buyer & Seller Relationship. The study looks at mobile advertising from both a buyer and seller perspective, focusing on the types of content that are driving the most mobile web and app traffic, where advertisers are focusing their budgets, and the intersection of the two.

Here are a few highlights from the research:

• Mobile application inventory is highly concentrated: On mobile applications, ad impressions and spend are highly concentrated around games, which account for 46% of total ad spend.
• Advertisers are embracing mobile applications: We're seeing all types of advertisers embrace advertising on mobile applications, with Media & Entertainment and Technology advertisers leading the way. These types of advertisers account for nearly half of all impressions and spend on mobile applications.
• Advertiser spending on mobile web is closely tied to relevant content: Unlike mobile applications, on mobile web, advertisers are predominantly focusing their spend on ad inventory that closely relates to their products or services.
• Spending on mobile web is evenly distributed amongst advertisers: The top five spending advertiser categories on mobile web accounted for 12-16% of total web impressions each.

Check out all of the findings by downloading the full report here.

Posted by Stephen Kliff - Product Marketing Manager @ Google Adsense Blog

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The responsive web + AdSense

We know one of the biggest challenges publishers currently face is designing websites that adapt to different screen sizes, resolutions and user experiences. You’ve been asking for responsive ad units to help you deliver the best possible user experience on your pages, and we’ve listened to your feedback. Today, we’re happy to share that responsive ad units are now available as a beta feature alongside our recently released asynchronous tag.

The new responsive ad units allow you to support a wide range of devices by working with your responsive design web pages.  You can now dynamically specify the size of the ad that will be served, adapting it to fit the way your site renders a page on a particular device.

As this is still a beta feature, here are a few pointers to keep in mind:

• Be sure to specify fixed pixel values when setting the width and height of the ad to be served.
• Make sure that the specified width and height match one of our supported ad sizes. Please note that link unit sizes aren’t supported at the moment.
• The new ad code is responsive on initial page load only. Subsequent changes to the ad size, such as a screen orientation change, will not cause a new ad to be displayed. We know that this is an important feature for many of you and we’re currently working to address this. 
• Always set a default ad size in case some media queries aren’t supported.

Step 1 - create a responsive ad unit

 
Step 2 - modify the sample CSS media queries in the new ad code

More detailed examples and steps to get started can be found in our Help Center. If you’d like to know more about responsive design, have a look at our Google Developers resource.

Thanks for all of your feedback on responsive web design to date. Please do continue to share your suggestions so we can keep improving AdSense for you. Watch this space for more news and updates in the near future!

Posted by Nick Radicevic - AdSense Product Manager @ Google Adsense Blog

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Get the most up-to-date data on your account with local time zone reporting

We know that access to the most up-to-date data on your account is important in understanding how it’s performing on a daily basis. Up to now, we’ve reported your daily earnings based on Pacific Standard Time (PST). Over the next couple of weeks however, you’ll be able to view your daily earnings based on your local time zone, giving you the latest information.

You can set up your time zone reporting preferences from your account in a few quick steps. From the Account information section on your Account settings page, a field now exists for time zone information where you can select your preferred local time setting. When you update your time zone preferences, you can expect to see some anomalies in your local earnings data for that day. Depending on your local time zone, you’ll either see a reduction or a spike based on whether the change means you are gaining or losing hours - keep an eye out for a notification in your account on this. It’s important to note that this does not affect your payments data which will always remain in PST.

When you update your time zone preferences, your existing saved and scheduled reports will be migrated to your preferred time zone automatically while future reports will also be based on your indicated preference. Updating your time zone preference will only affect your earnings data going forward and does not apply retrospectively.

Learn more about time zone reporting in our Help Center and make sure you’re getting the most up-to-date earnings data on your account.

Posted by Matt Goodridge - AdSense Product Manager
@ Google Adsense Blog

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Introducing favicons to our text ads

We’re constantly thinking about how we can make our ad formats better for you, your users and the advertisers appearing on your pages. Today we’re happy to share the introduction of favicons to our text ads. A favicon is a small graphic that an advertiser can use to brand their website, such as their company logo.

We regularly experiment with small changes to the look of our text ads, measuring the potential impact on user experience and publisher earnings. Our experiments show that adding these favicons to the ads makes advertisers more recognizable to your users, which benefits both you and the advertisers whose ads appear on your sites.

We’d love to hear your thoughts -- feel free to share your feedback about this new look for text ads on our AdSense +page.

Posted by Mohamad Ayyash - AdSense Software Engineer @ Google Adsense Blog

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Faster, more robust web with AdSense

In a perfect world, putting ads on a web page wouldn’t slow that page down at all.  We’re striving to get to that point, constantly looking at ways to improve the latency of web pages containing ads, and today we’re happy to share a new beta version of our ad code. This new code (known as an asynchronous tag) enhances user experience on your sites by ensuring site content loads for your users, even if they’re having trouble loading the ad. This is particularly good news for mobile users.

Our new asynchronous ad code is still a beta feature, and so changing over to the new version is optional. In your account, you’ll notice that you’re now able to choose between the new and current versions of the code. To try the new ad code, follow the steps to create an ad unit, then, in the Ad code box, select 'Asynchronous (BETA)' from the Code type drop-down menu. As before, copy and paste the ad code into the HTML source code of your pages.

If you choose to switch to the new code, we recommend switching all of the ad units on your pages in order to give users the best experience. If you’d like to read more on the technical aspects of this tag, take a look at our post on the Google Developers Blog. Let us know if you’re planning to try it out and share your feedback on our AdSense +page.

Posted by Johan Land - AdSense Product Manager @ Google Adsense Blog

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Faster, more robust web with AdSense

In a perfect world, putting ads on a web page wouldn’t slow that page down at all.  We’re striving to get to that point, constantly looking at ways to improve the latency of web pages containing ads, and today we’re happy to share a new beta version of our ad code. This new code (known as an asynchronous tag) enhances user experience on your sites by ensuring site content loads for your users, even if they’re having trouble loading the ad. This is particularly good news for mobile users.

Our new asynchronous ad code is still a beta feature, and so changing over to the new version is optional. In your account, you’ll notice that you’re now able to choose between the new and current versions of the code. To try the new ad code, follow the steps to create an ad unit, then, in the Ad code box, select 'Asynchronous (BETA)' from the Code type drop-down menu. As before, copy and paste the ad code into the HTML source code of your pages.

If you choose to switch to the new code, we recommend switching all of the ad units on your pages in order to give users the best experience. If you’d like to read more on the technical aspects of this tag, take a look at our post on the Google Developers Blog. Let us know if you’re planning to try it out and share your feedback on our AdSense +page.

Posted by Johan Land - AdSense Product Manager @ Google Adsense blog

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Changes in rankings of smartphone results

As the number of smartphone users continues to surge globally, many of you are responding quickly with mobile-friendly sites. Regardless of the device a user views your site on, their experience should be rich and consistent. With this in mind, the Google Webmaster Team is making some changes to the way they rank search results on smartphones. In particular, these changes will address sites that are misconfigured for smartphone users. Read the original post and learn more about common configuration mistakes as well as recommendations from the Webmaster Team on building your mobile-optimized website.

Posted by Suzanne Headon - Inside AdSense team
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