More options for Google+ badges

(Originally posted on the Google+ Platform Blog, cross posted on the Webmaster Central Blog)

UPDATE (2/2/12): The new Google+ badge is now out of preview and available to all users on all sites.

When we launched Google+ pages in November, we also released Google+ badges to promote your Google+ presence right on your site. Starting today in developer preview (and soon available to all your users), we're adding more options for integrating the Google+ badge into your website. You can configure a badge with a width that fits your site design and choose a version that works better on darker sites. You'll also see that Google+ badges now include the unified +1 and circle count that we added to Pages last month.

If you’re still considering whether to add a Google+ badge on your website, consider this: We recently looked at top sites using the badge and found that, on average, the badge accounted for an additional 38% of Google+ followers. When you add the badge visitors to your website can discover your Google+ page and connect in a variety of ways: they can follow your Google+ page, +1 your site, share your site with their circles, see which of their friends have +1’d your site, and click through to visit your Google+ page. These activities can help you expand your audience by enabling your users to share and recommend your content.

The Google+ badge makes it easy for your fans to find and follow you on Google+. With these additional options, we hope it's even easier to create a badge that fits your website.

Follow the conversation on Google+.

Posted by Lucy Hadden, Software Engineer, Google+

2012: Our resolutions to improve AdSense for you

It's already a few weeks into the new year, but it's never too late to set resolutions. That’s why today we'd like to share the outcome of our bi-annual publisher satisfaction survey. If you’re opted in to receive occasional surveys from us, you may have seen or filled out this survey. Over 28,000 of you participated globally, and we received more than 33,000 comments on your favorite aspects about AdSense as well as changes you’d like to see.

The main areas of improvement that emerged from the survey are: AdSense Program Policies, AdSense Support, and Communication from AdSense. Your feedback is very important to us and we'd like to share some insights on what we've done in these areas so far and how we want to further improve them. We’re also working on improving in other important areas like payments and we'll continue to report back on those throughout the year.

AdSense Program Policies
Many of your comments in the survey showed that you’re interested in more transparency around our program policies and which ad implementations are allowed. We’ve started adding more resources like our regular blog posts about specifics of our program policies and we're also working on:

• Making the violation messaging clearer to ensure the actions you need to take are clearly highlighted.
• Providing you with more information on how to contact the AdSense policy team and where to find important resources.

AdSense Support
We know that it’s important for you to get quick answers to your questions, and that’s why we have a variety of support resources available. However, you’ve told us that you sometimes struggle to find the information you need, or would like to be able to address questions directly to our team. With this in mind, we’d like to address two main points:

• After a ground-up rebuild of our AdSense Help Center we’ll continue to focus on improving usability and content quality in 2012. We’ll also be testing more personalized support options and want to make the available levels of support clearer for you.
• In the coming months, we’re hosting events in various countries to give you the opportunity to meet the AdSense team in person, ask questions, and get optimization tips. We want to be more accessible for you, so opt in to our “Special Offers” emails in order to receive event invitations and watch out for more information on our Inside AdSense blog or the AdSense newsletter.

Communication from AdSense
As you might know, in addition to receiving messages in your AdSense account, you can subscribe to receive occasional emails from AdSense with performance suggestions, special offers, and newsletters. We asked for your thoughts on the emails we’ve been sending, and  based on your feedback, here’s where we’ll be focusing on making improvements:

• We’ll collect and share new case studies focusing especially on small to medium sized publishers, with examples from specific verticals or industries to make our optimization suggestions even more relevant for you and your website.
• Following your suggestion to feature more local updates, we’ll incorporate local content in our AdSense newsletter, whenever possible.

A big thank you to everyone who participated in this survey! If you’d like to participate and share your thoughts with us in upcoming surveys, make sure you update your email preferences to receive “occasional surveys to help us improve AdSense”.

Posted by Sophie Emmerich, on behalf of the AdSense Publisher Satisfaction Team

Account performance at a glance with the AdSense Publisher Toolbar

We’re always looking for new ways to make it easier for you to use our tools, help you save time, and better understand account performance. With this in mind, we’re happy to share with you a new Chrome extension called the AdSense Publisher Toolbar. When viewing your website, this feature will show you a snapshot of your AdSense account performance as a widget in the corner of your browser window. It also includes ad overlays that describe the recent performance of specific ad units, and gives you the option to access AdSense directly. At the moment this toolbar is only available in English, but we’re working to make it available in additional languages in the near future.

To start using this new toolbar, just follow these steps:

1. Visit the Chrome Web Store and download the AdSense Publisher Toolbar. This will add the toolbar icon to your browser.
2. You’ll then need to grant the toolbar access to your AdSense account. To do so, click the toolbar icon and then sign in to Google Accounts with your AdSense login and password.
3. Next, visit a website where you've implemented your ad code, and enable the toolbar by clicking on the toolbar icon again.

And that’s it! The AdSense account overview widget will appear and show you an earnings summary, broken down by recent and all time performance as well as your top channels.

You can also enable ad overlays directly on top of your ad units, which will tell you how a particular ad unit has performed today, yesterday and in the past seven days. Clicking on the ad overlay will bring you to the “My ads” tab in your account, where you can edit this ad unit. If you have ad units using the older version of the code, or ad units created on partner sites like Blogger, we’ll instead show information on the ad unit size or channel. Rest assured that clicking on the ad overlay generated by the toolbar won’t create invalid clicks.

For more detailed instructions on how to use this toolbar, visit our Help Center. We hope that this new feature provides a useful way to quickly check on your AdSense account performance while browsing the web. Stay tuned for updates as we work on adding new functionality to the toolbar.

Posted by Gregory Block -- AdSense Engineering

Understanding your reports on Google-certified ad networks

Since launching a new report to show you how much you’re earning from Google-certified third party ad networks, we’ve received questions from publishers around how to make sense of the numbers they’re seeing. Some have let us know that they’re now blocking lower-performing ad networks based on revenue per thousand impressions (RPMs), a practice which can actually have a negative impact on overall revenue. Today, we’d like to take a moment to address your questions and provide more guidance around understanding your reports and blocking specific ad networks.

Let’s first talk about analyzing RPM figures. If you’ve ever tested color combinations for your ad units using channels, you’re probably used to comparing the RPMs of each channel to determine which one is most effective. Then, once you find the most effective combination, you remove all the other options and only use the optimal one. This works for channels, but it’s important to keep in mind that with Google-certified ad networks, the same approach doesn’t apply.

It’s true that in both situations, RPM represents the estimated earnings you'd accrue for every thousand impressions you receive. However, when you test layout options with channels and remove the ones that don’t perform well, this action doesn’t directly impact the dynamics of the ad auction. Picking a blue background over green won’t automatically remove certain ads from being eligible to appear in that ad space -- it just helps certain ad spaces perform better. With Google-certified ad networks, RPMs are dependent on the available ad inventory. Blocking an ad network will remove eligible ads from the auction, and so we strongly recommend against blocking ad networks solely based on RPM. Let’s look at an example:

Ad networks	Impressions	RPM
Network A	10,000	$1
Network B	14	$3
Network C	1000	$0.50

Network B has the highest RPM and appears to be outperforming the other networks. It’s important to note though that this metric is based on only 14 impressions and might not reflect the same revenue for the next 1000 or 10,000 impressions. The value of impressions can vary widely, so the RPM for a small number of impressions can be misleading.

Network C has the lowest RPM. However, blocking Network C because of this might have a negative impact on revenue. This is because our system will always maximize the value of every impression in an auction -- if an ad from Network C appeared on your pages, it was because any other eligible ads that could have appeared would have generated less revenue for you. By Blocking Network C, another network with a lower-paying bid might win the ad auction instead.

In general, blocking reduces the number of ads participating in the ad auction, which can then have a negative impact on your potential revenue. Please keep in mind that blocking “low paying ads” is a myth, as any ad that appears on your page has won the auction for that space and will earn you the most possible.

At the same time, we also understand that you sometimes need to prevent ads from appearing due to the content of the ad or advertiser. You have several options in your account, which are suitable for different scenarios.

With your feedback in mind, we’re constantly working on offering you more control over the ads appearing on your sites, so watch this space for further announcements! However, don’t forget to carefully consider which ads you’re blocking to ensure that you reach your full revenue potential.

Posted by Arlene Lee -- Inside AdSense Team

Making ads smart -- Adapting ads to the device

As smartphones and tablets become more and more popular, your websites are being viewed on a wider variety of devices - with different screen sizes and features. We’ve recently discussed the importance of having mobile friendly sites and the best ways to monetize them, and also just released Custom Search Ads for Mobile to help you take advantage of this trend. As part of our focus on helping you monetize your content across all screen sizes, we’ll soon also be improving the way ads appear on different devices.

We’re making our text ads smarter and will soon display them differently so they perform optimally depending on where users are viewing them from: computers, tablets, or smartphones. The best part is that our ads do the right thing automatically - without any changes required to your web pages - by detecting what device your web page is being viewed from.

With this change, we’re taking advantage of the unique features of mobile devices to deliver more engaging, better-performing ads.  Since the screens are smaller, we’re reducing the number of ads per ad slot and increasing the size of the text to make them more legible and noticeable.

We’re also providing a big button on each ad to make it easy for users to select the ads using a touch screen. Here’s how the 728x90 leaderboard will appear differently on the different platforms.

Desktop

Tablet

Phone

We’re continuing to look for ways to improve ad performance for publishers, no matter what size screen your users are accessing your site from. Stay tuned to Inside AdSense for more updates.

Posted by Priya Gupta, Mobile Ads Engineering

The AdSense in Your City team is kicking off our 2012 US tour

The AdSense in Your City team is preparing for our first series of North America events in 2012. We’re excited to hit the road and meet with more publishers across the country. At the events, we’ll focus on how to maximize your AdSense revenue, introduce our free DoubleClick for Publishers Small Business product and offer suggestions for monetizing your mobile pages. We’ll also meet with each attendee to review your websites and offer customized AdSense solutions.

Many publishers have found the events to be great ways to meet and connect with other local publishers.

“I traveled hours to attend this event and found it well worth it. The presentation was great and the 1-on-1 session was invaluable. Also, networking with other content publishers at the event added even more value to the experience. A must attend for anyone looking to optimize their websites and increase AdSense revenue.”
    -Craig, AdSense in Your City attendee, California

Attendance is limited, so sign up quickly for one of the following events:

Portland, OR - Wednesday, January 18th
Victoria, BC - Thursday, January 19th
New Orleans, LA - Thursday, February 2nd
Albuquerque, NM - Tuesday, February 28th

Once you register, event details will be sent to you prior to the event. We look forward to meeting you soon!

Posted by Courtney Yamada, AdSense in Your City team

Personalized optimization tips explained

We’ve heard from many of you that the AdSense optimization tips we regularly discuss are helpful but you’re still not sure just how these tips apply to your sites. You understand that wide formats perform better, but which of your small formats should you swap out? And which format sizes should you replace them with? Over the last year, we’ve increased our efforts to bring publishers personalized optimization messages that address these kinds of questions with the goal to provide targeted, personalized and impactful tips to as many publishers as possible.

The criteria we review to determine eligibility for a tip varies depending on the opportunity but the same principle remains true for all of them: we will only contact you if we expect you’ll see a significant benefit from making the recommended changes. Several of the success stories shared on the AdSense blog are of publishers who implemented the specific suggestions we made for their websites. For instance, Surgery Squad, FunCheapSF, and CareerPlanner all saw AdSense revenue increases between 50-200% after making the changes recommended by a personalized optimization tip.

While we can’t guarantee the same results for all publishers, each tip is generated using rigorous analysis of our entire content network to identify opportunities for significant improvement in AdSense performance. We’re constantly analyzing the performance of different AdSense configurations across all site types, regions, and verticals to determine which tweaks and adjustments will work best for your site.

When we detect a specific improvement you could make to your AdSense implementation, you’ll receive a notification from us either in an email (to the address listed as your contact email and only if you’re opted in to Performance Suggestions) or directly to your AdSense account. These messages have been around for awhile but starting this month you’ll notice a new line indicating that the message contains a personalized optimization tip that’s unique to your website and ad layout. We're also continuously working on new signals and ways to get that information to you in your account.

Be sure to check your email and AdSense account for optimization tips. We want your site to succeed with AdSense and we hope these personalized tips will help you achieve higher levels of performance from our products. As with any of our optimization tips, we always encourage you to test to find the right implementation for your site and users!

Posted by Jane Brinkley-- AdSense Optimization Team

Western Union option expands to more countries in Southeast Asia

We understand that payment options are very important to you, so we continuously work to improve them. Today we’re happy to announce that we’ve expanded Western Union Quick Cash® as an AdSense payment method to three additional countries: Singapore, Cambodia and Laos.

For those of you who aren't familiar with this form of payment, Western Union Quick Cash payments are free and will reach you faster than checks. Payments follow our normal payment schedule and are available for pickup in your local currency at your local Western Union agent the day after they're issued.

It’s important to note that at this time we can only send Western Union payments to publishers that have an individual account. Also, the payee name on your account must exactly match the government-issued ID card that you'll use when picking up your payments. For more information on how to sign up for and pick up Western Union payments, please visit our Help Center.

For those of you who don’t yet have Western Union Quick Cash as a payment method in your country, we appreciate your patience as we work to make this available. Please continue reading our Inside AdSense blog to learn about future launches.

Posted by Julia Peppiatt - AdSense Payments team

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year from the AdSense team! We enjoyed celebrating the holiday and hope you did too.

Cheers to 2012!

Posted by Jamie Firkus - Inside AdSense Team