Watch our latest Hangouts On Air to learn how to get started with DFP Small Business and Mobile

This past month we hosted two Hangouts on Air to help publishers get started with DFP Small Business and to create mobile websites using DudaMobile’s free mobile site builder. If you missed either Hangout, don’t worry -- we've included short recaps below, and you can watch the recordings at any time from our YouTube channel.

Getting started with DFP Small Business
If you’re thinking about using an ad server, just getting started using DFP or would like to learn some best practices you may have missed, then be sure to check out the video from our DFP Hangout.

In the video, DFP specialist Rishan first explains how an ad server works and the benefits it can provide to growing publishers. He then discusses orders, line items and your ad units, and the ideal way to set up each. Before closing, Rishan talks about the different ways to traffic direct ads versus other ad networks and enable dynamic allocation for non-guaranteed inventory.

Learning to build a mobile site
In our mobile Hangout, specialists from Google and our partner DudaMobile, work with Dan from ScienceDaily.com to build a mobile version of his website. You’ll learn about available resources and important questions to ask yourself when starting to ‘go mobile’ with your site and how to create mobile ads to monetize mobile traffic.

We hope you’ll join us for our future Hangouts -- be sure to stay connected with us by adding Google AdSense to your circles on Google+.

Posted by Jason Sanio - Inside AdSense Team

Meet Australian AdSense publishers Tim and Victoria van Brugge

Husband and wife team Tim and Victoria van Brugge run i-do.com.au, an Australian wedding directory. Their original business plan was to sell diamonds online, but in creating the wedding directory to build an audience of potential customers they discovered that media and advertising was an easier business model, and they've never looked back. Recently we sat down with Victoria and Tim to learn about how they use AdSense on their website. Watch this video to learn more.



Posted by Amelia Walkley, Strategic Partner Manager

Watch our video to learn how to integrate AdSense ads with your quality content

Placing additional ad units on your site can have a big impact on your earnings. However, sometimes publishers find it difficult to decide whether an additional ad unit makes sense for their site. We've created a short video below to help you make sure you're following best practices, as outlined on Google’s webmaster guidelines, when placing new ad units on your site.

Ultimately, great content is what will help your site stand out and engage your users. We recommend that you only place ad units on pages that are rich in original content and keep the user experience in mind as you think about where you place your ads.  Take a look at the video below for more information!



Posted by Caroline Halpin, AdSense Optimization Team
 

Understanding eCPM and RPM

Recently, we’ve heard some questions about the difference between eCPM (effective cost per thousand impressions) and RPM (revenue per thousand impressions), as the older AdSense interface references eCPM and the newer version shows RPM. We’d like to clarify and let you know that the terms are referring to the same thing: both eCPM and RPM represent your estimated earnings for every 1000 impressions. To calculate this figure, divide your estimated earnings by the number of page views, impressions or queries that you received, then multiply by 1000. For example, if you earned an estimated $0.20 from 50 page views, then your page eCPM or RPM would equal ($0.20 / 50) * 1000 or $4.00.

Formula:
eCPM or RPM = (Estimated earnings / Number of page views) * 1000

To avoid confusion in the future, we’ll work to use only one term (RPM). RPM is a commonly used metric in advertising programs, and you may find it helpful for comparing revenue across different channels. You can learn a lot more about using RPM in our two part blog series (part 1 and part 2).

Posted by Jamie Firkus - Inside AdSense Team

Bringing the benefits of TrueView to our video publishers

It’s no secret that I watch a lot of video ads. It’s one of the perks (or pains!) of working in the video advertising business. And yet, I was surprised to see that my younger cousins were gathered around a laptop showing each other their favorite ads over the weekend. Maybe it runs in the family. More likely, people just love watching great content and engaging ads. Every statistic we’ve seen shows that sharing and watching online videos has become a part of everyday life, and that the gap between video ad spend and audience attention is slowly narrowing. At Google, we’re always trying to improve the experience of watching video ads. With that in mind, we’re rolling out a new ad format called TrueView to our network of video publishers.

TrueView ads, pioneered on YouTube, differ from traditional video ads in two main ways. First, they give viewers choice - for example, the ad may be skippable or present a choice of ads to watch. Second, TrueView ads are sold through a Cost Per View (CPV) basis. You may be familiar with Cost Per Click (CPC) where the advertiser pays when someone clicks on their ad; similarly with CPV ads, advertisers are charged when a viewer chooses to watch the ad.

For example, say you're about to watch an interview with the makers of a new movie on The Hollywood Reporter. A TrueView in-stream video ad will start to play and a counter will appear giving you the option, after five seconds, to skip the ad and continue watching the video.

We believe TrueView is a win for users, publishers and advertisers. Users have more control over the ads they see. Advertisers get to combine the engagement of video with the precision of online advertising. And publishers see higher returns, since advertisers value a truly engaged audience.

A small group of our AdSense for video publishers are already using TrueView ads on a portion of their video inventory, and have seen RPMs equal or better than standard pre-roll ads, while dramatically improving the user experience. TrueView video ads also help to decrease audience drop-off rates by 40% on YouTube Partner sites when compared to regular in-stream ads, which means more viewers are continuing to watch videos.

One of our partners The Hollywood Reporter has been experimenting with TrueView ads and has already seen a significant increase in viewer retention. Product Manager Reed Halstrom tells us, “We’ve seen video views increase by 21% and viewed minutes increase by 17% since we started using TrueView ads.”

If you have existing video content on your site and are interested in gaining access to TrueView video ads through AdSense for video, please leave your details by completing our online form. We’re committed to improving the overall online video viewing experience and will continue to work with our publishers and advertisers to make that happen - which should come as no surprise.

Posted by Payam Shodjai, Lead Product Manager, Video Monetization

Got 2 minutes? Learn how to allow and block ads

Last week, we walked you through the Performance reports tab of the new AdSense interface. In the final two videos of this series, we wanted to highlight the key controls available in your account so that you’re empowered to make smart decisions about the ads that appear on your site. Take a look at the videos below to learn more about the ad review center and the additional features that enable you to allow and block ads:

We hope you’ve enjoyed our six videos walking you through key activities in your account, and that it has enabled you to be more comfortable with the new AdSense interface. If you haven’t started using the new interface yet, we hope you'll check out these demo videos and give it a try today!

Posted by Katrina Kurnit - Inside AdSense Team

Got 2 minutes? Watch our Performance reports videos

We know the Performance reports tab of the new AdSense interface can seem a little overwhelming. With all that data at your fingertips, it’s hard to know where to start! To help you learn more about the reports you can run and how to customize the graphs, we’ve created two new videos that walk you through navigating our reporting features:

Check out some of our previous posts on the new AdSense interface to learn more about the different reports you can run to gain even more insight into your performance. If you missed last week’s videos on creating an ad unit and custom channels, be sure to check them out. We’ll see you next week for our last two videos on the Allow & block ads tab!

Posted by Katrina Kurnit - Inside AdSense team

Got 2 minutes? Watch our new AdSense demo videos

Change is good, but change can also be hard. This is true for everything from getting used to a new job or apartment to starting with the new AdSense interface. If you’ve been following our New Interface Wednesdays blog series, you know that there are a lot of new features and benefits to making the switch. To help ease the transition, we want to make sure that you not only know about all of these great benefits, but that you’re also able to navigate through the new tabs and are comfortable with the standard tools you’ve been using in the old interface.

To help you become more familiar with the new interface (and start using it if you haven’t already!) we’ve created a series of six videos -- each under two minutes -- to quickly demonstrate how to complete some basic actions in your account.

Today, we’re excited to present the first two videos in this series: one walking you through how to create an ad unit, and the other on setting up custom channels.

We hope these help you get comfortable with the new AdSense interface! Stay tuned for the next set of videos, which will walk you through the Performance reports tab.

Posted by Katrina Kurnit - Inside AdSense team

Earn additional revenue from AdSense for search

Online readers have a very short attention span. You might be able to get users to your content, but what if they can’t quickly find what they’re looking for? That’s why it’s important to make sure that the users who come to your site actually stay there.

The solution is AdSense for search. This free, easy to implement product lets you place a Google search box on your website. It provides an additional layer of interactivity for your users, while helping you generate additional earnings from ads on the customizable search results page.

Here are some of our favorite AdSense for search features:

Site search: Allow users to search directly within your site to find the information they’re looking for without leaving your site.

Vertical search: Allow your users to search across multiple sites you select, including related sites you think users might find relevant or a network of sites that you own.

Keywords: You can use keywords to make search results more relevant to your audience and your site content. For instance, if you own a website about Pilates, you can enter keywords such as “exercise,” “fitness,” “meditation,” and “pilates.” As a result, when a user searches for “equipment,” the ads that appear will be specifically related to Pilates, rather than to any other types of equipment.

Ad location: You can optimize the location of your ads on search result pages. We recommend placing ads at the top and along the right-hand side, as we’ve found that this layout increases visibility and revenue.

Are you ready to give AdSense for search a try? You can find all the information you’ll need to set up AdSense for search here, or watch the video below to learn more!

Posted by Miguel Romar - AdSense Optimization Specialist

Understanding your eCPM (effective cost per thousand impressions): Part 2 of 2

Two weeks ago, we shared a brief introduction to the basics of eCPM (aka, RPM), including how it’s calculated and what factors impact it. In the Part 1 video, AdSense optimization specialist Matthew Carpenter-Arevalo discusses key variables you can use to better understand eCPM performance, including CTR (clickthrough rate) and CPC (cost per click).

Today, we’ll go a couple steps further and discuss how user behavior impacts eCPM and show you tools that can help you better understand your users’ traffic patterns.

User behavior refers to how users interact with your site. Generally, there are two types of users:

• Return users who continually come back to your site and spend more time engaging with your content
• Unique users who are arriving at your site for the first time in search of specific information that your site may or may not have

It’s important to understand the make-up of your audience, because different types of users will interact in different ways with your website.

To track and analyze user behavior to help you make informed decisions about your site, we recommend integrating Google Analytics with your AdSense account, so you can see data at more specific levels and by regions. We also suggest setting up channels to understand how the ads across specific pages on your site are performing.

In Part 2 of this video series, Matthew explains how user behavior affects eCPM and provides helpful tools to further analyze your site’s traffic patterns. Take a look at the video below to learn more:

Thanks for following our two-part 'Understanding your eCPM' series. We hope you found the content useful, and that you now have a better understanding of the factors that influence your eCPM.

Posted by Meredith Blackwell - Inside AdSense team

Understanding your eCPM (effective cost per thousand impressions): Part 1 of 2

“What is eCPM? What affects my eCPM? What can I do to earn a higher eCPM?”

Effective cost per thousand impressions (eCPM) is the amount of revenue you can expect to earn from AdSense for every 1000 impressions shown on your site. Since eCPM helps you measure how well your ads are performing, we often hear questions from publishers about the factors that impact this metric and how it relates to their earnings. If you're using the new interface, you'll see that your reports show RPM (revenue per thousand impressions); RPM is just another term for eCPM, and it's calculated the same way, so we use these two terms interchangeably.

To help provide some clarity, we’re kicking off a two-part video series with more insights into how eCPM is calculated in order to help you maximize earnings. With the help of AdSense optimization specialist, Matthew Carpenter Arevalo, we’ll show you the factors that affect eCPM, how to track user behavior and traffic patterns, and what you can do to improve your website performance.

In the video below, Matthew will introduce you to the basics of how eCPM is calculated and explain how to analyze the causes behind any changes in your eCPM.

If you’d like to learn more about eCPMs visit our Help Center.

Stay tuned for Part 2 to learn what you can do to better understand and optimize your website’s eCPM.

Posted by Meredith Blackwell - Inside AdSense team

The new AdSense interface: Greater efficiency

We’ve given you a tour and covered the greater insight and control that you get with the new AdSense interface, but we couldn’t end the series without a video about the improvements in account management. The new interface lets you find features and make changes to your account more efficiently than ever. You can also get help when and where you need it with relevant help links customized to the content of each page of the interface.

We hope you learned something with our video series and are continuing to enjoy the new AdSense interface!

Posted by Katrina Kurnit - Inside AdSense

‘Tis the season for placement targeting: Don’t forget to optimize

We’d like to share a final holiday reminder about our placement targeting series and summarize the tips we’ve shared over the past few weeks.

1. Make sections of your site available to be targeted directly by AdWords advertisers with ad placements. These easy-to-implement changes will make your website and channels more marketable to advertisers, which in turn will increase your overall earning potential.

2. Market your website with DoubleClick Ad Planner so advertisers can easily locate sites like yours that match their target audiences.

3. Optimize your ad units by enabling both text and image ads, using top-performing ad unit sizes, and placing ads ‘above the fold’ so that they’re immediately visible to your users.

We hope you enjoyed our placement targeting series. Check out the Help Center or watch the video below to learn more.

Happy Holidays!

Posted by Charise Wong - Inside AdSense team

Meet the international AdSense team

AdSense is an international product. We’re available in more than 200 countries and more than 36 different languages. Working with publishers and Googlers from around the globe is one or our favorite things about being on the AdSense team, and we’re proud to welcome readers from all over the world.

After we posted the Behind the Scenes videos in the U.S., many of our international publishers wrote to us saying they would also like to meet their local AdSense teams. So, after countless hours in the production studio, here they are!

Meet the people who help publishers earn more revenue in Australia, Poland, Netherlands, Brazil, Germany, Japan, China, France, South Africa, and the Spanish-speaking world here, or watch the videos below.

If you’re a publisher from any of these markets, feel free to comment and say hi. Your local AdSense team will be excited to hear from you!

Posted by Gus Smidt - Inside AdSense team

The new AdSense interface: More controls

Based on your feedback, we’ve worked hard to give you more control over the ads on your site by improving the ad blocking options and making them easier to use. You can now block ads by advertiser URL, block categories of ads from showing on your site, and search and review placement-targeted ads by ad type, keyword, URL, or ad network to easily find, approve, or block ads in the ad review center. The video below provides an overview of these features:



We’ll see you next week for our last video in this series on the new AdSense interface. Don’t forget the popcorn!

Posted by Katrina Kurnit - Inside AdSense team

The new AdSense interface: More insights

Now that you’ve had some time to dive deeper into the new AdSense interface, we want to be sure that you’re taking advantage of the additional insights at your disposal to help you make smart business decisions. You can now customize graphs and run detailed performance reports to analyze the amount you've made from various ad formats, ad sizes, bid types, and more. Watch this video for additional information:



Stay tuned next week for another video!

Posted by Katrina Kurnit - Inside AdSense team

The new AdSense interface: Take the tour

To help you learn more about the new AdSense interface, we’ve created a series of videos that focus on different features and benefits now available to you. Over the next few weeks, we’ll post new videos to the blog to ensure you learn all about the greater insights, control, and efficiency now at your fingertips. Today, we invite you to take a tour of the new AdSense interface. Check out an overview of the improvements we've made and the new features we've added:

If you’d like to start watching the rest of the videos, visit our new AdSense interface YouTube playlist or the video series tab of google.com/ads/newadsense.

Posted by Katrina Kurnit - Inside AdSense team

Insight into your earnings (Part II): How smart pricing fits in

Last week, in the first half of our series designed to help you better understand your earnings, we introduced you to the ad auction for AdSense for content. To recap, eligible ads compete to appear on your pages; our ad auction determines which ads show, and how much you can potentially earn from them.

Now, let’s talk about smart pricing, a tool designed to help advertisers bid efficiently and effectively on many publishers’ ad auctions at once. Our Chief Economist, Hal Varian, explains the purpose of smart pricing, how it plays a role in the ad auction, and how it benefits the entire advertising ecosystem of publishers, advertisers, and users.

Although we aren’t able to provide detailed explanations of our algorithms, we’d like to address a common misconception and show that smart pricing isn’t intended to be a ‘punishment’ for publishers. It’s designed to increase advertiser confidence in AdSense sites by helping them set more accurate bids that reflect the business results they’re looking for. This then allows advertisers to increase their maximum bids, which ultimately helps publishers earn more in the long run.

We’ll let Hal explain the concept of smart pricing in more detail:




Finally, we’d like to take a moment to address some of the questions we’ve received about the relationship between smart pricing and the AdSense for content revenue share. Smart pricing can impact which ad wins an auction for a particular content page. However, since the revenue share is fixed for all publishers, smart pricing doesn’t impact the percentage you actually earn for a valid click. Any changes to advertiser bids as a result of smart pricing will proportionately affect the amount both Google and the publisher earn.

Thanks for following our two-part earnings series. We hope you found the content useful, and that you now have a better understanding of the factors that influence your earnings.

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

Learn AdSense optimization techniques with our new video series

Did you know that a simple change like enabling both text and image ads can boost your eCPM and revenue? Or that a 300x250 medium rectangle typically performs much better in terms of revenue than a 250x250 square? Or that widening an AdSense search box can double the number of queries performed on your site, leading to higher earnings? If you didn’t, don’t sweat it -- the AdSense team and I have come up with a list of six top optimization tips and best practices that can help you earn more quickly.

Many of our publishers’ sites and accounts aren’t fully optimized for AdSense, which means that they’re not earning as much as they potentially could. In these AdSense optimization videos, we walk you through some of the top optimization techniques and explain why they’re helpful in boosting your eCPM and revenue. Incorporating these techniques into your website and AdSense ad layout can help you monetize your traffic like never before!

In the six-part video series, we talk about how to:

1. Upgrade to high-performing units
2. Monetize more content
3. Optimize search box placement
4. Opt-in to text and image ads
5. Use link units
6. Opt-in to placement targeting

Even if you consider yourself an AdSense expert, you’ll probably learn a few new and exciting tips from this series. Take a look at the 'Upgrade to high-performing units' video below, check out all six videos on the official AdSense YouTube channel, and visit our optimization essentials center for more information.



Posted by Andrew Boni - AdSense Optimization team

Insight into your earnings Part I: Explaining the ad auction

"Why do I earn more money from some ads and less from others? Why do my AdSense for content earnings vary from day to day, or week to week?"

If you’ve asked yourself questions like these before, you’re not alone -- we often hear from publishers that they’re unsure of how earnings are calculated and why their earnings fluctuate. As part of our efforts to be more transparent with publishers, we’re kicking off a two-part series to help explain these topics. With the help of Hal Varian, the Chief Economist here at Google, we’ll show you how ads are targeted to your pages, priced by the ad auction, and translated into the earnings you receive.

Today, Hal will introduce you to the ad auction for AdSense for content ads, and explain both what it’s for and how it works. Like a traditional auction, advertisers bid in our ad auction to show ads on your pages. The number and price of ads in the auction changes from moment to moment, based on how much advertisers are willing to spend and how they've set up their ad campaigns -- this is why we call our auction ‘dynamic,’ as these factors can then affect how much you earn.

If you’re ready to learn more about the ad auction and how specific prices are calculated, watch the video below and visit our Help Center.




So what can you do as a publisher to ensure you’re maximizing your earnings? Here are some tried-and-true tips to increase the amount of competition among advertisers in the ad auction for your pages.

• Keep creating high-quality sites full of original content to attract more advertisers, and use Google Analytics to see which content is generating revenue.
• Try adding popular advertiser formats such as the 300x250 medium rectangle to your pages.
• Turn your channels into targetable ad placements to help advertisers identify and target premium locations on your pages.
• Experiment to find the optimal locations for your ads, while making sure that your layouts won't generate accidental clicks.
• Help advertisers find your sites by claiming them in Ad Planner. You can add descriptions and categories that describe your content, which will help increase the visibility of your ad units to interested advertisers.

To understand changes in your earnings, we also recommend reviewing our two-part blog series, 'Diagnosing Revenue Fluctuations.'

That’s it for today. In Part II of our series, we’ll discuss how smart pricing affects advertiser bids in the ad auction, and clear up some myths about how it works.

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team