Tag Archives: AdSense

Celebrate publisher stories on our new website

Video shows a montage of publishers featured on the website discussing the businesses they have created and impact they have had.
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Publishers create the blogs, news, games, tools and videos we all enjoy. But we don’t always get to see the work that goes into building the content on the internet we know and love today. In 2021, the commercial internet helped generate 17 million jobs for Americans — and we’re celebrating just a few of those who were a part of that success.

After sitting down with these publishers, we’ve learned how they use digital ad revenue to grow their businesses, create free and accessible content, impact their communities and most of all, how their passion for their work fuels them to keep serving their audiences.

Check out their stories on Google for Publishers and hear from small and large publishers — in their own words.

Introducing Related search for content pages

We’re always looking for ways to help publishers make more money through high-quality ads. AdSense for search already plays an important role by allowing publishers to monetize search results on their own website or mobile app. And today, we’re introducing Related search for content in AdSense for search, a new feature for publishers to create even more useful search experiences on their sites.

Animation of mobile phone scrolling through the Related search experience, highlighting an example article about things to do in Barcelona.

Related search for content is a contextual navigation unit that shows users search terms related to the page they’re viewing on a publisher’s website. When they click a search term, they're taken to a search results page on the publisher’s site where they can explore other relevant topics, including search ads. As a result, Related search for content can help publishers increase site engagement — including site traffic, pageviews and ad impressions — and drive incremental revenue.

As a contextual unit, Related search for content is a privacy-preserving solution. It uses page content, instead of user data, to deliver relevant search terms. Meanwhile, ads on the search page target the search term the user clicked on, rather than actual user data.

If you’re interested in using Related search for content, please contact your account manager to activate AdSense for search for your AdSense account.

For more information and future updates, check out our help page.

7 takeaways from our Black and Latinx Publishers Summit

This month, Google virtually hosted more than 200 publishers at the 2021 Black and Latinx Publishers Summit to discuss how they can grow their businesses using digital advertising. The event featured talks with industry leaders like Local Media Association and CafeMedia on empowering diverse creators, innovating out of a crisis, using analytics to curate content and earning money from sites.

With ad spend predicted to keep rising in 2022, we’re sharing the top seven takeaways from the event to help publishers make the most of this growth.

  1. Increase your reach through collaborations
     Sonny Messiah Jiles and Larry Lee from Local Media Association's Word In Black, a newsroom collaboration of leading Black publishers in the U.S., shared what it means to be in the audience business — not the news business. Reflecting on the Black Lives Matter movement, Sonny and Larry noted that the Black press plays a critical role in elevating voices and servicing communities. Collaborations like Word In Black, among others, have proven valuable to publishers looking to grow and serve a niche audience.
  2. Think of your platform as a business
     Showing up and being authentic to yourself, and to your audience, is important. Tomi Akitunde, Vanessa Mota and Jenné Claiborne from CafeMedia’s Remarkable Voices — an eight-week training and mentorship program — spoke about the challenges of feeling confident enough to turn their hobbies into sustainable businesses. For these creators, keeping a list of wins and removing the “perfection” barrier helped keep them grounded and focused.
  3. Treat your website like your digital piece of real estate
     Grow with Google Digital Coach Sandra Garcia shared that, as a small publisher, you are in “the business of you.” She noted that small publishers and business owners can grow their careers by mastering their brands and online presence — including making sure your brand is consistent and up to date across any platforms you’re publishing content on.
  4. Take advantage of productivity tools
     According to The Tilt, content creators spend 30% of their time creating content weekly. The remainder is spent on managing their personal brand, building relationships, selling, marketing and emailing. Using productivity tools like Drive, Gmail and Google Meet to manage emails, calls and documents can help you spend more time on what really matters — creating content.
  5. Start measuring for better marketing
    Getting to know your audience is essential. Eden Hagos from BLACK FOODIE shared how she analyzes her content’s performance to understand what’s resonating with her audience, what channels are driving traffic and where she should invest more time. Tools like Google Analytics can give you insights about your audience and website to help you make strategic business decisions.
  6. Use emerging platforms to generate leads and test content
     Emerging technologies, formats and social networks are a great way to grow your audience and test out new features. Cedric J. Rogers from Culture Genesis shared how his team uses new platforms to grow readership for their main monetized platforms. Rene Alegria and the Mundo Hispanico team also recently tested moving to an infinite scroll on their homepage, which increased time spent on their site by 300%.
  7. Understand what metrics make up your revenue
    Your earnings are a product of your costs-per-click, clickthrough rate and pageviews. Google AdSense and Google Ad Manager have a variety of features — like Auto ads, Auto optimize and manual experiments — to help you learn how to maximize your metrics and increase your earning potential.

If you’d like to explore new platforms and start monetizing today, Google AdSense is a great place to start — it’s easy to use and automatically provides optimal ad formats and sizes for your site. For publishers looking to monetize cross platform or manage direct deals, try out Google Ad Manager.

A big thank you to all of our speakers for sharing their wisdom and expertise at this year’s Black and Latinx Publisher Summit. If you’re interested in hearing more, check out the event replay.

Your guide to user-generated content

User comments are a great way to drive discussion and engagement around articles. But if a publisher wants to run ads on pages where user comments appear, all of the content on those pages — including comments — must follow our Publisher Policies. Publishers are responsible for ensuring that comment sections, forums, social media postings or anything else that users generate on their site or app are compliant with our Program Policies. This content is also subject to our Publisher Restrictions.

To help publishers manage user-generated content (UGC), we’re sharing a new infographic and troubleshooter with important information, like what to consider before incorporating UGC and helpful management strategies.

Check out the infographic below, and download or bookmark it for easy reference.

This is an image of the first section of the infographic. There is a decision tree if there will be a user generated content or not. Exact same information that is in this image can be found via downloading the infographic.
second part of the infographic with 6 blue and white bullets explaining how a publisher can monitor the user generated content to stay policy compliant At the bottom there are 4 different resources given

PubCast Season 2: turning passions into profits

PubCast is a podcast featuring the stories of website creators and app developers who turned their passions into profit with help from Google. In our second season of the series, you’ll hear from small business founders across the globe sharing how they launched their digital businesses and navigated challenges like the pandemic. Using AdSense, Ad Manager and AdMob to earn ad revenue, these businesses create free content, tools and resources that contribute to a thriving, open internet.

You can listen to the miniseries on the Talks@Google podcast channel — just look for PubCast in the episode title — or anywhere you find podcasts.

Check out our Season 2 episodes:

  1. Jessica Rovello | Building your favorite games and a thriving digital business: Jessica Rovello is the CEO and Co-Founder of Arkadium, a game development company that has built hundreds of games enjoyed on over 800 million devices worldwide. Arkadium has been voted one of Inc. Magazine's best places to work and takes an employee-centric approach to growth.
  2. Dennis Littley | Helping the world create restaurant-quality food at home: Chef Dennis Littley got his start as a classically trained chef, and kindled his passion for teaching by creating a culinary program at the high school he worked at. Now, Chef Dennis works full time on his food and travel site, Ask Chef Dennis, helping people create restaurant-quality meals at home.
  3. Christeen Skinner | Bringing astrology online and building an audience from zero: Christeen Skinner is the Director of City Scopes, an astrology-focused company founded in 1998 in London. The company has grown to offer a variety of resources, like astrology sites, training courses, books and more. Christeen now focuses her time on expanding into other areas, such as using astrology to try to predict financial outcomes.
  4. Paul Husbands | Amplifying Caribbean artists on the world stage: Paul Husbands is the CEO and Founder of Selecta Charts, a first-of-its-kind music streaming platform for Caribbean artists. Since its launch, Selecta Charts has drawn thousands of listeners and propelled hundreds of artists to new heights.
  5. Horatiu Boeriu | From zero to millions: How BMW Blog drove to journalistic success: Horatiu Boeriu is the CEO and Founder of BMW Blog, a Chicago-based website dedicated to automotive journalism with a focus on the BMW brand. Horatiu transformed his website from a passion project into a respected media outlet in the car industry, and has grown his audience to several million car enthusiasts.

Are you a digital business owner who uses AdSense, AdMob or Ad Manager, and want to be featured on PubCast? Fill out our feedback form, including your contact information and a few sentences about your business.

And if you’re interested in learning how to earn money from your site or app, check out how Google AdSense, AdMob and Ad Manager can help.

Behind ads privacy: our latest Publisher Privacy Q&A

5 Minutes or Less | Publisher Privacy Q&A Episode 2
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Curious how the Privacy Sandbox will keep people’s data private?

In the second episode of our Publisher Privacy Q&A video series, we simplify how the technology behind the Privacy Sandbox works and how its solutions incorporate tested privacy practices into online advertising. We also explore how Chrome is designing new capabilities to help advertisers reach their audiences in more privacy-forward ways, and why we believe these solutions will last for the long term.

Questions covered in episode 2:

  1. How will the Privacy Sandbox solutions keep people’s data private?
  2. How will the Privacy Sandbox impact my advertisers?
  3. Will Privacy Sandbox solutions last?

Stay tuned for the third Publisher Privacy Q&A episode coming in January 2022. In the meantime, check out episode 1 of this series, and the Privacy Sandbox website for more information and the latest timeline on solution development, testing and releases.

Prioritize and fix issues in the new Policy center

A few years ago, we introduced the Policy center in Ad Manager, AdMob and AdSense to provide publishers with a single, centralized hub to review and monitor policy violations and appeals. This helps ensure they have the information they need to monetize their inventory and remain policy compliant.

Starting today, our Policy center has a brand new look. As part of this update, we’re introducing new features — like the ability to report the number of ad requests affected by policy issues, and advanced filters that are designed to help you better understand, prioritize and resolve issues.

What's changing?

Improved account health summary

The new and improved account health summary now provides a quick overview of the total number of sites and apps with issues, highlighting the number of issues that are a “Must fix.” This can help publishers better prioritize the issues that require their attention. The account health summary also shows the impact on ads serving for any given page where ads have been disabled or restricted.

A white chart with progress bars and section titles ‘Total items affected’, ‘Must fix items affected’ and the percentages of ‘Disabled ad serving’, ‘Restricted ad serving’ and ‘Ad serving at risk’ as well as ‘Regular ad serving’.

Robust filtering

We have added more robust filtering and search capabilities across the issue table, which lists current issues waiting to be resolved in the Policy Center. Publishers can now filter the tables using single or multiple columns, such as all issues reported on a given date that are a “Must fix.” A list of issues can also be downloaded as a CSV file for a filtered view.

A white filter bar showing the ‘Must fix’ and ‘Ad request’ filters, with an option to Download CSV in blue text.

Comprehensive issue table

Issues across sites and apps are now part of a single issue table, so Ad Manager publishers have a more comprehensive view of issues across their inventory. We have also introduced a new aggregate column — “Ad requests - last 7 days” — to help publishers understand the impact of each issue and prioritize them accordingly. The full table can now be sorted by column.

A white graph with columns for affected sites and apps, the issue location, status, issues, ad requests, date reported, and action. In the "Action" column, there is an option in each row to "Fix" in blue text.

What’s next?

We're bringing more changes to help you solve issues faster, including enabling screenshots of issues in the Policy center. This will help you pinpoint exactly where the issue is, and give you the context to fix it quickly.

To learn more about the Policy center, check out our Inside the Policy center video series.

Moving AdSense to a first-price auction

Creating great content takes time, but earning money from it shouldn’t. That’s why we built AdSense, to help you make money from your site with an easy-to-use advertising platform. AdSense simplifies advertising for you by automatically tailoring ads to your site’s layout, optimizing for mobile web and connecting you to millions of advertisers.

In our continued effort to simplify AdSense, we will be moving the AdSense (AdSense for Content, Video, and Games) auction from second-price to first-price in the coming months. This change will make it easier for buyers to purchase your ad space sold on AdSense. There is no action for you and you will likely not see a change in your earnings. We’re making this announcement now to help our advertiser partners prepare before we change how the AdSense auction works. View our FAQ page for full details across the AdSense product range.

What’s happening:

In the early days of online display advertising, ad space was sold to advertisers in a second-price auction, where the final price paid by the winner was determined by the amount of the second-highest bid. Over time, many ad selling platforms in the display advertising ecosystem, including Google Ad Manager and Google AdMob, switched their auction to first-price. In a first-price auction, the final price reflects the winning bid. In the coming months, AdSense will move to a first-price auction. This will help advertisers by simplifying how they buy online ads and make it easier for them to buy your ad space sold on AdSense.

Benefits to publishers and advertisers:

By streamlining the auction model across AdSense, Ad Manager, and AdMob, we are aligning our process with other ad selling platforms in the display advertising ecosystem. We believe this will help grow advertiser spending confidence in digital advertising and an increase in spending confidence over time will benefit publishers (that's you).

Preparing for the change

We expect the transition to a first-price auction to be completed later this year. As we said above, you do not need to do anything, because these changes will update automatically.

For more information and future updates, please check out our AdSense first-price auction help page.


Final reminder to migrate to the AdMob API

On October 12, 2021, you will no longer be able to retrieve AdMob data from the AdSense Management API v1.4. To retrieve AdMob data programmatically, migrate to the AdMob API.

What do I need to do?

Follow the instructions in the migration guide to migrate your API workflow. Review these additional resources to support your migration:


Start migrating from the AdSense API to the AdMob API as soon as possible. If you don’t complete the migration by October 12th, 2021, you will lose access to AdMob data through the AdSense API, which may impact your ability to make data-driven business decisions.

Feel free to reach out to us via the AdMob API Developer forum if you have questions or feedback regarding the AdMob API.


 - Amira Badreldin, AdMob API team

Watch our new privacy video series for publishers

Every day, our global teams field questions from publishers seeking to learn more about privacy topics like the end of support for third-party cookies and the Privacy Sandbox.


To help partners stay current on these topics and more, we’ve created a new publisher privacy video series that addresses questions we hear most often. Each episode will be brief – five minutes or less – and will be released every few months to keep partners informed about new developments. 


The first episode of the series is designed to provide a base level of understanding around ads privacy before we dive into deeper or more timely topics.


Questions answered in episode 1:

  1. Why is privacy such a major focus right now?

  2. What is the Privacy Sandbox and how does it work? 

  3. When will third-party cookies go away?

  4. What does all of this mean for publisher revenue?

  5. What will I need to do to use the Privacy Sandbox?

Stay tuned for the second Publisher Privacy Q&A episode coming in October. In episode 2 we’ll take a much closer look at how the Privacy Sandbox protects user privacy and what publishers and advertisers will be able to do with it.