With the peak holiday season just around the corner, let’s make sure your AdSense account and site are ready to make the most of every revenue opportunity.

Get started with our three-step checklist:

Step 1: Know your numbers.

Check your seasonality patterns and data from previous years so you can prepare properly for this year’s peak.

• Check your data using the Reports section of your AdSense account:
  • See which type of devices brought you the highest earnings. You can get this information by accessing the “Platforms” report in your account.
  • Note which ad formats performed well for you. You can get this information by accessing the “Ad formats” report.
• Know your audience behavior using Google Analytics and gain insights on your site’s traffic over the past holiday seasons:
  • Landing Pages: This Google Analytics report shows you which part of your site gets the most traffic and which users are most engaged for the longest time (Google Analytics path: Reports/Behavior/Site Content/Landing Pages).
  • Geo: This report highlights traffic from geographical areas in which users exhibit an interest in your site (Google Analytics path: Reports/Audience/Geo/Location).
  • Search Terms: This report shows you the actual queries that people have searched as well as number of unique searches per query.

Step 2: Prepare your inventory.

Maximize demand from advertisers by making sure you utilize all relevant ad formats and provide all viewable ad placements.

• Add more ad units. Make sure you’re adding more ads to let more advertisers compete for placements on your site during the holiday season. As always, make sure you stay inline with the AdSense policies.
• Try new formats with Auto ads. As seasonal demand peaks, make sure all your ad formats and placements are available. Enable all Auto ads formats, especially AdSense’s best-performing ad format, Vignette. Also, check you’ve turned on the “wide screen.” control in your Auto ads settings for both anchor and vignette ads. Here’s how to turn on Auto ads.
• Automate the optimization of your ad format settings. Let Google run optimization experiments for you with Auto optimize. This lets you test different ad settings combinations and automatically apply improvements aimed at increasing revenue. High holiday traffic levels also mean your experiments can run faster, and your revenue boost kicks in sooner.
• Experiment with Labs. AdSense Labs are experimental features that aren't yet ready to be rolled out to all publishers. Simply switch them on or off, whenever you like. Labs can be anything from brand-new formats to experimental features. We only show Labs if we determine that they're applicable to your site. If you're interested in trying out a Lab, we recommend you check your Labs page regularly.
• Got games on your site? Sign up for the new H5 Games Ads Beta solution. It’s a new AdSense product that lets you grow your earnings by showing ads in your HTML5 games. It allows you to integrate the Google Ad Placement API into your H5 Games and show ads at the best moments for your users. Sign up for the beta on our website.

Step 3: Enable the competition.

Make sure you allow more advertisers to compete for your ad units.

• Unblock all possible categories. Visit your Ad review center to review your ads and review your blocking controls.
• Enable all possible ad sizes. Try responsive ad units and let Google automatically optimize the size of your ad units on mobile with the Ad size optimization setting.

With the peak holiday season just around the corner, let’s make sure your AdSense account and site are ready to make the most of every revenue opportunity.

Get started with our three-step checklist:

Step 1: Know your numbers.

Check your seasonality patterns and data from previous years so you can prepare properly for this year’s peak.

• Check your data using the Reports section of your AdSense account:
  • See which type of devices brought you the highest earnings. You can get this information by accessing the “Platforms” report in your account.
  • Note which ad formats performed well for you. You can get this information by accessing the “Ad formats” report.
• Know your audience behavior using Google Analytics and gain insights on your site’s traffic over the past holiday seasons:
  • Landing Pages: This Google Analytics report shows you which part of your site gets the most traffic and which users are most engaged for the longest time (Google Analytics path: Reports/Behavior/Site Content/Landing Pages).
  • Geo: This report highlights traffic from geographical areas in which users exhibit an interest in your site (Google Analytics path: Reports/Audience/Geo/Location).
  • Search Terms: This report shows you the actual queries that people have searched as well as number of unique searches per query.

Step 2: Prepare your inventory.

Maximize demand from advertisers by making sure you utilize all relevant ad formats and provide all viewable ad placements.

• Add more ad units. Make sure you’re adding more ads to let more advertisers compete for placements on your site during the holiday season. As always, make sure you stay inline with the AdSense policies.
• Try new formats with Auto ads. As seasonal demand peaks, make sure all your ad formats and placements are available. Enable all Auto ads formats, especially AdSense’s best-performing ad format, Vignette. Also, check you’ve turned on the “wide screen.” control in your Auto ads settings for both anchor and vignette ads. Here’s how to turn on Auto ads.
• Automate the optimization of your ad format settings. Let Google run optimization experiments for you with Auto optimize. This lets you test different ad settings combinations and automatically apply improvements aimed at increasing revenue. High holiday traffic levels also mean your experiments can run faster, and your revenue boost kicks in sooner.
• Experiment with Labs. AdSense Labs are experimental features that aren't yet ready to be rolled out to all publishers. Simply switch them on or off, whenever you like. Labs can be anything from brand-new formats to experimental features. We only show Labs if we determine that they're applicable to your site. If you're interested in trying out a Lab, we recommend you check your Labs page regularly.
• Got games on your site? Sign up for the new H5 Games Ads Beta solution. It’s a new AdSense product that lets you grow your earnings by showing ads in your HTML5 games. It allows you to integrate the Google Ad Placement API into your H5 Games and show ads at the best moments for your users. Sign up for the beta on our website.

Step 3: Enable the competition.

Make sure you allow more advertisers to compete for your ad units.

• Unblock all possible categories. Visit your Ad review center to review your ads and review your blocking controls.
• Enable all possible ad sizes. Try responsive ad units and let Google automatically optimize the size of your ad units on mobile with the Ad size optimization setting.

Privacy regulations like the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) are an important part of privacy-first advertising. But navigating privacy regulations can be complex if you can’t dedicate resources to meet the varying regulatory requirements across the globe.  

The process of consent management often entails:

• Notifying site visitors on how their data is being used

• Enabling site visitors to provide consent or manage their data preferences

• Communicating those preferences to advertising partners, so that they’re respected

To help you gather and manage user consent for GDPR and opt-out requests for CCPA, we’ve launched new consent management features directly in AdSense Auto ads. These features offer an easy way for you to communicate with your site visitors, providing them an opportunity to manage their data and privacy preferences. This also gives you the ability to gather consent for advertising purposes, so you can continue to grow advertising revenue and fund your content. 

Gather and manage consent for GDPR

AdSense’s consent management solution is integrated with the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Europe’s Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF) v2.1, which standardizes the process and offers common language for gathering consent under the GDPR and ePrivacy Directive. When an EEA or U.K. user visits your site from those regions, your GDPR consent message will display to give them options to manage their data, and their choices will be automatically respected by AdSense and communicated to your advertising partners. 

Gather opt out requests for CCPA

AdSense also supports the IAB's CCPA Compliance Framework, which provides you with a standardized approach to manage opt-outs from users in this state. AdSense Auto ads detects when a user from California visits your site, shows them a CCPA opt out message, ensures their choice will be automatically respected by AdSense and makes the user’s choices available to other advertising partners you’ve integrated on the page. 

Grow revenue in a privacy-focused way

AdSense makes the process of gathering and managing consent easy. It allows you to communicate with your users and give them more transparency and control over how their data is being used. This makes it possible for you to continue to fund your content with advertising in a privacy-first way. 

The consent management solutions in AdSense are simple for publishers to use. As they’re already integrated into AdSense Auto ads, simply edit your site’s Auto ads settings, click “More features” and then turn on your consent messages. Of course, this feature is optional to use and you can work with any consent management platform of your choice. 

As new privacy regulations arise, we’ll continue to evolve our consent management solutions to help partners navigate user privacy decisions in a transparent way. We remain committed to helping site owners earn money through their content and grow their digital businesses for the future in a privacy-first ecosystem. Watch this space for further updates in the coming months.

Please visit the AdSense help center to learn more.

If you want to start monetizing your online content with Google AdSense but either got an initial rejection or you’re simply not sure where to start, this series will be a useful resource for you. Throughout the episodes you’ll build on your policy knowledge to get your content ready for approval with AdSense. 

Here’s what the series has in store:

• Episode 1: Overview: In this video, Aurora (yours truly) and Andy — a publisher in the making — welcome you to the series and take you through a high-level look of the AdSense Site Approvals process.

• Episode 2: Site Ownership and Basic Checks: Aurora and Andy go through the steps you’ll need to follow to confirm the ownership of the website you’re planning to monetize.

• Episode 3: Good and Bad Traffic: In this episode, Aurora and Andy define what good and bad traffic look like, to help publishers get their content approved for monetization on Google AdSense.

• Episode 4: Quality Content: Aurora and Andy help you better understand what good content looks like, how it qualifies you for Google AdSense approval and how we define bad content.

• Episode 5: Navigation: In this video, Aurora and Andy talk about Navigation — how easy or difficult is it for your users to get around your content — and how important this is when getting your site approved on Google AdSense.

• Episode 6: Rejections and Next Steps: In the season finale, Andy manages to get his site approved by Google AdSense and himself and Aurora are surprised by a new aspiring AdSense publisher. They provide an overview of what to do to get a site up to standards for monetization with Google AdSense.

Ensuring a healthy digital advertising ecosystem means that we are constantly balancing the needs of users, advertisers and publishers.

Because we’re aware that it’s difficult to run a business while keeping up with policies, restrictions and their updates, my team works very hard meeting content creators where they are. Some might be at the beginning of their journey with AdSense, while others are seasoned industry leads. Our transparency efforts are based on your feedback and requests for educational content; you are the reason why we participate in policy webinars, write blog posts, improve our Help Center articles, collaborate with online media and create video content.

Be sure to keep an eye out for more policy video guides on the Google AdSense YouTube channel. If you have any questions, feel free to visit our Help Center any time, or head over to the Google AdSense Help Community. 

We hope you enjoy the series!

The new series Sustainable Monetized Websites is now available on the Google AdSense YouTube channel. 

If you create, manage or monetize online content, you’ll find these videos a handy resource for latest policies and best practices in areas like navigation, user-generated content, unique and original content and more. 

Keep an eye out for more videos in the coming weeks, as my two alter-ego co hosts and I cover topics like Search Console — and even explain how to use the Publisher Policy center and Site Kit to improve your online presence. 

Although you might think that the organic and monetized worlds are very different, the truth is, no matter who you are, everything can be distilled into this mantra:  Focus on your users: create great content.

During a challenging year, we've been creative in sharing these best practices while staying safe. By turning our homes into film sets, we’ve been able to keep creating content to help you get the most out of the web. 

We're really looking forward to continuing to bring you information and best practices on policy topics this year, and hope you enjoy this series as much as we’ve enjoyed making it from my very own home studio.

AdSense program policies help ensure we preserve a healthy digital ecosystem for the benefit of all users, advertisers and publishers. Based on feedback from AdSense publishers, we know that there's more we could be doing to make our policies easier to understand. To demystify some common questions, we’re sharing a new infographic with important information on:

• Google’s digital ecosystem and the role of advertising policies
• Most frequently faced policy violations 
• Resolving policy issues and navigating through the AdSense policy center

Check it out below, and don't forget to download or bookmark the infographic with clickable links. 

Online content and media consumption behaviors are continuously evolving. If you'd like to optimize your online business and help improve your AdSense performance, it's important to follow and adapt to the trends. We'd like to provide some resources to help you successfully navigate in an ever-changing digital environment.

Adapt your content to changing trends

It’s important to understand what’s top of mind for the people you’re aiming to reach in order to make your content interesting and useful to wide audiences. Below are some tools you can use to optimize your content:

Use Google Trends to analyze the popularity of top search queries in Google Search across regions and languages. If you need help with understanding, using and visualizing the data better, you can get Google Trends lessons.  

Stay on top of market trends in a dynamic environment and reflect it on your content to keep it up to date. While doing so, please be mindful of our content policies.

Use Question Hub to create richer content by leveraging unanswered questions online. Review these questions to get inspired and create deeper, more comprehensive content.

Track how your content performs 

Get to know your audience and how they engage with your site through Google Analytics. The earlier you spot changes in your user behavior, the quicker you can address them. You can review the below reports to get the insights: 

• Realtime Content Insights to identify the most popular articles amongst your audience
• Behavior Reports to understand the overall page and content performance of your site
• Acquisition Reports to review the shift in your site traffic and traffic sources. If you see unusual spikes from certain sources, you might want to monitor them. 
• AdSense Overview to see your revenue information once you link your AdSense account to Analytics. 

As an addition to your current content strategy, experiment with different content formats such as video or infographics and track your user i. If you see improvement on user interest, you can double down on those content formats. Diversifying your content could help you expand your audience, and also improve the engagement of your current ones. 

Optimize your revenue stream

When your content is ready, appealing and easy to reach, you can optimize your AdSense account to maximize your revenue from the content you created. We know that creating content takes time, so we’d like to remind you of some solutions that you can use to get the most out of your content.

You may consider using Auto ads to help you increase your ads revenue. Auto ads are optimized to deliver better performing ads, so that you can spend more time creating the content your audience is searching for. As they work through any AdSense ad code, you can start using Auto ads byturning them on in your account. 

As time spent on mobile increases, it becomes even more important to have a mobile-friendly site with goodpage speed. This will help people to access your content without problems. Make sure your ad units are responsive in order to provide a positive ad experience regardless of which device people use to visit your site. 

Lastly, make sure that your site complies with the AdSense Program policies so that your business can grow sustainably. 

We’re here to support you through the AdSense forums, email and troubleshooters. Learn more about the support options available. 

Online content and media consumption behaviors are continuously evolving. If you'd like to optimize your online business and help improve your AdSense performance, it's important to follow and adapt to the trends. We'd like to provide some resources to help you successfully navigate in an ever-changing digital environment.

Adapt your content to changing trends

It’s important to understand what’s top of mind for the people you’re aiming to reach in order to make your content interesting and useful to wide audiences. Below are some tools you can use to optimize your content:

Use Google Trends to analyze the popularity of top search queries in Google Search across regions and languages. If you need help with understanding, using and visualizing the data better, you can get Google Trends lessons.  

Stay on top of market trends in a dynamic environment and reflect it on your content to keep it up to date. While doing so, please be mindful of our content policies.

Use Question Hub to create richer content by leveraging unanswered questions online. Review these questions to get inspired and create deeper, more comprehensive content.

Track how your content performs 

Get to know your audience and how they engage with your site through Google Analytics. The earlier you spot changes in your user behavior, the quicker you can address them. You can review the below reports to get the insights: 

• Realtime Content Insights to identify the most popular articles amongst your audience
• Behavior Reports to understand the overall page and content performance of your site
• Acquisition Reports to review the shift in your site traffic and traffic sources. If you see unusual spikes from certain sources, you might want to monitor them. 
• AdSense Overview to see your revenue information once you link your AdSense account to Analytics. 

As an addition to your current content strategy, experiment with different content formats such as video or infographics and track the engagement on your site. If you see an improvement, you can double down on those content formats. Diversifying your content could help you expand your audience, and also improve the engagement of your current ones. 

Optimize your revenue stream

When your content is ready, appealing and easy to reach, you can optimize your AdSense account to maximize your revenue from the content you created. We know that creating content takes time, so we’d like to remind you of some solutions that you can use to get the most out of your content.

You may consider using Auto ads to help you increase your ads revenue. Auto ads are optimized to deliver better performing ads, so that you can spend more time creating the content your audience is searching for. As they work through any AdSense ad code, you can start using Auto ads byturning them on in your account. 

As time spent on mobile increases, it becomes even more important to have a mobile-friendly site with goodpage speed. This will help people to access your content without problems. Make sure your ad units are responsive in order to provide a positive ad experience regardless of which device people use to visit your site. 

Lastly, make sure that your site complies with the AdSense Program policies so that your business can grow sustainably. 

We’re here to support you through the AdSense forums, email and troubleshooters. Learn more about the support options available.