Tag Archives: Produce update

Introducing “Ad balance” – focus on your best-performing ads

Over the last few weeks you may have noticed the Ad balance subtab under My ads. This new AdSense feature will give you more control to create a great ads experience for your users.

Ad balance lets you reduce the number of ads you show to your users. Finding the right balance between the number of ads you show and the user experience on your site can lead to better overall engagement with your content. With Ad balance, you’re able to see how changes in the volume of ads you show affect your earnings, and find the balance that makes the most sense for you and your users.

By only showing your best-performing ads, you may see a minimal drop in your earnings. However, these changes may result in an overall earnings increase, since an improvement of the user experience often leads to users staying longer on your site and engaging with more of your content*.

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Ad balance is the first example of a Lab that's being made available to all publishers. Those of you who had the Show fewer ads lab enabled have been automatically moved over to Ad balance**. Thank you for trying it out!

To learn more about this new feature, please visit the Help Center.

We’d love to hear what you think about Ad balance. Please leave your feedback within your AdSense account by clicking send feedback.

Posted by:
Dongcai Shen, Software Engineer
Rikard Lundmark, Software Engineer
Spandana Raj Babbula, Software Engineer

*We don’t guarantee any specific results. And, just as a reminder, you’re responsible for the content and layout of your site.
**Find out how you turn this feature on and off and make changes to your settings in the AdSense Help Center.

Source: Inside AdSense


Meet the new AdSense user interface

The new AdSense user interface (UI) is here. Over the last year, our product team has been hard at work bringing Material Design principles to AdSense. This new UI highlights the information that’s relevant to you on a personalized homepage and streamlines navigation.


Over the next few weeks we’ll be offering the new UI to AdSense publishers.  All you’ll need to do is opt in when you log in to AdSense: 
What’s new?
  • A fresh new look & feel. We're adopting Material Design principles with a completely redesigned homepage and menu. We’ll roll out further improvements throughout the product soon.
  • A great new homepage. All the information you need, right where you need it. We've organized your homepage into a stream of interactive cards. You can pin your favorites to the top of the stream, and arrange your homepage just the way you’d like.
  • A streamlined new menu. We’ve brought everything together in a new left hand menu.
We’ll continue to improve and refine AdSense over the coming months. While we’re making these improvements, you’ll still be able to find all the content and features that you’re used to–right where you expect them.


Opt in through the AdSense interface to try it for yourself, and let us know what you think in the feedback tool.


Posted by: Andrew Gildfind, Daniel White & Louis Collard
From the AdSense Product Team


Source: Inside AdSense


Content is king


Publishers are constantly faced with the question of how to balance content and ads to provide the best possible experience for your users. And as you might have found, there’s no easy one-size-fits-all approach. Every site and app is different, with different types of content, objectives, and users, which means that balancing content and ads will look different from publisher to publisher. When faced with this challenge, it’s important to ensure that you give your users what they're looking for in a format that’s easy to find and navigate, and this includes the ads on your page or app.

Here are a few tips to help you balance ads and content.

1. Content is king.
Your content is the reason users are visiting your site or app. If you think about it, your users are visiting your site for a reason, whether they are looking for a recipe, how to build a birdhouse, or trying to find out what’s happening in their town. By providing them with the information they're looking for, you satisfy their need in the moment that they need it the most. Check out this blog post to learn more about winning these micro-moments.

2. Design your site or app around the user journey.

By making your content the focal point on the page, and following standard web best practices, you can create a site that's visually appealing and easy for your users to use and navigate. Check out the AdSense Guide to Audience Engagement for best practices on designing user journeys, not just web pages.




3. Use ads to complement your site or app.
Ads should always supplement the content on your site, not the other way around. So when you’re placing ad units on your site, consider the user journey and how the ad format will complement your site and provide value for your users. If you want ads to look more natural, and match the feel of your content, consider using native ad units. For example, news and article publishers could consider using the native-style format called Matched content at the bottom of each article to direct readers to other relevant content on the same site. This strategy can help grow readership and your ad business. 






4. Test, test, test and test again.

At the end of the day, data will be your source of truth. If you’re considering implementing new ad units, run an AdSense experiment to see how they perform. Also, test the different formats to see what works best for your users and your page.




Remember, content is king and it’s the most important thing to users on your site. So you should always have more content than ads on each page. For more information and best practices, head over to the AdSense Help Center or join our next #AskAdSense office hours on Twitter and Google+.


Posted by: John Brown, Publisher Policy Communications Lead

Source: Inside AdSense


How to make the most of Matched content

Matched content is a recommendation tool that allows you to promote relevant content from your site and sponsored content to your visitors. Matched content can help capture visitor attention and loyalty by showing relevant content which could increase pageviews on your site. Here’s a few tips to help you get started with Matched content.

Strategically place your ads to improve viewability.

According to a Think With Google study, “56.1% of all impressions are not seen.” So when determining the placement of your Matched content units, think about which spot(s) would improve viewability and engagement. To increase these metrics we recommend placing this unit directly below your article and either above or below your ad unit. This way readers can easily click on the next piece of content that is interesting to them. Placing it directly below the article often drives higher click-through rates (CTR) than other placements.



Since Matched content units help your users learn more about similar content, you should think about placing it at points in your website where your user will engage more with the content.

Track performance.
To determine if your placement is effective for your site, be sure to track the performance of your Matched content units. Understanding performance is key to maximizing your ad revenue and satisfying your readers. On your Performance reports tab, you’ll see an updated way to view two metric families -- the Overview metric family and the Matched content metric family:
Overview metric family

Selecting this metric family will allow you to understand how much you’re earning from your Matched content units and how these units compare to other ad units on your site. You can also review metrics such as impressions, clicks, and estimated earnings.

Matched content metric family

To get a more detailed performance of your ads and recommendations, use this metric family to view metrics like total impressions, ad impressions, ad clicks, ad revenue per thousand impressions (RPM), and recommendation clicks. Since this metric family is more specific, you should be able to use this data to optimize the ad unit itself.

To see all metric offerings and how they work, take a look at the AdSense Help Center.

By optimizing your Matched content units, you will allow your readers to learn more about topics they are interested in and potentially increase your site’s engagement rate and revenue. If you do not currently have Matched content but are looking to add the feature, determine if you’re eligible by viewing our Help Center article.


Posted by Bserat Ghebremicael
From the AdSense team




Source: Inside AdSense


More personalized recommendations with automatic experiments

Today we’ve launched automatic experiments*, the latest addition to our suite of optimization tools.

Enabling this feature allows us to run automatic experiments on a small portion of your traffic and provide you with insightful data about which ads perform best on your site. This could help you optimize your ads and potentially increase your long-term revenue and user engagement on your site**.

To enable automatic experiments on your site, visit the "Experiments" page on your Optimization tab, and switch on "automatic experiments".


The opportunities generated from these experiments will appear in the “Opportunities” page on your Optimization tab. They'll be labelled "verified by experiment,” so you’ll know they’re backed by data and tailored to your site and users.

To learn more, visit the Help Center.

We'd love to hear your feedback in the comments below!


Posted by Chris Gamble, Software Engineer


*Automatic experiments will appear in your account if you have enough eligible traffic.
**These suggestions are designed to help you optimize your pages and are not meant to guarantee any specific results. And, just as a reminder, you are responsible for the content and layout of your site. 

Source: Inside AdSense


Block wisely with Impression charts in the Ad review center

Today we’ve launched impression charts in the Ad review center. Impression charts provide you with insights into the frequency at which individual ad creatives are shown on your site.



Based on feedback from our publishers, we’ve replaced the previous interface with an impression chart that shows the absolute number of impressions and its distribution over time. When you’re considering blocking an ad, the impression chart can help you make a more informed decision by highlighting the potential revenue impact it may have. 

To learn more, please visit our Help Center.

We'd love to hear your feedback in the comments section below and on G+ and Twitter.
 


Posted by Liyuan Lu
Software Engineer

Source: Inside AdSense


Matched content: designed to engage your users and increase visitor duration

Last year we launched Matched content to help publishers promote their own content to readers. Since then, we’ve run some experiments and found that when a publisher used Matched content, readers tended to consume more content and spend more time on sites, resulting in a corresponding revenue increase.

If that’s not enough to convince you, take a look at the results from our experiment:


  • Number of pages viewed increased by 9% on average
  • Time spent on site increased by 10% on average


Matched content is available for sites with multiple pages and high volumes of traffic. Have a look at the site management settings in your AdSense account to see if your site(s) is eligible to run Matched content.

Make the most out of your Matched content units with these best practices:
  • Let Google help you find the right size by using responsive Matched content units. 
  • Place your Matched content unit directly below the article and either above or below your ad unit
  • Consider using Matched content on long scrolling pages


We'd love to hear your thoughts about this new feature in the comments section below this post and be sure to follow us on G+ and Twitter. 


Posted by: Vasyl Pihur, AdSense Data Scientist

* These suggestions are designed to help you optimize your pages and are not meant to guarantee any specific results. And, just as a reminder, you are responsible for the content and layout of your site. 

Source: Inside AdSense


Meet AdSense’s next generation ads: Page-level ads

Today, we’re excited to introduce AdSense’s next generation ads. Page-level ads is a family of ad formats that offer a new and innovative way to help you earn money from your mobile content.

With Page-level ads, you place the same ad code once on each page that you want to show ads. They’re designed to show automatically at the right time and in the right format -  potentially increasing your earnings without interfering with your users’ mobile experience.

The benefits of Page-level ads include:


  • Optimized ads that show when they’re likely to perform well and provide a good user experience.

  • One-time set-up that only requires you to place the Page-level ad code once on each page you’d like the ads shown. 

  • Ability to adjust the settings in your account and to enable new ad formats without having to change the code on your site.

  • Additional ads on your site that don’t count towards your AdSense per page ad limit.


Watch the video below for a quick view of Page-level ads:


Currently, the Page-level ads family includes the anchor/overlay and vignette ad formats. More ad formats will be available soon.

Learn more about the Page-level ads in the AdSense Help Center. Get started with Page-level ads today and let us know what you think in the comments below.


Posted by Matthew Conroy, AdSense Product Manager

Source: Inside AdSense


Now you can also earn money with Matched content


Last year we launched Matched content to help increase user engagement on your site by promoting relevant content from your site to your visitors, which may help grow your ad business as well. Starting today, you can use Matched content units to directly generate revenue by allowing ads to appear alongside your recommended content.

Matched content with content recommendations and ads

With the new “Allow ads” feature, relevant ads will appear within your Matched content units, and will be styled to complement the look and feel of your content recommendations. We'll gradually roll this feature out to all Matched content eligible publishers across the globe over the coming weeks. To enable ads, visit your My ads tab and choose “Allow ads” for your Matched content units.


Matched content is available for sites with multiple pages with unique images and high volumes of traffic. Have a look at the site management settings in your account to see if your sites are eligible and to get started with Matched content. Matched content units don’t count towards your Google content ad limit per page - to get the most out of this new tool, check the best practices in the AdSense Help Center.

As always, we'd love to hear your thoughts about this new feature in the comments section below.



 Posted by Tobias Maurer, Product Manager

Source: Inside AdSense