Monday, January 16, 2017

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 EngineerRikard Lundmark, Software EngineerSpandana 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.
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Editor's Note: This post was originally published in October 2016 and has been updated with the most recent product announcement.  Over the coming weeks, when you log in to your AdSense account, you'll be automatically taken to the new User Interface (UI). You will no longer be able to opt-out of the new UI. Thank you to the more than 500,000 publishers who switched to the new UI over the last few months. Your feedback has been invaluable in launching the new UI to all of our users. ---- Posted October 13, 2016 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
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Hello AdSense Publishers, if you are seeing sites on your performance reports or under your sites list that don’t belong to you, this post is for you! First off, you are not under attack. Although you may feel some alarm seeing another site show up in your account, there's nothing to worry about. The most common scenario is another site has copied your site code and pasted it onto their site, also copying the ad code in the process. Since your publisher id is still in the ad code, the new site will now appear in your account. To address this you’ll want to make two quick changes to your account.
  1. Verify which sites in your account are yours.
    • Sign in to your AdSense account.
    • Click Settings in the sidebar. 
    • In the dropdown, select My sites.
    • In your site list, locate the site you want to verify and click the Down arrow
Down Arrow
    • Next to "Verified site", turn the switch on
 
2. Once verified, enable site authorization. Site authorization is an optional feature that lets you identify your verified sites as the only sites that are permitted to use your Google ad code. 
    • Click Settings in the sidebar.
    • In the dropdown, select My sites.
    • On the "Manage sites" page, click More 
More
    • Click Site authorization.
    • Next to "Only authorize my verified sites to use my ad code", turn the switch on 
On
    • Click Save. Your changes should take effect within 48 hours.
Once your sites are verified and site authorization is turned on, ads will still show on the unverified site(s), and impressions and clicks will be recorded. However, advertisers will not be charged, and you won't receive any earnings for that site. Any policy violations that occur on these sites also won’t count against you. 
The URLs will still show up in your list of sites so you are aware of who else is using your ad code. The sites may also still show in your performance report in order to keep a definitive record of activity. If you are seeing the sites in your reports but don’t want to, consider setting your report type to “Verified Sites” to ensure you are only seeing data related to your verified sites. More on managing your sites here.
Post by Brandon Canniff, AdSense Support Specialist
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This is the final guest post from AdSense publisher Brandon Gaille. Brandon has built his small business marketing blog, BrandonGaille.com, to over 2 million monthly visitors in less than three years. He’s featured as our guest blogger to share insights and tips from his personal blogging experience to help AdSense publishers grow earnings. If you’re new to AdSense, be sure to sign up for AdSense and start turning your #PassionIntoProfit.  Every year more people are using their phones and devices to browse web pages. In 2013, mobile made up only 17% of web traffic. In 2016, this number has risen to over 38%. Within the next couple of years, mobile traffic will easily surpass 50%.
Mobile's Share of Global Web Traffic
This is why you need to take time to optimize your AdSense ads for mobile traffic. Although you can easily grab a responsive AdSense ad unit, there are more ways to optimize your ad units for mobile. It may be the easiest way, but I’ve found that the easy way usually does not always produce the best results. I’ve tested the responsive ad units on my blogs against manual optimization, and the results were staggering. The manual optimization of my ads produced a 54% increase in my AdSense revenue. Here’s what I learned from the tests I ran: #1 A large mobile banner at the top of the page earned the most money on my site The highest producing location was below the title of a post and above the first paragraph. It’s important to know that  AdSense amended their policy on ads above the fold on mobile devices, and you can no longer use the 300x250 ad above the fold on mobile. #2 Hide the sidebar ads in tablets and mobile The sidebar is going to be pushed down to the bottom of the post when it is viewed in mobile. This is essentially banishing any ads in the sidebar to no man’s land. Most premium WordPress themes will allow you to turn off ad spots in the sidebar. This will allow you to drop in an additional AdSense ad into the post to get maximum monetization from mobile. #3 The best ad grouping was top, middle, and bottom Out of all the mobile ad groupings, this one easily produced the most revenue for me. The grouping was made up of one 320x100 ad and two 250x250 ads. The first ad was below the title and above the first paragraph. The second ad was placed after the 6th paragraph of the post. The final ad was placed at the end of the post. In addition to mobile optimization, I applied four AdSense optimization strategies, which resulted in an overall revenue increase of close to 300%.  Whether you are making $500/month or $5000/month, a 300% increase can make a huge impact on your yearly earnings. Go here to read all of my “5 AdSense Optimization Strategies that Will Increase Your Earnings.” Posted By Brandon Gaille Brandon Gaille Brandon Gaille is an AdSense publisher. You can learn more about Brandon at BrandonGaille.com and listen to his popular blogging podcast, The Blog Millionaire. If you’re new to AdSense, be sure to sign up for AdSense and start turning your #PassionIntoProfit. 
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In the third part of the #SuccessStack, we take a look at programmatic ad sales. This article will give you the tools to decide whether programmatic may be the right route for you to grow your publishing business. Adsense_Publisher_growth_program.png What is programmatic? Originally, digital ad sales required you to go out and sell your ad space direct to advertisers. If they liked the price they agreed to the sale. If not, they may have negotiated with you. All this took time, required advanced bookings, and necessitated a lot of leg work on both sides. Programmatic advertising takes your digital ad inventory and matches it to buyers looking for the ad space you offer, doing the selling for you. It uses software and algorithms as a go between, increasing ad revenues through a bidding system where the highest paying buyer’s ad is chosen for each space. The easy way to try programmatic
For most publishers, the easiest and most effective way to try programmatic ad sales is to use an automated ad network like AdSense to sell their ad inventory. This means you don’t have to worry about generating direct sales or any high-touch manual optimizations of your ad sales. The AdSense platform will find advertisers for you from AdWords and other Google advertisers and accept bids on your behalf, automatically selling your ad units for the highest possible price and placing the winning ad in that spot. Programmatic advertising 2.0 If you’re a larger publisher who has a significant amount of direct sales or needs to manage their ads at a granular level to avoid conflict, you may need a more advanced programmatic solution. DoubleClick Ad Exchange is for publishers looking to go beyond the basics of programmatic advertising. You’ll be able to access a wider pool of advertisers, agencies and ad networks to tap into advertising markets beyond Google advertisers. In addition to expanding demand, Ad Exchange provides publishers with advanced Programmatic Direct tools to help grow your business. But it’s important to know, you’ll also be required to manage more manual inputs and adjustments, so it’s not ideally suited for every publisher. Consider your next step
If you’re thinking about what you should do next, you might begin with this short quiz to help you decide which is the correct next step for your business and programmatic advertising. Ready to take the plunge? Make sure you choose the right tool to give yourself the best possible potential earnings. To help you with this, arrange a free consultation with one of our experts who can help you to choose the right programmatic solution for your business.

A staggering $6.9 billion was spent on mobile digital ads in Q4 2015. In this second installment of the #SuccessStack, learn how you can claim your share of advertising budgets spent this quarter and grow your revenue.

Tip 1: The early bird catches the worm
Does it feel like the holiday season gets bigger and starts earlier every year? You’re not wrong. This year Black Friday set a new record with over $3 billion in online sales. The entire holiday shopping season has evolved into a truly multi-month, online affair.
Take advantage of the holiday ad spending spree by placing ads on your site. A good first step is to choose the right tool to sell and manage ads on your site. Then, make sure your available ad space is optimized and mobile friendly. Finally, when the holiday season is in full swing, you can use experiments to measure and improve your use of ad space further.
Tip 2: Tailor your content to what users are looking for
The holiday shopping season creates big opportunities for AdSense publishers. According to Luth Research*, the way people search when shopping becomes more niche as they move closer to buying an item. For example, individuals may start their shopping journey with search terms like “gadgets for men” or “laptops” but finish a few weeks later with searches for specific models or screen sizes.
To capture audience attention and increase your ad impressions, build a content strategy that taps into this insight. Try creating content that taps into each stage of the buyer journey like gift inspiration articles for those early stage “i need ideas” moments, and product comparison content for those “i want to know” moments before users make a purchase decision. To help you make the most of these moments check out our guide to help you draw the crowds to your site.
Tip 3: Use the right advertising partner
Partner with an ad network that can help you earn more during this peak advertising period. AdSense, with its access to millions of Google AdWords advertisers offers an easy, profitable and low touch advertising solution.

Already an AdSense user? Enjoy an expert consultation to walk you through DoubleClick’s suite of tools to help you manage and optimize the ad inventory on your site. It could help you grow your revenues even further this holiday season.
*Google/Luth Research, U.S. Google partnered with Luth to analyze the digital activity of its opt-in panel participants. The data was analyzed between April and Aug. 2016.
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This is the fourth of five guest posts from AdSense publisher Brandon Gaille. Brandon has built his small business marketing blog, BrandonGaille.com, to over 2 million monthly visitors in less than three years. He’s featured as our guest blogger to share insights and tips from his personal blogging experience to help AdSense publishers grow earnings. If you’re new to AdSense, be sure to sign up for AdSense and start turning your #PassionIntoProfit.  Google Analytics defines bounce rate as the percentage of single-page sessions, which essentially means the people that left your site after seeing only a single page. When your bounce rate is high, it also means that your AdSense ads may not be seen by a large percentage of your audience. Over the years, I've researched this topic many times over in an effort to constantly decrease the bounce rate of my sites and my clients’ sites. Through countless hours of A/B testing and deep analytics research, I was able to identify 25 tactics that consistently reduced the bounce rate. The great thing about most of these tactics is that they usually only take a matter of minutes to incorporate, and you can start seeing results the next day. #1 Do not use more than 7 sentences per paragraph You never want to block too much text together. One really long paragraph can easily overwhelm your visitors and lead them to hitting the back button. Most bloggers write their posts on a desktop or laptop computer. From a computer, the occasional 12 to 15 sentence paragraph does not look too intimidating. However, over 50% of my blog visitors are using their phones to read the posts on my site. On a phone, these long paragraphs will fill up the entire screen and add to your bounce rate. I like to break up my paragraphs into different sizes. This can make the text of a post visually stimulating, which can turn scanners into readers. Using an occasional single sentence paragraph will speed up the flow of article and add some nice white space. #2 Keep your column width between 700 and 800 pixels There have been many big name bloggers that have been considering ditching the sidebar. Although the sidebar does not get as many clicks as it once did, this is largely due to the increase in mobile traffic. A post without a sidebar will have a column width well beyond 800 pixels. This is going to make your content look very long on a desktop computer. The ideal width for engagement is 700 pixels, which will allow between 80 and 90 characters per line. Smashing Magazine did a study on the typographic design patterns in websites. When they looked at a segment of websites with the highest engagement, they found the majority of these sites had between 75 and 90 characters per line.
average-characters-per-line
Source of image: Smashing Magazine
#3 Organize your content with headers and sub-headers Based on reviewing heat maps of million and millions of page views, I’ve found that visitors of blog posts are made up of a mix of readers and scanners. To be precise, the results showed that 40% are readers and 60% are scanners. The readers start by reading the introduction paragraph, and the scanners scroll through the entire post. The scanners consistently stop scrolling to read each header and sub-header. For the readers, most bloggers are pulling them into the post with a great introduction. However, the vast majority fail to create compelling headers. The easiest type of post to break into headers is the list post. For example, “13 Habits that Lead to Success.” Each habit should be turned into a bold header and be able to stand alone as its own title. The goal here is to create thirteen compelling titles. Each title is designed to grab the reader’s attention and drive them into reading that section. If you’ve enjoyed these three tips to decrease your bounce rate, go here to read all of the “25 Proven Ways to Decrease Your Bounce Rate.” Posted By Brandon Gaille Brandon Gaille Brandon Gaille is an AdSense publisher. You can learn more about Brandon at BrandonGaille.com and listen to his popular blogging podcast, The Blog Millionaire.  If you’re new to AdSense, be sure to sign up for AdSense and start turning your #PassionIntoProfit. 
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Welcome to the #SuccessStack, a new series of articles designed to help you:
  • Access Google’s large network of advertisers 
  • Grow your publishing business 
  • Earn more from the ads on your site
This first article can help you choose the right tools to sell and manage the ads on your site. AdSense: Get started with easy access to Google’s network of advertisersWho it’s for: Publishers looking for a smart and easy-to-use tool to optimize their ad space and revenue. What it does: AdSense makes it easy for you to place, manage and earn revenue from ads on your site. With AdSense, Google is your advertising sales team, bringing you ads from millions of advertisers using AdWords and other Google advertising programs. AdSense includes simple and easy controls to help you get started with earning money from ads, but it also does a lot of work behind the scenes to help you make more money. It’s a bit like an automatic car -- it removes some of the manual adjustment, allowing you to cruise along with less effort. You still need regular “tune ups” to get optimal performance, but you won’t need to shift gears all the time.DoubleClick Ad Exchange: Control who gets programmatic access to the ads on your site with advanced featuresWho it’s for: Publishers who require a more granular control over their inventory and who have the resources and expertise to manage ongoing optimizations. This product is suited to publishers with yield management expertise and those who have need for advanced features like Programmatic Direct. What it does: DoubleClick Ad Exchange gives you real-time access to the largest pool of advertisers. This means that in addition to AdWords advertisers, you can also access major ad networks and agencies. A major difference between DoubleClick Ad Exchange and AdSense is that AdSense does a lot of the technical settings and optimization work for you, such as automating the sale of all your ad space to the highest bidder. With DoubleClick Ad Exchange, you can control these adjustments yourself and control exactly how your inventory is sold. As an example, DoubleClick Ad Exchange allows you to choose which ad space is for public sale and which is reserved for private auctions. This increased amount of user input is necessary for you to get the best results from DoubleClick Ad Exchange. Another important distinction is that the AdSense demand is majority AdWords advertisers, whereas DoubleClick Ad Exchange pulls demand from multiple sources. You can see the full list of differences at our help center. DoubleClick For Publishers: Scale your advertising business Who it’s for: Publishers who are looking for a tool that has AdSense or Ad Exchange built in, along with lots of useful features to help them, schedule, deliver and measure their ad inventory regardless of how they sell it, to networks, programmatically or through their own direct sales teams. What it does: DoubleClick for Publishers is a single platform that allows you to manage and deliver all of your web, mobile, and video advertising across all your sales channels. It doesn’t come with it’s own ads, but rather helps you scale your ads business by managing your ad sales across a variety of ad networks such as AdSense, ad exchanges like DoubleClick and direct advertising partners. You can get started with the small business version right away for free, or talk to us about integrating with the premium, paid version that is built for large organizations with sophisticated ad sales teams.Both versions have a simple interface, lots of great tools, built-in revenue optimization, and Google powered ad delivery to provide a simple, worry-free way to potentially increase the value of your ad impressions.Ready to get started? You can arrange a consultation with one of our experts who can help you to choose the right solution for your business, and setup AdSense, DoubleClick Ad Exchange or DoubleClick for Publishers. Posted by Jay Castro, from the AdSense team.
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This is the third of five guest posts from AdSense publisher Brandon Gaille. Brandon has built his small business marketing blog, BrandonGaille.com, to over 2 million monthly visitors in less than three years. He’s featured as our guest blogger to share insights and tips from his personal blogging experience to help AdSense publishers grow earnings. If you’re new to AdSense, be sure to sign up for AdSense and start turning your #PassionIntoProfit.  Over the past three years, I’ve crafted titles for over 5,000 blog posts and have received over 58 million unique visitors to date. With that many titles and that much traffic, it’s allowed me to identify what types of titles get the most traffic. The title of your page or blog post will play one of the largest roles in how much traffic you receive. From my extensive experience, a really great title can move your blog post dis and increase the number of social shares by over 300%. The bottom line is… If you fail to write a compelling title that gets people to click, then your post is doomed to wallow in mediocrity. Here are a few title optimization tactics that have proven to drive the most traffic. #1 Place a number at the beginning of your title If you have a list formatted post, then you need to be using numbered titles every single time. Titles that begin with numbers are proving to drive traffic. This is largely due to the increased consumption of users reading list posts more than any other type of blog post. A list post typically has anywhere from seven to forty key points, which are listed out numerically. This makes it really easy for anyone to scan through the big takeaways and decide whether to dive deeper into the article. When people see the number 13 at the beginning of the title, they know they can scan through all 13 key points in a matter of seconds. A numbered title paired with a list post will drive more clicks to your post and list style posts have one of the highest engagement rates. Posts with more clicks and higher engagement often are rewarded by becoming more discoverable to users. Here are a couple of examples of numbered blog titles:
  • 11 Tools to Create Share-Worthy Content
  • 17 Incredible Social Media Statistics
I recommend crafting numbered blog post titles for more than half of your posts. A Conductor study on headline preferences also backs up what I’ve found to be true on my blog.
blog headline statistics numbered titles
#2 The odd number gets 20% more clicks than the even number Although no one has figured out exactly why this happens, the odd numbered titles get more clicks than the even numbered titles. Here’s an example. Odd Numbered Title: 11 Keys to Earning More Money on Adsense Even Numbered Title: 12 Types of Ads that Convert Before you hit publish on the blog post titled, “8 Crazy Ways to Double Your Ad Revenue,” take a moment to either add one more tip or remove the least valuable tip. This will allow you to capitalize on the extra twenty percent of clicks by having an odd numbered title. Learn more about creating better blog titles from my blog and read all of the “17 Ways to Create Catchy Blog Titles That Drive Traffic.” Posted By Brandon Gaille Brandon Gaille Brandon Gaille is an AdSense publisher. You can learn more about Brandon at BrandonGaille.com and listen to his popular blogging podcast, The Blog Millionaire. If you’re new to AdSense, be sure to sign up for AdSense and start turning your #PassionIntoProfit. 
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We’re all consumers of web content. Yet as content creators it can be easy to forget what we need as users. But don’t worry, you’ve got this, and we’ve got you covered with just four S’.  If you’re new to AdSense, be sure to sign up today and start turning your #PassionIntoProfit.  1. Speed  We all know how frustrating it is when a page takes forever to load. We twiddle our thumbs and look from side to side. And after just three seconds, we bounce. But somehow publishers aren’t responding to this primal need that we all know as users. According to Google's research from the Mobile Speed Matters report, the average load time for mobile sites across the web is 19 seconds. This is a LONG time. Usain Bolt can run 200m in 19.9s - think of what your users can do with a tap and a swipe. But how does this impact me? Well, the report also states that…
  • 53% of mobile site visits are abandoned if pages take longer than 3 seconds to load.
  • Publishers whose mobile sites load in 5 seconds earn up to 2x more mobile ad revenue than those whose sites load in 19 seconds. 
By now we think you’re sold on speed. So what’s next?
2. Scroll
The magic scroll. It’s an infinite, endless, perfectly loaded stream of content. There’s no need to click, to wait for a page to load, to navigate to that tiny ‘next’ with your giant thumb. It’s all right here, content, just waiting for you to consume it.
There are, of course, a few caveats before developing an infinite scroll. Like almost everything online, this isn’t a one size fits all solution. 
Infinite scroll is great for ...
  • UGC publishers with constantly evolving content - think Tumblr, Facebook, Pinterest.
  • Sites with lengthy articles or tutorials. No one wants to click ‘more’ or ‘page 2’ anymore. It’s just too dang hard. 
  • Publishers using a slideshow with pagination. Consider a lazy loaded infinite scroll instead. Users love it. 
  • Publishers considering mobile first (aren’t we all?!).
Watch out for … 
  • Crawler errors & SEO impact and check out this article for creating a search friendly infinite scroll. 
3. Style 
Style should never be an afterthought. You and your users want to interact with something that looks good and feels good. 
There are two primary components to style: content style & ad style. 
First: Content Style 
Great websites are able to maintain a consistent style  across pages and platforms. Consistency gives users a sense of familiarity when interacting with your content. 
  • Choose a color scheme and stick to it 
  • Choose a layout and stick to it 
  • Choose a theme and stick to it 
We can’t stress this enough - stick to it. 
As the industry continues to migrate towards a mobile first perspective, consistency across device types and platforms becomes increasingly important. Responsive web design enables your site to adapt to various device sizes without changing the overall look and feel or compromising user experience. 
If you're up for the challenge, check out more on responsive design. 
Second: Ad Style 
In the internet of yesteryear it was nearly impossible to monetize without stripping a site of what made it beautiful. The good news? It’s 2016 and now you have the ability to make a profit and maintain your site’s style. 
When implementing ads think about what makes sense for you and your users.
Here's a sample of a native ad design.
Most importantly use ads to complement the content of your site. Since content is king, 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, this includes the ads on your site. Place ads at natural breaks or where the user’s attention may have waned. Not only will this improve user experience but it also may encourage a higher CTR and increased audience engagement. 4. Simple Keep it simple, folks. 
This rule underlines most everything that is targeted towards consumers, but it is even more important for a mobile first audience. 
When it comes to consuming digital content, we’re a generation of hungry hippos. We want headlines, snippets, concise and clear information. We want minimalist design with streamlined content and easy navigation.
Tips on keeping it simple
  • Make it touch friendly. What’s easier than that?
  • Bullet points make your content easily consumable 
  • Be brief in sign-ups. If your site requires users to sign-up or sign-in, keep input requirements to a minimum or consider adding a Google sign-in option to speed up the process 
So there you have it; the four S’ of user experience: speed, scroll, style, simple. If you’re new to AdSense, be sure to sign up today and start turning your #PassionIntoProfit. Posted by: Sarah Hornsey, from the AdSense team
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