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Mobile is the fastest growing platform and it’s important for us to ensure that our sites are set up for long-term success. Recently, we’ve heard questions and concerns about lower than expected click through rate (CTR) and revenue per thousand impressions (RPM) for mobile inventory and we’d like to share some insights as to what may cause this. To understand what’s happening you need to look at your performance reports . Analyzing your AdSense performance allows you to see how well your ads are performing and which devices your ad units were viewed on. To view this report simply log into your AdSense account, click “Performance reports” and select “Platforms” from the “Report type” dropdown. You may notice that your CTR or RPM is lower on mobile than it is on tablet and desktop. This might be caused by one or more of the following reasons: Your site may be displaying suboptimal ad sizes Your responsive design is using the column drop approach You’re not focusing on optimizing for view...

We’re paying special attention to improving the mobile ad experience to help empower content creators, news organizations, and publishers. As mobile continues to grow, choosing high-impact mobile ads are key for businesses to generate revenue from a mobile audience. When choosing the right mobile ad units for your business, it’s a best practice to ensure that each and every mobile impression receives the highest value possible, which can be determined by a mix of metrics like viewability, size, placement, and demand. It’s also important to protect the user experience by choosing the right ad formats and placements for your site to engage mobile users so that you don’t interrupt their desired intent. Start by choosing a high-impact mobile format: medium rectangle (300x250), large rectangle (336x280), large mobile banner (320x100), and r ectangular responsive ad units tend to get the best results. Here’s why we recommend these formats: Each format works well on both desktop and mobil...

Join us for an upcoming live stream titled: “Grow your business with ads on your site”. In this 30 minute live Hangout on Air, you’ll learn how to earn money from your online content. Register now and join us, live on May 30th, at 11:00 a.m. GMT. When you register, you’ll also receive updates and training materials designed to help you get started with AdSense and earn money from your online content.  If you can’t attend the live event and you’re interested, be sure to register and we’ll share the link to the recording after. If you have any questions you’d like to ask please submit them on the HOA event page or during the event and we’ll try to answer them live.  See you online. For more information about AdSense, follow us on Twitter and G+ or hear from our publishers. Posted by:  Oisin O'Connor From the Google AdSense team

We’ve all been there. You’re trying to send an article from your phone to a friend, or you’re playing a mobile game while waiting in line for a movie, when you accidentally touch an ad on your screen. You weren’t interested in the ad -- heck, you didn’t even have time to see what it was for -- but now you’re hitting the back button to get back to what you were doing. Not only do accidental clicks like these annoy users, but left unaddressed, they can drive down the value of ads. Over the last four years, we’ve introduced a series of protections across mobile web and mobile apps to prevent accidental clicks like these on ads. Today we are continuing this commitment to protecting users and advertisers by extending accidental click protections to native ad formats. Native ads were developed to help publishers and developers implement ads that complement the look and feel of their content. Since our teams started instituting various click protections, we’ve learned quite a bit along the...

Four things to explore if your AdSense earnings take a dip Today we'd like to share some insights about why AdSense earnings sometimes go down -- and look at how to troubleshoot what's going on when that happens. Google has a variety of tools and reports that will help you see what might be causing a decline and how you can respond to optimize your earnings. One of the first things to consider is: have your overall page views gone down, or are other issues causing the drop? There are many factors that affect revenue, but the key ones to look at include: Clickthrough rate (CTR) Cost per click (CPC) Page revenue per thousand impressions (page RPM) Page views You can view all these metrics on the Performance reports tab in your AdSense account. Here are a few tips on how to address issues you may discover. 1. My page views have decreased When troubleshooting changes in page views, it's a good idea to extend the date range of your reports out to 30 days or more to help identif...

Our latest infographic puts a spotlight on viewability by sharing a dozen technical best practices for improving viewability based on insights from Active View , Google's MRC-accredited viewable impression measurement technology. Recently on the blog, we focused on 2 tips for enabling viewability measurement . In this post you'll learn tips for improving ad viewability by optimizing your apps and sites for speed and responsiveness. Here is today's recommendation: We hope these recommendations are improving your site or apps ad viewability. Feel free to share your viewability success story in the comments section below. In the next part of our Spotlight on Viewability, we'll share 4 ways to improve ad layouts for better viewability rates. Posted by Anish Kattukaran, Product Marketing Manager

There's a lot that publishers and app developers can do to increase the likelihood that their ads will be measured as viewable. Our latest infographic puts a spotlight on viewability by sharing a dozen technical best practices for improving viewability across four categories based on insights from Active View , Google's MRC-accredited viewable impression measurement technology. These insights and recommendations come from our services teams that have spent thousands of hours working with publishers and developers to improve advertising outcomes. In this post, we focus on tips you can use to improve ad viewability by optimizing your apps and sites for speed and responsiveness. Here is today's recommendation: We hope these recommendations will improve your site or apps ad viewability. Feel free to share your viewability success story in the comments section below.  In the next part of our Spotlight on Viewability, we'll share 3 speedy ways to improve viewability. Posted b...

Today, we’re excited to announce the new Optimization tab, a dedicated place in your AdSense account that shows tailored tips for your site. This new tab is a one-stop shop for all the resources that could help you increase your revenue and user engagement on your site. With the new Optimization tab, you can: Explore new opportunities and features that could boost your income Run A/B experiments and check results to make better decisions for your site Find valuable optimization resources in one place The new Optimization tab is currently in beta and available for a limited group of publishers. It will roll out to all AdSense publishers over the coming weeks. Check your account now to see if you have this exciting feature in your account! To create a great optimization experience for you, we’re planning to add more features to the new Optimization tab, including new experiment features and a host of new opportunities. We hope that this new tab will help you explore more opportunities...

Not being able to log in to your account can be frustrating, and it happens to most of us now and then. Every week the AdSense support team receives emails from publishers who are logged out and stumped. With that in mind, let's look over the five most common "can't log in" scenarios and how you can clear them up and get back into action. 1. The email and password you entered don’t match This is always the #1 login issue. Luckily, a fix is just few clicks away. If you've run out of all your memory tricks for remembering your password, visit Google's account recovery service . Enter your login address to reset your Google account password. 2. You deleted your Google Account Your AdSense account is linked to other Google services like Gmail, Calendar, and Google+ under one Google Account. Sometimes a user decides to delete one service and deletes their entire Google Account, which cuts off access to their AdSense account as well. The good news: even if you delet...

As part of our continued effort to be as transparent and accessible to publishers as possible, we’ve launched a collaboration with Search Engine Journal with a column titled “ Ask the AdSense Guy ”. In this monthly column, we’ll answer questions on topics of interest from the readership of the Search Engine Journal, as well as provide insight into best practices for publishers of all sizes. Our hope is that these external collaborations strengthen overall understanding of our policy positions and allow publishers to scale their long term growth in ways that provide value for their users, as well as advertisers who place ads on publisher sites. A Search Engine Journal managing partner, Brent Csutoras, interviewed me at Pubcon 2015 to get a glimpse of what investments Google is making to help the entire ecosystem: users, advertisers, and publishers.  Follow our column and share your questions, or submit them as a comment below.  We will answer questions posted on Search En...

I’ve been posting a series to this blog relating to demystifying AdSense policies. Today we’re exploring what happens when ads are disabled from publisher sites, when to submit an appeal, and tips for making those appeals successful. Our policies are designed to foster a healthy ecosystem which protects users, advertisers, and publishers. In 2014, the vast majority of publishers ( >98 %) did not receive a policy violation notice from us. In order to ensure a healthy ecosystem we continuously monitor our ad network and periodically review AdSense sites. We use a combination of sophisticated, automated systems and manual reviews to identify violations. If you’ve received a policy violation or ad serving on your website has been disabled have a look at our Help Center and review our Program Policies . You will find information on how to fix the violation and apply for an appeal. Here are some useful tips, should you need to submit an appeal: 1. Understand the violation . If you recei...

We've had a lot of questions recently from AdSense publishers about viewability and the new Active View metrics in AdSense accounts. Active View can really help you improve your AdSense earnings, so let's take a closer look. What are Active View and viewability? Active View is Google’s ad viewability measurement solution. It tracks the viewability of ads served by AdSense: that is, the percentage of ads that are considered viewable out of the total number of ads measured. We use the online ad industry standard: a display ad is counted as viewable when at least 50% of the ad is within the viewable space on the user’s screen for one second or more. So an ad that is (for instance) placed below the first screen on a given page won't be counted as viewable if the viewer never scrolls down. This is why viewability a good way of determining whether your AdSense ads are actually being seen by your website visitors or simply loading without a chance of catching the viewer's ey...

Sometimes it's a good thing to step back and look at the basics. With that in mind (and with the new AdSense interface now in place), we'd like to recap the big five AdSense reports you should start with to analyze your overall account performance. Let's take a look at these reports. 1. The reporting dashboard: Get an overall summary of your performance As the name suggests, the reporting dashboard gives you a quick summary of three main reporting metrics: estimated earnings, page views, and revenue per thousand impressions (RPM).  This report is a great way to get a quick check of your recent AdSense performance. You can switch to a wider date range, too, like the past month or year. If you see a sudden change in your results for any area, you can see a more detailed report with a click on the View report button. 2. The entire account by day report: Monitor your daily performance To see this report, visit the Performance reports tab, click Common reports on the left-ha...

Want to freshen up the AdSense performance on your site? Google Analytics can help. Here are some simple and effective places to start. 1. Find out where to focus Content Groups let you bundle your offerings to analyze them more clearly. Instead of analyzing all shoes at once, for instance, a shoe company might divide content into shoes for adults and kids, for men and women, or by tennis shoes and high heels. You can view and compare aggregated metrics by group, or drill down to any individual URL or page title. Suppose you want to know: What topics have the best AdSense CTRs? Group content by topic (such as food, politics and sport) Use the AdSense Pages report to view metrics Once you learn which topics have the best clickthrough rates, you could then focus on creating more content for those topics. Suppose you want to know: Which product groups have slow-loading pages? Group products by type (such as shirts and shoes) Use Page Speed reports to look at page load performance Are s...

The holiday season is the busiest time of the year, with shoppers out in full force to gather their holiday gifts, round up their decorations, and treat themselves to something special. 2014 was a record-breaker in terms of ad spend, which goes to show just how important it is that your advertising is as targeted as possible, and that you’re fully prepared for the final, and most lively, quarter of the year. Check out these stats and tips below which can help you be in tip-top form for the season: (viewing from mobile? Download it here .) Not yet an AdSense user? Sign up now! Posted by Yigit Yucel Marketing Communications Specialist

5 tips to grow site visitors If you're like most publishers, you think a lot about how to grow your site audience. It should be no surprise that for this topic, content is key . Great content attracts and engages new users and keeps your wonderful old users coming back again and again. But how do you produce content that is high in quality, value, and unique? For the answer, look back to why you became an AdSense publisher in the first place. Do what you love and your content will naturally be at the heart of all you do. As you build your new content, use these five tips to make what you create as engaging as it can possibly be. Be targeted, be consistent, be frequent Take time to figure out who is reading your content and what topics they find most interesting. Does your blog about dogs get 20 comments about Chihuahuas for every one comment about Great Danes? Maybe you should focus on the little guys! Update your content as often as you can. With regular updates you’ll build trust...

What is human-centered design, and why should you care? Suppose you want to come up with a new way to engage your site visitors and attract more of them. You could lie on the couch and hope to dream up a genius idea... or you could try human-centered design. Human-centered design is a creative approach to problem solving. It's taught by innovative institutions such as IDEO and the Stanford Design School and is often used to design new products. But it's not just for designers. Publishers like you can use human-centered design to understand what audiences want and create new content to match. Why not give it a try? The steps go like this: 1. Empathize: Observe, engage, and immerse To get started, look at your users’ behavior and think about why they behave that way. Meet some of your users and watch what they do with your content. Engage with them. Ask them why they read or watch your content. Try to uncover their needs.  Immerse yourself in their experience however you can....