If you are using Google Adsense for monetizing your blog or websites, here is some good news.

The Adsense team may soon introduce larger ad formats to the Adsense inventory, this will surely have a good impact on your Adsense earnings. The expected ad formats are 728 X 300, 300 X 600, 960 X 250 and 300 X 600 apart from the regular ad units.

Here is a video which gives a short glimpse about the upcoming Google Adsense units:

Exactly one month ago, we told you that Google is experimenting with newer Adsense formats. Major changes were made to the Leaderboard (728 X 90),large rectangle (336 X 280) and medium rectangular (300 X 250) units.

When it comes to online advertising, bigger is better. Study shows that visitors are more attracted to larger ad blocks and they ignore small banners or button advertisements. The newer ad formats will surely give publishers as well as advertisers more option, you can place the 300 X 600 ad unit on the sidebar or the 960 X 250 ad unit above the header.

There is no clear announcement on the official Adsense blog yet, we will update this post once we get more information on the story.

Thanks Anand for the tip.

The Google Adsense team has announced a revamped design for some Adsense units. This includes some major changes to the Leaderboard (728 X 90), large rectangle (336 X 280) and medium rectangular (300 X 250) units.

Here is an image from the official Adsense blog which shows the changes that are on route:

Google says that they have implemented the change after analyzing publisher site layouts and reviewing requests from around the world. The newer Adsense units will be more space efficient and visually pleasing.

The changes are predominant, the links, title and description of the advertisements are now arranged in rows instead of columns. The ads are easier to read which is surely going to affect the CTR and performance. Of course, when only one ad unit is shown – the title, description and the links will take over the entire ad space.

In case of the rectangular blocks, the URL of the website will appear in the same line as the title of the advertisement. Font sizes have also been changed which adds up in easier reading.

One good thing regarding the Leaderboard unit is that the title of the advertisement appears in far left. Since a human eye scan a webpage from left to right, I think this change will encourage more Adsense publishers to test the newer Leaderboard units. Thanks to tabbed browsers, you can place a big Leaderboard unit at the top of your blog’s template because the portion near the tabbed area receives good attention.

Please note that until now, the changes are not reflected in all the existing Adsense accounts because the Google Adsense team is still testing the newer units and the final changes will be rolled out in a few weeks from now.

Until today, no one had even a wild guess on how much revenue the Adsense team shares with it’s publishers. Today the Adsense team announced the exact percentage of revenue shared among Adsense publishers.

Among the most popular Adsense products are Adsense for content and Adsense for search. Adsense for content publishers earn 68% of the revenue made on their websites. This means, the Adsense team pays you 68% of the total money that they collect from the respective Adwords advertisers whose advertisements appear in your websites.

The revenue shared with Adsense for search is however on a lower number. Adsense pays you 51 % of the total revenue earned from the search ads that appear in your websites. The Google Adsense program started way back in 2003 and the revenue share has been the same from the start.

Google has not revealed how much revenue it shares for other Adsense products. This include Adsense for feeds, Adsense for domains, Adsense for mobile content etc. Google says that the revenue they keep is used to compensate for Google’s costs for continued investment of the Adsense program, for further development and for building features and products that improve the overall “Money making” experience.

I think Adsense is the only network which has shared this kind of information. Do you think   68% is okay or should Google share more revenue with Adsense publishers? Share your thoughts in the comments section.

Google does not disclose the percentage of revenue that it shares with AdSense publishers. However, Amit Agarwal from Digital Inspiration has come with some clever arithmetic to deduce the revenue share being offered by Google.

Digital Inspiration based its calculations on the quarterly earnings report released by Google. The report has two sections – Google Network Revenues and Traffic Acquisition Costs. While the former reflects the amount Google earned from AdSense, the later tells us how much it paid to AdSense publishers. Digital Inspiration used this information to calculate the percentage share paid by Google to publishers. The share has decreased from 75.0% in Q1 2009 to 72.1% in Q4 2009. If true, this is indeed a worrying trend for publishers. However, the problem is that there is a big hole in this logic.

There is a logical explanation to the declining revenue share, which does not involve “Google is becoming evil”. Google does not completely rely on publishers for eyeballs. AdSense ads are displayed in several major Google initiatives including Google Search, YouTube and Gmail. Obviously, the traffic acquisition cost associated with in-house page views is zero, since Google would be paying itself.

Over the past year, Google has managed to steadily increase page views to various Google projects. Because of this, Google’s reliance on publishers has decreased. Publicly available stats also back this up. For example, YouTube crossed 1 billion page views per day in October 2009.

Rise of YouTube (via Compete)

With Google aggressively expanding its portfolio, traffic acquisitions cost’s percentage will continue to decline. We are not claiming that Google isn’t reducing the AdSense revenue share. We simply believe that we don’t have sufficient data to come to any conclusions.

Quite recently the Google AdSense team rolled out new changes that allowed you to control the font sizes and fonts for the ads, however by default Google started applying medium font sizes by default.

In another announcement today the AdSense team has decided to change the default font face that will be used for displaying ads, currently most of the ads are displayed using Arial and Verdana, the new default font faces for ads will be as follows;

Arial: 728×90, 336×280, 120×600, 120×240
Verdana: 300×250, 160×600, 468×60, 250×250, 234×60, 125×125, 180×150
Times New Roman: 200×200

If you are not happy with the default font face you can change it by editing the ads.

Default font faces to be updated [Official Google AdSense Blog]

Was surprised today when I got a email from the Google AdSense team asking publishers to update their websites privacy policy and include the use of interest-based advertising. The email took me by surprise, because never in the past have any advertisers asked users to update their privacy policies.

The changes are related to the DoubleClick DART cookies, that will stored on users computers who visit websites displaying Google AdSense ads. The email asks users to update their privacy policy before April 8th 2009.

Interest-based advertising will allow advertisers to show ads based on a user’s previous interactions with them, such as visits to advertiser website and also to reach users based on their interests (e.g. "sports enthusiast").  To develop interest categories, we will recognize the types of web pages users visit throughout the Google content network.  As an example, if they visit a number of sports pages, we will add them to the "sports enthusiast" interest category.  To learn more about your associated account settings, please visit the AdSense Help Center at http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/topic.py?topic=20310.

As a result of this announcement, your privacy policy will now need to reflect the use of interest-based advertising. Please review the information at https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=100557 to ensure that your site’s privacy policies are up-to-date, and make any necessary changes by April 8, 2009.  Because publisher sites and laws vary across countries, we’re unfortunately unable to suggest specific privacy policy language.

AdSense publishers will now have to add-in a new policy that tells users about these changes, but is it really the publishers job? What is your take on this? Do you think Google is right to tell publishers to update their privacy policy? Do let us know through your comments.

The AdSense team announced about a inconvenience that you may have to face, if you do not en-cash  your checks in 6 months. Your payments though will not vanish and you can still get old as well as new payments from AdSense.

You will have to choose a new form of payment to resume the payment sending service, those could include checks, EFT and Western Union.

If you have changed your country and lost you checks don’t forget to read our tips about changing your country for Google AdSense, for more such AdSense tips you can visit the Google AdSense category.

Google AdSense as always keeps on adding new policies to their already heavy user policies. This time around there are some interesting changes to their policies with regards to ad placements.

The first interesting change is no ad units under section headings that imply ads are not ads. According to the policy such formats may mislead a user that the ads are part of the post. This change affects the hugely popular format used by most blogs wherein the ads are directly placed beneath the title before the content starts. Check out the screenshot below to look at the format of the ads.

As you see the new guidelines ask you to refrain from posting ads below the title, but wait do not panic it is only for posts which have misleading titles that try to blend the ads as part of the actual content. You can continue using this format on your blog as long as the title is relevant and not misleading.

The second policy change implies that the ads on your site should be easily distinguishable from the content. Check out the screenshot below for offending formats of ad placements.

As you can see the content and ads are not easily distinguishable. You can such many such ads being using on MFA (Made For AdSense) sites.

Summarizing

As always these policies are bound to affect many publishers and it is always good to stay on the good side of the AdSense team rather than getting banned. That said the first policy change should raise many a doubts among publishers but like I said it will not affect you unless there is a title that is actually questionable.

If you have any doubts about Google AdSense do feel free to tell me about it, you can leave a comment or contact me directly.

Via: [Official Google AdSense Blog]

The AdSense team today announced that new policy changes with regards to placing images and videos on a page serving AdSense ads. In the announcement they are asking publishers to refrain running AdSense on pages which contain adult or mature images.

Before posting videos or pictures on a page with Google ads, put yourself in an advertiser’s position and consider whether you would want to have your ad displayed on the page. If your content might potentially be seen as offensive or disturbing, an advertiser may not be comfortable running their ads on that page. Here are a few specific types of content that you can check for:

• Adult or mature: Includes, but is not limited to, images and videos containing sexual activity, full nudity, and lewd poses. Please review this recent post to determine whether your content might fall into this category.
• Violent or gory: Can include images and videos of street-fighting, people hurting each other, or gruesome accidents and their victims.
• Culturally insensitive or hate speech: Includes content promoting racial intolerance or advocating against a specific individual, group, or organization.

In addition to that they are also advising publishers not to place AdSense ads on pages involved in unauthorized distribution of copyrighted materials. As usual these announcements need to be taken seriously to avoid a ban from the AdSense program.

So next time you are using any images or videos that do not confirm with the AdSense policy make sure to disable AdSense for the page.

Do you spend a lot of time looking at your Google Adsense reports? Are you querying your different stats in Adstats to get an idea of what works and what doesn’t several times a day?

With Google Analytics being so feature rich and has pretty graphs to give you visual feel for all the numbers, it’s a little surprising that Google doesn’t offer such performance tracking tools to its flagship brand, Adsense.

CSV AdStats is a free application that can analyze your Google Adsense data that you can download in CSV format. AdStats then calculates detailed statistical information like CPM, number of clicks, moving averages, etc.

CSV AdStats Quick Facts

• Supports automatics download of csv file from Google Adsense
• Powerful analysis in 7-day, weekly, monthly and yearly trends
• Choice of different parameters to get relevant stats on your earnings
• Supports stats for ‘Search’ and ‘Referrals’ as well
• Extensive charts give you a visual feel of your performance and you can save charts in emf, bmp, jpg or png formats
• A timer allows you to download csv files from Adsense automatically and you can opt to get notified if the earnings go up.

Download CSV AdStats

Some of the menu options are still in French after choosing Language as English but the tool is useful enough to learn a little bit of French! :wink: Especially the automatic update throughout the day and a message with increase in earnings without the need for a browser is just incredible!

Check out some of the screenshots in this page to get an idea of what you can see in AdStats.