The Google Content Network (Google’s ad network that includes over a million websites) connects Google’s hundreds of thousands of advertisers with our 1 million publishers. Advertisers can control where the extra layer of control and complexity is added with our targeting options. Here are the ways an advertiser can show ads on your site. Contextual TargetingPlacement TargetingRemarketingAdvertisers choose a particular targeting option depending on their overall goals. You might be most familiar with contextual targeting, which enables advertisers to choose broad themes that match the content of your site. For example, if I’m marketing my cheese shop, I create a keyword list that includes terms such as “cheese,” “gourmet” “cheese,” and “delicatessen,” among others. This would allow my cheese shop ads to show up on sites about gourmet cheeses as well as next to content on other sites that mention gourmet cheeses. At the same time, some advertisers are interested in showing their ads on specific sites because they find a match between the site’s visitors and their offerings. They can do this using placement targeting; in general, advertisers who tend to be more brand-sensitive use placement targeting because they can choose the sites where they want to show their ads. More recently, we’ve opened up remarketing, which enables advertisers to target ads to users they’ve previously interacted with, to all AdWords advertisers. At the same time, users can continue to control the ads they see by using the Ads Preferences Manager.To help advertisers target your sites, we recommend ensuring that there’s a clear theme to each of your pages, if you’re going to allow for placement targeting, create sections of your pages that clients can target easily. Lastly, think about your site from an advertiser’s perspective. Posted by Joanne Liu - AdWords Content Specialist team
Limit removed from category filtering feature
Based on your feedback about the category filtering feature, we’re happy to announce that there’s no longer a limit to the number of categories you can filter from your sites. You can now filter as many of the 11 available categories as you’d like.The category filtering feature allows you to prevent ads that fall into specific categories like ‘religion’ and ‘dating’ from appearing on your pages. You can filter categories by visiting your Ad Review Center, located under the AdSense Setup tab. Click the ‘change’ link to view available categories to filter. Your selections will be applied to ads in English, French, German, and Spanish, no matter how they’ve been targeted to your site.We also recommend taking a look at the columns showing how much of your recent revenue and ad impressions are generated by each of the categories. This will give you an idea how applying these filters may affect your account.Thanks for continuing to provide your feedback about category filtering. We’ll be sure to keep you posted with any additional updates. In the meantime, please feel free to visit our Help Center for more information about the feature.Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team
Bridging the gap: Introducing the AdWords Content Specialist team
Do you ever wonder who at Google helps advertisers understand which websites are relevant for their placement-targeted ads? I’m happy to say that this is one of my goals and also one of my team’s goals. My name is Lindsey Kurz, and I manage a team that helps advertisers understand how to best use AdSense sites in the Google Content Network to reach their marketing objectives. We focus on educating advertisers of all sizes on Content Network best practices, and how they can find success running campaigns on AdSense publisher sites. You, our publishers, help our advertisers by offering high-quality inventory. My team’s job is to help advertisers understand how to make the best use of that inventory. One example of how we do this, is by helping advertisers understand how to connect with users of a site. For example, when someone’s reading an article, what kind of ad do they want to see? Chances are, they’re browsing for information, so an ad promoting how to “learn more†may perform better than an ad asking them to “buy now.” My team helps advertisers understand these differences to create the most relevant ads for your users. These ads then go through our targeting algorithms and standard ad auction to compete to appear on your pages.Look for more posts from my team over the next few weeks. We’re excited to share with you more details about what we suggest to advertisers. We’ll talk about the specific recommendations we provide, such as advising advertisers to use a Placement Performance Report to optimize a Google Content Network campaign, along with more broad suggestions, like changing messages to reach different audiences.Posted by Lindsey Kurz - AdWords Content Specialist Manager
Troubleshooting your AdSense for search box
We hope you found some useful tips in our troubleshooting series for AdSense for content. Today, we’ll take a look at some tips for implementing your AdSense for search box, to avoid some common issues. Are your search results hosted on your own webpage? When implementing your AdSense for search box, you have the option to display the search results either on a site hosted by Google or on your own webpage. If you choose the second option, make sure you select an existing site to host the results, such as www.example.com/searchresults. Once you’ve selected a site to display the search results, hit ‘Submit and Get Code’ and you’ll generate two sets of code:The first is for the search box, to be implemented on the site where you would like to place the search boxThe second piece of code has to be pasted on the results pagePlease be sure not to place the two sets of code on the same page, as this will prevent the search box from working correctly. Also, note that the option to host the result on your own page is not available for Blogger sites.Is your AdSense for search code nested within FORM tags? A form tag is used to create an HTML form for user input, such as text fields, buttons, and checkboxes. The code you receive for your search box uses an HTML FORM to submit the search queries. In order for the AdSense for search code to work properly, it can’t be nested within another set of FORM tags on a page. To implement the AdSense for search feature on your page, please paste the code into your pages outside of any existing FORM.Posted by Ulrike Jung - Inside AdSense Team
Site maintenance on Saturday, March 20
This Saturday, our engineers will be performing routine site maintenance from 10am to 2pm PDT. You’ll be unable to log in to your AdSense and Ad Manager accounts during this time, but we’ll continue serving ads to your pages and tracking your clicks, impressions, and earnings as usual. In addition, your ad targeting won’t be affected.We’ve converted the maintenance start time for a few cities around the world:London - 5pm SaturdayDar es Salaam - 8pm SaturdayChennai - 10:30pm SaturdaySingapore - 1am SundaySydney - 4am SundayIf you’d like to learn more about what goes on during these maintenance periods, check out this Inside AdSense post.Posted by Dia Muthana - Inside AdSense team
Irish eyes are smiling
The Dublin AdSense team would like to wish all of our publishers a very happy St. Patrick’s Day! Today we’ll be dotting our i’s with shamrocks, crossing our t’s with shillelaghs, and wishing you all the luck of the Irish.
Posted by Siobhán McCormack - Inside AdSense Team
Google-certified ad networks now available to all publishers
Back in August, we announced plans to give publishers the ability to allow multiple Google-certified ad networks to compete for display ad space on your site. While this feature was initially available only to publishers located in North America and Europe, we’re happy to announce that all publishers will now have access to these participating ad networks.Allowing these ad networks to compete for your display ad space means that more ads will be eligible to appear on your pages, leading to potentially higher earnings in the long run. Our system will show the ads that will generate you the most profit, whether they’re from these Google-certified ad networks or the AdWords program. As a reminder, all Google-certified ad networks are required to adhere to our standards for user privacy, ad quality, and speed. In addition, you can use the controls in your Ad Review Center to specify which ad networks can appear on your pages. Finally, some ad networks use tools similar to Google’s interest-based advertising to show more relevant ads to users on the sites they visit. We’ll allow certified networks who comply with user privacy guidelines to show ads using these tools, but they won’t be permitted to collect data from your site for the purpose of subsequent interest-based advertising. You’ll be able to opt out of receiving ads based on user interests from these certified networks, and we have changed our requirements for third-party ad serving to reflect this. We’re dedicated to providing users with a positive experience, while helping publishers effectively monetize the ads appearing on their sites. We believe you’ll find that more competition translates into better ads and increased revenue in the long run.We’re continuing to certify additional ad networks, so please keep in mind that you won’t see immediate changes in your earnings or ads. As we continue to add new ad networks, you’ll see them appear in your Ad Review Center. To learn more about managing your account settings and Google-certified ad networks, visit our Help Center. Posted by Atul Bhandari - AdSense Product Manager
Troubleshooting tips part IV: Ad controls and filtering
We understand that when showing ads on your site, there may be a few you’d like to prevent from appearing. There are a number of ad control and filtering tools in your AdSense account, which we’ve listed below to help you determine which ones are right for you.Competitive Ad Filter You can enter the specific URL of an ad into the Competitive Ad Filter to prevent ads from that site from appearing on your pages. If you’d like to block ads coming from an entire domain, enter a top-level domain such as www.example.com to block all ads that link to subdirectories below that domain.Ad Review Center The Ad Review Center, located under the AdSense Setup tab in your account, lets you review and filter any placement targeted ads that are appearing on your pages. You can filter ads by type (text or image), or by individual ad groups and advertisers.Category Filtering To use the category filtering feature, you first have to enable the Ad Review Center. Category filtering allows you to block ads from up to 8 categories such as dating, politics, and weight loss, from displaying on your pages. Ads in these categories will be filtered if they’re in English, French, German, or Spanish, regardless of how they’ve been targeted to your pages.If you still see filtered ads are appearing on your site after you’ve used these features, please take note of the following:Ad filters should become effective within 30 minutes, but in rare cases might take up to 48 hours to be effective. Review the information in our Help Center for more information.If you use both AdSense for content and AdSense for search, and wish to filter an ad from appearing in both products, make sure that you’ve entered the correct URL in question in both filters. If you display ads from more than one AdSense account on one page, you need to filter the URL(s) in both accounts.That brings us to the end of our troubleshooting series for AdSense for content. Stay tuned next week for tips on troubleshooting issues with AdSense for search.Posted by Ulrike Jung - Inside AdSense Team
Building And Monetizing Communities
This article is guest posted by Mike Ndegwa.
When you seek advice from most Internet Marketers. They all have a common phrase: “Money is in the list”. What this means is that you build a blog, send traffic and capture visitors with an auto-responder and follow up with marketing emails to sell your products or other people’s products as an affiliate. This business model works but it limits your profits, read on to see how.
According to Seth Godin book Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us
By being a leader you automatically attract followers, hence creating a tribe where you are a king. For any group of people to trust you to lead them, they must see certain qualities in you.
One lie that has been told over the years is “you need to be an expert to be a leader”, “you need to be of a certain age to be a leader”, “you need to be of a certain academic background to be a leader” and the list goes on.
Here is the shocker: actually truth before your eyes:
President Obama is the Commander in Chief of US Forces or Marines and I doubt he had 8 years of military training and wen through the ranks.
As you can see: with leadership you can be placed in any rank irrespective of your area of expertise or any set prequalifications.
Lets get way back on track..
There is a leader who new myspace was a successful social network but went on to create his own which has proven to be a success, commonly called Facebook.
Another leader new there was Yahoo Search and MSN search (Bing) but wen on to put a local server in a garage or campus dormitory today is popularly known as Google.
Hope now you see. The Internet market is not saturated, it’s just lacking leaders. If you don’t take your leadership positions the spammers and time wasters are.Tribes are eagerly waiting for you to lead them.
While you are a leader, you need tools, Business model and Monetization strategy. These are the secrets of Supreme Marketers.
Tools
To build a tribe or online community you need tools.
A domain name
A community builder script
Online Business Model
There are various Internet business models that you can adopt:
Blogging – Carl Ocab is a leader in the blogging community, he has identified a niche and exercises his leadership on the same. For you to start a blog you need a blogging script like wordpress. which is available for auto install for most web hosting companies that support Fantastico or Simple Scripts.
Video Sharing Sites – Most people only know of youtube as the only free video sharing site. but there are a 1000 others out there. you can get a Youtube clone script to start your own community targeted to region or any other demographics. Small Is the New Big: 
Membership Site – Again you can create your own membership site using free scripts like wordpress and make your posts private such that only logged in members can view your posts.
Forums – With a number of scripts to choose from you can create your small forum and invite users to start contributing. At start you might need to be active by creating over 100 topics that will provoke response and watch your community grow.
Dating Website – There are many singles out there imagine making a site like singlesinyourcity.com and do an element of offline marketing where you orgarnize events and activities for your online communities to participate in.
Auction website – Again there is so much business in the local market. Don’t get angry at ebay if they have not started an auction targeting your country. You can take this as an opportunity and start one for your local community or region.
Social Bookmarking Site – With the increase of open source almost in every internet business category, today you can have your own bookmarking site in minutes. Every Marketer is looking for “do follow” back-links. Standard.co.ke is such a site made with pligg – I saw it on their footer. Your community will be excited with such a site because it’s easy to make it on the front-page of your Bookmarking site easily.
The hundreds of online opportunities out there, you don’t have to re-invent the wheel, just find a way of doing it differently by filling the gap. You don’t have to know html or complex programming languages. All you need to understand is the online business method and then you can outsource from experts with the least possible expense.
Monetization Strategies:
There numerous monetization strategies and each work to give results depending on various demographics:
Google Adsense - It’s the most popular monetization strategy out there. However, it can minimal earnings depending on the value of your community. For example, if you search the word “credit cards” on google.co.uk and the same keyphrase on google.sc .sc stands for Seychelles – Tiny islands in the Indian Ocean. You’ll see that under Google Uk there lots of sponsored links – meaning there are lots of advertisers bidding for the keyphrase hence they pay more whereas on Google Sc there is only one sponsored link meaning there is only one advertiser targeting that country with the key phrase “credit cards”. What does this mean to an internet Marketer or infopreneur? If you own an adsense monetizing website, you would earn more per click from UK traffic as Opposed to a click from a visitor in Seychelles. It’s up to you to identify the value of your target market and see if Adsense is the best monetization method. Here are some illustrative screen shots. Google Uk and Google Sc.
Banner Placement – Once you community website proofs to vave some good ranking on Alexa, then selling banner placements cannot be a problem. Once your advertisers start to get results they will become repeat customers and eventually their competitors will want to pay more so as to be considered for a premium placement and of course these competition wars translate to more money for you and more improvement on your community.
Affiliate/ CPA Marketing - You can identify revenue sharing websites that pay you per sale or per action. If you have a technology forum then placing tech products from amazon or antivurus and antispyware offers would be relevant to your community and definitely will earn you money. This can be very lucrative business model especially if you know how to do it right e.g. by offering bonuses and extensive product reviews. You can combine other strategies to this monetization model.
Premium Membership or Content – Once your community is able to interact freely there are certain sections that you can limit to paid members or subscribers. This will earn you a monthly passive income that you can use a budget to keep on improving your community and your premium offerings.
Combination of the Above Strategies- It’s not cast with stone that you should stick to a single of the above strategies you can combine two or more. Keep on experimenting until you get the right one. Once you set up a community you can as well build another and another.
If you like this post feel free to share and bookmark – You can enjoy more by joining the Supreme Marketers Circle. To your Success Mike Ndegwa
Earn more with AdSense tips by email
A few months ago, we updated the email communication options in your AdSense account to give you more choices about the types of messages you’d like to receive from us. You can now pick the types of messages that interest you from five categories:Customized help and performance suggestions NewslettersGoogle market research Special offersInformation about other Google products and services which may be of interest to youIf you’d like to receive emails with optimization tips that are targeted to your specific account settings and ad implementation, you’ll need to choose the category Customized help and performance suggestions. You’ll receive roughly one email per month from us with targeted performance suggestions, so you don’t have to worry about your inbox overflowing with messages from us.
In case you aren’t currently opted into this category, we’d like to recommend that you update your preferences to be able to receive Customized help and performance suggestions going forward and not miss out on valuable information on how to optimize your AdSense performance.Posted by Annette Vorstoffel - AdSense Optimisation team
Attracting new brand advertisers to your site
We’re constantly focused on bringing new advertisers and more advertising spend to AdSense sites. One way to do so is to make it easier for brand advertisers to reach their goals on AdSense sites. Brand advertisers are focused on raising brand awareness and driving engagement, typically with display ads, for a product or service a person may buy in the future. Brand advertisers differ from direct response advertisers, who typically look for clicks and conversions from the campaigns they run on your site. For example, an advertiser selling DVDs online may want users to click through and make purchases, while a brand advertiser for an upcoming summer blockbuster may want to generate awareness among users. Because of their campaign goals, brand advertisers tend to be more selective about the sites their ads run on, as well as where on the page their ads appear. We want to help these new advertisers compete for the portions of your ad space that are most attractive to them so that we can increase your earnings over time. With that in mind, we’re launching a new beta advertiser feature that we believe will help accomplish this goal. The new feature enables brand advertisers to target their ads to ad units that are immediately visible when a page is loaded — in other words, the portions of the page a user can see without needing to scroll down. The ads that are immediately visible are called ‘above the fold’; those that require a user to scroll down in order to be seen are called ‘below the fold.’In order to determine which ads are above and below the fold, we’ve implemented a statistically-driven model. The model takes into account various user experiences and situations, including different web browsers, monitor sizes, and screen resolutions, and only considers ads above the fold if they are fully on-screen when the browser window loads.If you’ve placed your ad units above the fold, advertisers using this feature will now be able to reach your site in a new way. If you haven’t, placing new ad units above the fold will enable them to do so. We believe this feature will help attract new brand campaigns to AdSense sites, bringing more revenue to publishers over time.Posted by Aaron Rothman - Product Manager
Troubleshooting tips part III: Performance reports & earnings
Once ads are displaying fine on your pages, your next concern may be your earnings. To make sure all your impressions and clicks are recorded correctly, check out the following notes and tips.First, be aware that your AdSense reports are updated every 15 to 30 minutes, but can sometimes take up to 24 hours to update. So at times, if you don’t see the numbers you expect in your reports, be sure to check again later once your reports have been updated.Do you use the Allowed Sites feature? Allowed sites are websites or URLs on which AdSense publishers allow or wish to have their Google ads displayed. If you use the allowed sites feature in your AdSense account, be sure to add all the websites you’re displaying ads on, to the list of allowed sites. If you forget to add a sites where you’re displaying ads, then impressions and clicks on the sites will be shown in your reports, but advertisers won’t be charged and the clicks won’t earn any revenue.
Do you have channels set up to track your clicks and impressions?If your channel reports show more data than your aggregate reports, it might be the case that your domains or ad units are being tracked simultaneously on multiple URL or custom channels. If that’s the case, then to see your complete, accurate statistics, visit your Advanced Reports page. When you select the Aggregate Data radio button and click Display Report, you’ll see all clicks, page impressions, and earnings from your account with no duplication of data.Alternatively, you may see that your aggregate reports show more data than your channel reports, even if all your pages are tracked with channels. This can occur sometimes when your page is displayed within a frame; in this case data won’t appear in your channel reports but will display in your aggregate reports.
Channel data can be a bit tricky, so make sure to pick distinctive names to differentiate between URL and custom channels — that way, you’ll know exactly what data you’re viewing. We also recommend checking out our optimization tips for channels to help you determine which ad units and placements are performing well, and how you can use this information to earn more revenue.If you have ad placements, have you named them accurately? Once you create channels for your ad units or domains, you can turn your custom channels into ad placements that advertisers can specifically target their ads to, using placement targeting. When entering a description for your channels to appear as ad placements, be sure to enter something informative and accurate to represent your site well.Also, we advise you to be careful when renaming the ad placement as you will lose existing advertiser bids.Next week, we’ll look at publisher controls and how to filter certain ads from appearing on your site.Posted by Ulrike Jung - Inside AdSense Team
Join us for two live webinars this week
This week, we’ll be hosting two live webinars to help you discover how you can make the most of your AdSense account with a detailed understanding of DFP Small Business and AdSense for search.The DFP Small Business (formerly Google Ad Manager) webinar will take place on Tuesday, March 2nd. This webinar will cover how you can:Use DFP Small Business to sell, schedule, deliver, and measure all of your direct-sold and network-based ad inventory (including AdSense) Have AdSense backfill your directly-sold inventory and compete with your other ad networksOptimize your AdSense placementsThe AdSense for search webinar will take place on Wednesday, March 3rd. In this webinar, you’ll learn how to:Optimize your AdSense for search performance Improve the relevance of your search results and ads using keywordsWe encourage you to post your questions in advance of each webinar on our Google Moderator pages for DFP Small Business or AdSense for search.Sign up for these webinars here! We look forward to seeing you soon.Posted by Caroline Halpin - AdSense Optimisation team
