Cover all your 'Bases'

Looking for a place where you can easily share your site content with the world? Try Google Base, Google's database of information submitted by businesses and individuals like you. In a nutshell, Google Base is a free service that helps you publish virtually any kind of information -- be it your latest riveting screenplay, your physical business locations, or your famous brownies recipe.

So what's cool about Google Base for publishers? For starters, it allows you to make your content more accessible and useful. You can describe the content you upload with your own keywords and attributes so users can easily find it when they search Google Base, Froogle, Local or Google.com. For example, if you're posting a recipe, you might include attributes such as 'Meal: Breakfast', 'Main Ingredient: Eggs', and 'Servings: 4'.

The other cool feature is that you can choose to share a lot of your content, or just a little. You can post individual items by completing a simple UI form, or you can submit a bulk upload file with multiple items in standard formats including TSV, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0 and Atom 0.3 formats. This means that if you already have RSS or Atom feeds, you can easily submit your content to Google Base without much additional work. To keep yourself informed with official news and tips about Google Base, read the Google Base blog or join the Google Base Help Group.



Posted by Naureen Kabir - Google Base Support

Eight for experts

After showing our new publishers some love recently, we realized our veteran publishers deserve recognition, too. Test your AdSense expertise with the suggestions below.

1. You're probably familiar with alternate ads, but you may want to take alternate ads a step further and try out collapsing ad units.

2. Save time with custom reports and emailable reports -- so quick and convenient!

3. Our optimization tips are great, but what's even better is testing them on your specific site -- whether it's a blog, a forum, or a site like Engineeringtalk, which really benefited from link units.

4. You know how great your site is -- get the word out to advertisers by customizing your Onsite Advertiser Sign-up landing page.

5. Integrate AdSense for search into your site even further by making sure that SiteSearch is enabled and your website is the default. Be sure to customize your search box, too, so it fits in seamlessly.

6. Add your site to Google's search results using Google Sitemaps so people can find all the great content you've created.

7. Since you're already using multiple ad units (right?), be sure you're making the most of them, including using section targeting to get the most relevant ads.

8. Once you've exhausted the AdSense resources, try more of Google's publisher tools, like Google Maps API and Blogger.

Got an expert tip for us? Let us know.

Posted by Julie Beckmann - AdSense Publisher Support

We love you!

Happy Valentine's Day to all of our AdSense publishers.

Posted by The Google AdSense Team

The experimental approach

One of our responsibilities on the AdSense engineering team is to ensure that you always receive the most relevant and valuable ads on your site. It's exciting because we deal with the entire ad targeting process from analyzing your site's content to selecting ads and determining how to best display the ads on your page. I just celebrated my 2-year AdSense anniversary last week, and it's never ceased to be a fascinating and challenging project.

Prior to launch, any innovation in AdSense goes through three phases: analysis, implementation, and experimentation. When evaluating a new idea that might improve ad targeting, we first analyze all of our existing data. AdSense generates an amazing amount of data every day -- a record of every ad impression and click occurring on every web publisher in our network -- so identifying interesting trends is a never-ending challenge, from determining what ads perform best to identifying the most common causes of public service ads in German.

Once we believe a new idea is ready for testing, we have to implement the idea in our ad serving code using the very powerful development tools Google has provided for us. Naturally, all code designed to serve ads to our customers must pass a rigorous review and testing process before release to ensure that we continue to offer uninterrupted service. During the testing process, we typically run an experiment on a small percentage of traffic for anywhere from a few days to a few weeks. We select the experiment traffic randomly so it is as representative as possible of overall traffic; no individual site should ever see more than a small percentage of its traffic involved in an experiment. Because most targeting experiments involve adjustments to the ad-selection algorithms, they are rarely noticed by anyone outside Google. However, we occasionally run experiments that affect the format or display of ads as this is the only way we can verify whether a potential change will provide an overall benefit to publishers, advertisers, and users.

Throughout an experiment, we track a large number of metrics including clickthrough rate and cost per click, and compare this data to regular traffic collected during the same time period. This prevents external factors unrelated to the experiment -- for instance, a large new advertiser or publisher entering the system, or time considerations such as holidays, weekends, and seasons -- from significantly skewing the results.

After an experiment is complete, we consider the effects on publishers, advertisers and end users; we only release new features we believe will provide an overall benefit. Of course, once a feature is launched, we continue tracking the same metrics to make sure everything is behaving as expected, while starting to work on the next innovations in AdSense targeting.

Posted by Scott Benson - AdSense Engineering

Ad Rank explained!

Ever wonder what determines the order in which ads appear on your site? Then you've wondered about the Google AdWords ad ranking system. AdWords is the advertising platform thousands of advertisers use to place their ads on the Google network. Once an ad is in the AdWords system, it competes against other ads to appear on relevant pages in the AdSense network. It's through this real-time dynamic auction system that ads are ranked. Those ads with the highest Ad Rank at any given moment are displayed on your site.

So, you ask, how is Ad Rank determined? While bid price (the price advertisers are willing to pay for each click per thousand impressions) is obviously an important factor, we also calculate advertiser Quality Score to make sure the best performing ads will always appear on your site. Quality Score takes into account factors such as an ad's relevancy and click-through rate (CTR) (i.e. how likely users are to click on a given ad) because a higher CTR sometimes outweighs the benefits of a higher bid price. This ensures that your site always displays the ads representing the highest revenue potential for you.

You might also wonder: "But image ads usually take up multiple ad slots -- does this limit the amount of money that I can make?" Good question, but no -- for an image ad to appear on your site, it has to produce an effective CPM greater than the sum of the individual text ads.

For a more detailed explanation about how Ad Rank is calculated, visit the AdWords Pricing overview.



UPDATED: Image

Posted by Bismarck Lepe - AdWords Product Marketing

I, Robots.txt

Often when troubleshooting targeting inquiries, we find that publishers have unknowingly blocked the Googlebots from crawling sections of their site, resulting in PSAs or mistargeted ads. With the newest release of Google Sitemaps, you can get a report that shows you Googlebot's view of your robots.txt file.

In addition to general status updates such as the last time Googlebot downloaded your robots.txt file, this new report allows you to test specific URLs to see if your robots.txt file is blocking them from the MediaPartners Googlebot, the Google content crawler. Plus, you can test changes to your robots.txt file against other Google crawlers (e.g., search or image) or the Robots Standard. This way you can experiment with changes to see how they would impact the crawl of your site, as well as make sure there are no errors in the file, before making changes to the file on your site. Learn more about this recent release on the Google Sitemaps Blog.

Still not sure if Sitemaps can really help you? Check out the newest Sitemaps success story showcasing fellow AdSense publisher ApartmentRatings.com.

Posted by Shaluinn Fullove - Sitemaps Product Marketing

A gooooood question

Lisa asked: Hi Google guys - Why do my ads say "Ads by Goooooogle" instead of "Ads by Google" as I've seen on some other sites?

We say: Just as we have holiday logos for our Google homepage and "Goooooooooogle" at the bottom of our search results, we thought "Ads by Goooooogle" would be a fun alternate version of "Ads by Google" for our AdSense ad units. They are both branding features we've tested, and we found that "Ads by Goooooogle" is often more memorable for users than "Ads by Google", so you may notice either label appearing beside your ads at any given time. Currently, link units and AdSense for search ads are only labeled as "Ads by Google".

So why label our ads at all? The "Ads by Google" label helps distinguish clearly between content and ads, thus providing a more positive user experience. It also distinguishes Google ads from other ads so that when users click on Google ads, they know they can trust Google to provide high quality ads targeted to their interests. This trust provides value to both publishers and advertisers.

Lastly, by clicking on an "Ads by Goooooogle" or "Ads by Google" link, users can submit feedback about the Google AdWords and Google AdSense programs. This feedback is valuable to us as we're always working to improve our feature and product offerings.

Posted by Brian Axe - AdSense Product Management