An 'AdSense Help'-ing hand

Since the AdSense Help Group launched, we noticed you've been having lots of interesting discussions about AdSense. We thought we'd address a couple questions that have come up fairly frequently in the Help Group.

My website tracking software is registering more impressions than my AdSense account -- why is there a discrepancy?

To provide more accurate information about ad performance, we count impressions only when the AdSense JavaScript is executed by a user's browser. Therefore, the impressions listed in your AdSense account may differ from statistics reported by third parties. For example, AdSense doesn't count impressions generated by:

Other spiders, robots, crawlers from other search engines

Browsers that don't have JavaScript enabled or don't support JavaScript

Browsers that don't support the iFrame tag

Programs that people may have written to grab website content

I pasted AdSense ad code for two ad units into my site -- why is only one ad unit appearing on my page?

Don't worry, this is normal ad behavior designed to automatically optimize your site's revenue potential. Although you can display up to 3 ad units per page, sometimes only the first ad unit contains ads. When highly targeted ads aren't available for all your ad units, we'll display the additional ad units as transparent boxes rather than showing ads that our system determines would not perform well. As our ad inventory changes, or if your page content changes, you may start seeing ads appear in all of your ad units.

In the meantime, you can set up your ad code so that an alternate ad will appear when this happens.

Posted by Suzie Dewey - AdSense Publisher Support

Love Google Maps?

Show your visitors where you stand with the Google Maps API. The Maps API allows you to embed geographical information into your site using JavaScript. You can add overlays to your map including markers, polylines, and shadowed information windows. It's a great way to enhance your current site content, and best of all, using the Google Maps API is free.

To learn more, and to find out whether your site meets the terms of use, visit the Maps API FAQ.



Posted by Bill Kilday - Google Maps Product Marketing

Referrals are a wiz with new wizard

Since we received positive feedback about the new AdSense for content and AdSense for search code generation wizards, we've created a referrals code wizard to help guide you through the process of implementing referral buttons on your site. Simply choose Referrals from the AdSense Setup page of your account and select the product of your choice.

And don't forget, now you can display referral buttons in a text link format as well.

Posted by Laura Chen - AdSense Publisher Support

See the bigger picture

There's good news for those of you who are partial to Square (250 x 250) and Large Rectangle (336 x 280) ad formats: Now they support image ads! This means that if you've opted to display image ads, the pool of ads competing to show on your site is about to expand -- and with more ads available, your revenue potential will also grow. Check today to make sure you're opted into image ads.




Posted by Suzie Dewey - AdSense Publisher Support

Maintenance Saturday April 22nd at 10 a.m. PST

We'll be performing routine AdSense maintenance on Saturday, April 22nd at 10:00 a.m. PST. During this time, you may not have access to your account. However, please be assured that your Google ads will continue to display and stats and earnings will be recorded as usual.

Thanks for your patience!

Posted by Suzie Dewey - AdSense Publisher Support

Search results with the flavor of your site

You can already customize the style of your AdSense for search results. Now, you can customize the substance of them, using the new site-flavored search option available in your AdSense account. The learning technology used in site-flavored search offers a subtle flavoring of your results to match the themes and topics of your site. For example, if you've got a site about music, over time our search results might learn that when your users search for [bass], they mean the instrument - not the fish.

Interested in getting site-flavored search for your search results? Just visit the AdSense Setup tab, choose AdSense for search as the product, and generate your search code as normal, making sure to select the Flavor search results to my site checkbox in the process.

Since site-flavored search technology takes time to learn your site, you likely won't notice any changes right away -- but over time, you should see gradual improvements.

Posted by Julie Beckmann - AdSense Publisher Support

Announcing text links for referrals

In reading the feedback from publishers on the forums and in our support queues, the number one product request was the ability to use referrals in formats other than the current buttons. In particular, publishers asked us for the ability to refer via text links. So I'm pleased to announce that we now offer text links as a format option for AdWords, AdSense and Firefox referrals. You'll notice the new text link formats show up for US English; we'll be adding other languages shortly.

Please keep the suggestions coming.

Posted by Rob Kniaz - AdSense Product Manager