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Thursday, January 29, 2009

Add on to AdSense

Do you regularly work with your webpages and AdSense implementation, tinkering with HTML or PHP and creating images and code on the fly? If you do, Firefox add-ons can help streamline the process of creating webpages. Here are some in particular that you may find useful:

ColorZillaThis extension tells you which RGB or hex color you're looking at, to help you make sure you created that logo for your business with just the right shade of blue, for instance. The tool also creates custom color palettes while you're browsing, so you can use them in your designs.

MeasureItLike the name says, use this add-on to measure the width and height in pixels of any element you see on a webpage. It's very simple to use, and you can define how much space you have left for that AdSense ad unit on the right-side. :)


IE ViewDo you frequently use Internet Explorer to check how your website renders on that browser? This add-on allows you to view the way any page would look if it were opened in IE, without the hassle of opening another browser. You can also see pages that aren't Firefox-friendly much more easily.


WebDeveloper toolbar This all-in-one toolbar gives you quick control over things like JavaScript display, form and CSS elements, screen resizing (so you know what your website looks like in smaller resolutions), HTML validation, and much more.

Hopefully, we'll soon have a similar set of add-ons for Chrome, and we'll be sure to share them with our readers.

Saturday, January 24, 2009

Ads back up on Blogger-Adsense

If you have a Blogger site, some of you may have noticed that your ad units began showing public service announcements (PSAs) in the last nine hours. This was due to a technical issue that we've now identified and resolved. As a result, you should now begin seeing paid ads on your pages again.If you're still displaying PSAs after 24 hours, we recommend reviewing our Help Center and using our PSA troubleshooter.

Thursday, January 22, 2009

robots.txt

User-Agent: *Allow: /2008/06/adsense-publisher-crawl.htmlAllow: /2008/04/promoting-your-referrals-properly.htmlAllow: /2008/07/adsense-referrals.htmlAllow: /2008/05/website-design-101.htmlAllow: /2008/06/refinance.htmlAllow: /Allow: /2007/08/dragon-jambala.htmlAllow: /2009/01/update-on-us-tax-forms-for-2008.html
User-Agent: GooglebotAllow: /2008/03/repairmycreditnow.htmlAllow: /2008/03/search-engines-and-link-building.htmlAllow: /2008/06/adsense-publisher-crawl.htmlAllow: /2008/04/promoting-your-referrals-properly.htmlAllow: /2008/07/adsense-referrals.htmlAllow: /2008/05/website-design-101.htmlAllow: /2008/06/refinance.htmlAllow: /Allow: /2007/08/dragon-jambala.htmlAllow: /2009/01/update-on-us-tax-forms-for-2008.html

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Update on US tax forms for 2008

This is a friendly reminder that we're currently preparing and mailing tax forms to eligible U.S. publishers and will be sending them out by the end of January. Please keep in mind that not all U.S. AdSense publishers will receive a tax form from Google.How do you know whether to expect a tax form? We'll send you one if:


You submitted a Form W-9, are not a corporation, and were paid at least US $600 in 2008, OR
You indicated that you are subject to backup withholding and had taxes withheld-

If you qualify for a tax form, you can expect it to arrive at the address listed in your account by early February. We recommend checking your account to ensure that your mailing address is up-to-date; you can make any necessary updates by following the instructions in our Help Center. Please note that payments dated in 2008 will be reported in 2008. This means that unpaid earnings from 2008 that are rolled over to 2009 (for example, December 2008 earnings paid in January 2009) will not be included.

If you won't be receiving a tax form, but you still have questions on how to report the payments you received from AdSense, please consult your local tax advisor.

Thursday, January 15, 2009

Asking Dave Taylor about AdSense

Inside AdSense: Where did the idea for your 'Ask Dave Taylor' site come from?


Dave Taylor: There's a great backstory, actually. I've written twenty different books on various business and technical topics, including Teach Yourself Unix in 24 Hours and Creating Cool Web Sites. Each time I'd publish, I would be sure to include my email address and other contact information. Problem was, people would send me email with questions. Lots of email with questions.


Over time I found myself answering the same questions again and again and realized that there had to be a better way for readers to search through an archive of already answered questions. I tried an online discussion forum, but it didn't really work very well (though it did give me an excuse to write my own bbs system from scratch, but that's another story.

Then early in 2003 this "weblog" thing started to gain a bit of traction. When I first saw how it was built upon the concept of an author writing entries and others being able to add their comments, I realized that it could be ideal for my needs.


IA: Why did you join the AdSense program?


DT: As a businessperson, I had always viewed my website as a cost center. I mean, you had to pay for hosting, you had to pay for graphic design, you had to pay for Internet connectivity, etc. That was just my mindset. It was a marketing expense and its purpose was lead generation for my consulting and book sales.


In mid-2003 my friend told me about this "AdSense thing" and said that he'd been experimenting with it and making some money. So I finally decided that I'd try putting some adverts on my site (I'd been on the Web since 1996 but never had any adverts on my sites until that point). That first month I made more than I expected by simply adding the AdSense adverts to my pages and was surprised as heck.



That's when it hit me, that my website was becoming a profit center for my business, not a cost center. I began to pay more attention to the site and published new content on a more regular basis. Within a few months I was earning enough to pay my mortgage, and today my website, and specifically Google AdSense, is a primary revenue stream for my entire company.



IA: Can you talk a little about your experience with optimizing your ads?



Enter A/B testing. I read and talked with many AdSense publishers, tried what they suggested and what had worked for them, fiddled with my own ideas, and generally tried every variation I could imagine to see if I could improve the click-through-rate of my ad blocks. The greatest boosts I saw in clickthrough rate were when I moved the advert into the middle of my articles, when I made sure it had the same color background as the material around it, and when there wasn't a solid border or other visual element to make the ad stand out from the surrounding content.


Truth be told, I've also paid close attention to the sites profiled on the AdSense blog, looking at how they integrated ads into their own design and trying to emulate their successful techniques on my own site.



IA: Glad to hear you used the blog! Any other optimization tips for our readers?



Focus on generating really good content that meets real user needs.
Design your blog so that there are minimal distractions for the user.
Wrap your blog entry around the Google ad unit and put the ads where users will see them, though make sure you have them visually distinct from your content: trying to trick readers into clicking on ads is a definite no-no and anti-reader too.








Monday, January 12, 2009

Vista tools

You want to find a program you do not use very often, you know it is installed, but you just cannot find it. Windows Vista lets you search straight from the Start Menu and you do not even need to take your hands off the keyboard because the first result is already selected.

This means that you can cut down on the number of shortcuts you need to create, but it does not come naturally to some people.

Since the desktop metaphor was invented, navigating your way around a computer has been about using the mouse, and having all the icons on display. It is like having all your books and tools out and within arms reach.

The more stuff you have, the less useful this method becomes, so it is only natural that we are moving to search-centric navigation.

The search begins as soon as you enter the first characters. You can search for e-mails and websites you have visited. It searches within other documents too, so you are not limited to searching for the filename of a Word document, you can look for matches inside all the Word documents you have.

Speech recognition

There are actually some features about Windows XP that I miss because they are still the quickest way of doing things for me. It is the File Menu I am talking about here. It has been so familiar, so long I feel a bit lost without it.


If you feel the same way, just tab the ALT key and it comes straight back. In fact, you can avoid pressing the keys at all, because Windows understands your voice.

Speech recognition within Windows is not actually new. There has been support for it hidden inside Office since 2002 and you have been able to buy off-the shelf software which does this for years. But now, Windows can do all that itself.

It is still not the easiest to start though, you have to go to the Control Panel, select Ease of Access, then Speech Recognition Options.

First you have to select the kind of microphone you are using, and then train the computer to recognise how you say different types of words. Normally this involves spending 20 minutes or so reading passages from out-of-copyright books. This can get very tedious, but it is necessary if you want the results to be anything like accurate. The only other thing you will need is a good microphone.
STUMBLE IT !

Saturday, January 10, 2009

Behind the scenes of scheduled maintenance

AdSense Software Engineer -

We know many of you have questions about what we work on during our monthly scheduled maintenance and how this work affects you. As one of the engineers who's involved with this maintenance, I'd like to provide some insight into what goes on during these periods.

First, you're probably used to hearing us say that maintenance won't affect your ad serving, and that your earnings will still be tracked as normal. Here's why: when someone visits your site, one of our many ad servers decides which ads we'll show on your pages, and we log the fact that we delivered those ads to your site. We use this information to calculate the number of ad impressions your site visitors generated. Likewise, any clicks on those ads get logged by another of our ad servers. These servers operate independently, so as we roll out upgrades, we can update groups of ad servers without impacting overall ad serving or our internal logs.

Reporting, on the other hand, is quite a different issue, and this is why you aren't able to access your account during maintenance periods. The stats logged by our ad servers aren't immediately reflected in your reports, as they need to be collected and tallied in one place before we can give you a single summary of your ad impressions, clicks, and earnings. Our systems diligently work around-the-clock to collect this data from our many ad servers and tally it all up for each publisher, generally updating the reports with recent stats every 15 to 30 minutes.

Although many of our software upgrades occur throughout the month without any noticeable impact to you, certain types of reporting upgrades just aren't practical to perform on-the-fly. When we perform our monthly maintenance, we have a chance to put this reporting collection on hold for these big upgrades. This lets us upgrade our databases, prepare our systems for new features, and perform the necessary tasks needed to keep a complex system like this one running smoothly.

Some of you have noticed that impression and click stats appear a bit low after we bring the AdSense site back online, wondering if maybe AdSense maintenance is used to change data to affect your earnings. That's a theory I'm happy to debunk: this discrepancy is actually a reporting artifact, occurring because we pause stats tallying during our maintenance period. After resuming, our reporting systems have to digest all of the accumulated impression and click logs, and there's a lot of data! It takes the reporting systems a little while to process the logs, but rest assured that once we get the chance to catch up, the reports will reflect all of the impressions, clicks, and earnings that occurred during the maintenance period. If you're concerned about the stats you're seeing, we recommend checking back throughout the day as your reports are updated.

I hope this explanation provides a better picture of what we're doing during these maintenance periods. Though I do have to work the occasional Saturday, it's worth it to make sure your stats are accurate and everything's working smoothly. (Hey, at least it gives me the chance to sing cheesy 80's pop music in the office to my heart's content without disturbing too many other engineers!)

Thursday, January 8, 2009

Microsoft begins Windows 7 push

The first public trial, or beta, version of Windows 7 has been released.

Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer used his keynote speech at CES to announce that software developers would get at the trial version on 7 January.

On 9 January members of the public will get the chance to download the successor to Windows for themselves.

Mr Ballmer said Windows 7 would be the pivot of a broader Microsoft push to improve the way its separate software and service families work together.

In delivering the opening keynote, Mr Ballmer has taken over from Bill Gates - who in 2008 bowed out of day-to-day involvement with the company he founded.

In a nod to the chilly economic climate, Mr Ballmer said: "We face some really big challenges. We are all feeling it and its impact will likely be with us for some time."

But, he said, the global economic slowdown would not hobble the pace of technological change.

"I believe our digital lives will only continue to get richer," said Mr Ballmer. "There's no turning back from the connected world."

The newest version of the Windows operating system would, he said, be the "linchpin" of an effort to make it easier for customers to do more with the different Microsoft gadgets and services they use.

Gadget family

Although Windows 7 was a trial version it was, said Mr Ballmer, almost "feature complete" and would help to re-define the way people thought of the software.

Instead of it being an operating system mainly associated with a PC, he said, Windows was becoming a "connected platform and experience".

Microsoft is expected to cap the number of copies of the beta version of Windows 7 available to the public. The minimum requirements for running Windows 7 are a PC with a 1 Ghz processor, 1GB of RAM, 16 GB of disk space, 128MB of video memory and support for DX9 graphics.

Some of the Windows 7's features help it work with other devices. A "home group" system makes it straightforward to enrol PCs, Xbox consoles, media servers and other gadgets into a local network that can share media and content.

Demonstrations during Mr Ballmer's keynote also showed changes to Windows Live online services that let it act as a co-ordinating centre for many of the things people do on the web.

In connection with this Mr Ballmer announced a deal with Facebook which would mean any changes a member made to their page on the social networking site would be echoed on their Windows Live pages.

Another feature shown off was a "Quick Add" system that made it easy to annotate e-mail and instant messages with weblinks and other information from specific categories, such as restaurant locations, without firing up separate applications.

Another demonstration showed a phone running Windows Mobile being used to control the list of favourite TV shows and movies that customers of Microsoft's internet TV system Media Room can compile.

"Today much of the stuff we care about sits in silos; on a PC, phone or the web," said Mr Ballmer. "Your experiences are split when you move from one to another."

"Increasingly these barriers are going away," he said, adding that the internet would act as the cloud linking all three.

He predicted that the PC, phone and TV would become closely connected devices that acted as an individual's digital "ecosystem".

"Connecting all these devices together is the last mile in creating a real breakthrough experience for consumers," said Mr Ballmer.

Thursday, January 1, 2009

Adsense-Year in review: 2008

As 2008 winds down, we'd like to follow tradition and close out the year with a look back at a few of the biggest happenings in AdSense.In 2008, we introduced new features like AdSense for feeds and an improved version of AdSense for search to help you generate additional forms of revenue. We brought Google Ad Manager out of beta to help publishers with smaller direct sales teams more efficiently sell, schedule, and deliver their ad inventory. At the same time, we worked towards providing more information within AdSense accounts. In April, we enabled the Ad Review Center in all accounts to help you review ads placement-targeted to your sites. And in response to requests for more insight into your reports, we launched link unit reporting and began inviting publishers to link their AdSense accounts with Analytics.




Internationally, we launched AdSense for content in Thai and also expanded Western Union payments to a number of new countries such as Egypt, Taiwan, and Panama. To help more publishers find answers to their questions, we launched AdSense Help Forums in Hebrew, Czech, and Slovak.



On the English Help Forum, we celebrated our 50,000th member and then unveiled a new platform with additional capabilities. Now, forum participants can vote on the best answer to their questions, subscribe to individual discussions, and receive replies to their threads via email.



In news closest to home here on the blog, the Inside AdSense family continued to grow with the launch of blogs in Russian and Traditional Chinese. With your support, our 13 global AdSense blogs received 3.8 million pageviews from 2.4 million visits this year. Through our blogs, we brought you a Newbie Fridays series, 'Optimisation Essentials' videos from our Australian team, and began distributing AdSense stickers. Check out the sticker requests, postcards, and notes we received in the photo on the right :)


Last but not least, the 2008 Reader's Choice Award for this year's most visited post goes to our April Fool's joke, 'Introducing AdSense for conversations'. Co-author Julie Beckmann had this to say: "A lot of hard work went into omega testing the product for this post. While I found the hat fit snugly, I was disappointed to learn the effect my Orange County upbringing had on my chats -- 17 'like's' sprinkled into a two-minute conversation? My chats aren't fit to be placement-targeted."



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