If you're an avid Inside AdSense reader, you know that we frequently post about the latest developments in AdSense and new features you can take advantage of. However, we've heard from some publishers that they want to know more about what's happening in AdWords, and what we're doing to bring more relevant, targeted ads to AdSense sites like yours. With that, we'd like to take a moment to give you insight into a few recent AdWords developments, and what they mean for you as an AdSense publisher.

One of the main changes is the ability for advertisers to be more specific with their ad targeting through a combination of contextual targeting and placement targeting. As you may know, contextually targeted ads will appear on your pages if an advertiser's keywords match your content, while placement-targeted ads will appear if an advertiser has specifically selected your ad placement or site. Now, advertisers can target your site or placements, but can also specify keywords for them so that their ads only appear in the most relevant pages. These ads will still need to compete with the available inventory of ads for a particular placement, and so only the highest-paying, most relevant ads will appear on your pages. At the same time, you'll still be able to use your Competitive Ad Filter to prevent ads from specific URLs from appearing.

What does this mean for you, as an AdSense publisher? Your users may see more relevant ads on your pages, and advertisers who become more confident that their ads are reaching the right audience may increase their ad spend -- both of these can result in higher monetization for you. In addition, while advertisers previously could only change their bids for all ads running across multiple sites, they can now adjust their bids for individual sites. This means that advertisers can spend more of their budgets on the specific AdSense sites which perform well and generate high-quality leads for the advertiser.

With these recent improvements, we're looking forward to expanding the number of advertisers who use the AdSense content network and increasing the relevance of their ads on your sites. Not only will this increase your earnings potential through the AdSense program, but it will also strengthen the ads ecosystem that benefits publishers, advertisers, and users.

Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

(To the tune of "Strangers in the Night")

"Publishers with websites, creating content
Wondering about their sites
If with their content, they could show some ads
Before the day was done

Something in AdSense, was so inviting
Something about those ads, was so exciting
Something in our Help Center
Told them they must be one

Publishers with websites, yearning for earnings
They were just publishers with websites
Up to the moment
When they placed their first ad code
Little did they know
Revenue was just a click away
A happy-user-generated click away and --

Ever since that day, they've been monetizing
Newbies at the start, they're now optimizing
It turned out so right
For publishers with websites.

Newbie, newbie dooo, da da da daaaa da..."

If my lyrical effort didn't clue you in, and our Newbie Central resource wasn't a big enough clue, let me come right out and say it: we care about new publishers. For the next few weeks, we'll be sharing that caring every Friday, with posts especially intended for all the publishers who have recently joined AdSense, fresh and green like a newly mown lawn in the summertime.

Now let's see if we can apply that same spirit of new beginnings to your sites.

Posted by Julie Beckmann - AdSense Publisher Support

Since our announcement about retiring AdSense Referrals during the last week of August, we've noticed a number of questions in your blog comments and in our Help Forum. In this post, we'll address some of the most frequently asked questions.

When you say 'AdSense Referrals' are being retired, does this only mean the program where I refer publishers to AdSense?

No, all referrals will be retired. This applies to referrals for AdWords advertisers, as well as for Google products.

What's the deadline for generating referral conversions once the program has been retired?

In order for you to be credited for a conversion, the referred user must complete the required action by the last week of September 2008. However, please keep in mind that your referral units will no longer display after the last week of August.

I have referral earnings in my account, but they haven't been included in a payment yet. Will I lose all past referral earnings?

No. If you've had successful referral conversions in the past, they'll still be included in your earnings and future payments. As mentioned above, any additional conversions must occur by the last week of September 2008 in order to generate earnings for your account.

Can I sign in to the Google Affiliate Network with my AdSense login information?

At this time, no. You'll need to create a new login and password on the Google Affiliate Network site at http://www.google.com/ads/affiliatenetwork/ .

Will my ad units and search boxes be affected by this Referrals change?

No, AdSense for content and AdSense for search will still be available to publishers in our supported languages, and you can continue to generate ad and search code by visiting your AdSense Setup tab.

Thanks for your feedback, and we hope this helps provide clarification. Feel free to visit our Help Center for additional details about the AdSense Referrals retirement.

Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

In addition to participating in the AdSense network, you may also be interested in having your site ranked in organic Google search. In this post, I'll highlight some important points for search optimization. While there's no a magic formula to make your site show up first on a search results page, there are some good practices when it comes to links, design, content, and the structure of your site.

First of all, as a reminder, Google organic search and AdSense are independent of each other. Displaying AdSense ads on a site won't change the ranking of the site in Google search in any way. So it follows that sites containing AdSense ads don't receive special treatment in Google search.

Ranking in Google search is based on many different algorithms, and optimization for search is a long, continuous process. For these reasons, and because the techniques might violate our guidelines, we recommend avoiding any techniques that claim to optimize your ranking very quickly or radically. If you have concerns or questions, you can consult other webmasters on a number of forums, including Google's official forum for webmaster-related issues.

We encourage you to monitor the quality of your site's backlinks -- links from any site directing to your site. To increase your site's popularity, check if other sites that discuss similar topics or have a similar reader base are aware your site exists.

Outgoing links are also important and should comply with our guidelines. When you create a link to another site, we recommend first asking yourself: "Is this link going to be useful for my visitors?" or "Is this link likely to be clicked by my visitors?". Don't participate in link schemes or buy/sell links that pass PageRank, as it is against our guidelines and may hurt your site's performance in our search results.

Here are some tips for structuring your site:

• Your pages should have a clear hierarchy and relevant internal links. We also recommend creating a Sitemap and using Google's Webmaster Tools. These tools are useful, user-friendly and will provide information such as where your backlinks come from or which queries visitors used to reach your site.
  
• Use <title> tags that are explicit and useful for the user. For example, avoid a title like "Homepage" or "Welcome to my site".
  
• For images, use ALT attributes to describe appropriately what the image is about. We've recently created a quick and useful YouTube video to further explain this topic:
  
  
  

Also, adding original and compelling content on a regular basis may help Google crawl your pages regularly. It can have the added benefit of attracting links to your pages too.

Finally, design your site with your users in mind, and be patient and consistent in your efforts. To attract quality backlinks and develop your optimization strategy, it's important to keep a clear structure for your pages and regularly add organic content.

Posted by Ambroise Fensterbank - Search Quality Evaluator

Following on the five tips on AdSense for content optimization our Sydney team presented a couple weeks back, now let's turn to AdSense for search. As you may know, we recently integrated Custom Search Engine into AdSense for search to provide additional customization options and improved targeting. Whether you've already implemented an AdSense for search box on your site or you're just getting started with this feature, we recommend these five optimization tips:

1. Place your search boxes in visible locations.
   
   Integrate your search boxes in easy-to-find locations, such as under the header or in your left navigation. Also, keep the placement of your search boxes consistent on all your pages, so users will know where to look if they need help finding something.
   
   
2. Add two search boxes to content-rich pages.
   
   For pages with a lot of content or which require scrolling, try placing one search box at the top of the page and another at the bottom. A box at the top of the page will allow users to perform a search immediately, and a box at the bottom will provide a search option to users who've just finished reading your content. You can also track and compare the performance of each search box by creating custom channels.
   
   
3. Host your search results on your own site.
   
   To keep users on your pages, you can host your search results and ads within your own pages. If your users don't find what they're looking for in the search results or ads, they'll still be able to to navigate to other sections of your site using your site's template. In addition, you can further integrate your search results into your site by customizing the colors of the results page.
   
   
4. Add a search box to your search results pages.
   
   Similar to #3, try placing a search box on your search results pages so users can perform additional searches from your site.
   
   
5. Customize your ad locations.
   
   Place ads at the top and right sidebar of your search results pages. This layout offers added visibility, and our tests have shown that these ad locations can improve monetization.
   

After you've optimized where search boxes are placed on your site, don't forget to try new targeting options such as keyword refinements and vertical search. To generate AdSense for search code and take advantage of these features, sign in and visit your AdSense Setup tab. You can also find more information in our Help Center.

Posted by Sandra Tsui - AdSense Publisher Support

We'd like to let you know about two recent improvements to video units that make them more easy and appealing to place on your sites. First, we've partnered with some new content providers that we'd like to highlight. These partners have signed on to let AdSense publishers embed their videos and share in the ad revenue.

• Broadbandtv: "Broadbandtv is partnering with YouTube to bring the very best video program lineup to a growing and engaged online audience. Broadbandtv shows include hits from Fashion, Celebrity News, Sports, Technology, Comedy and Travel to top notch Spanish-language TV series like Somos Tu y Yo."
  
• Canadian Broadcasting Corporation: "CBC/Radio-Canada is Canada's national public broadcaster and one of its largest cultural institutions. CBC/Radio-Canada is available how, where, and when Canadians want it."
  
• The Orchard: "A global leader in digital music, video, new media and brand services, The Orchard offers family content like Gumby, Mr. Bill, My Favorite Martian, and other categories of content like music and comedy."
  

To give you a better idea of the videos that are available for syndication to your site, we've also created a gallery of some featured video units content partners. Note that to choose any of these content providers for your video unit, you should get their YouTube username by visiting their YouTube channel, and then put this username into the "Channel" field when choosing content for your unit.

Second, we're happy to announce that video units now support 728x90 and 160x600 formats to more easily fit into your site. These two new formats will feature five video thumbnails - when a user clicks on one of the thumbnails, a full sized video unit will appear, along with accompanying ads:

728x90 video unit


728x90 video unit, expanded


160x600 video unit, expanded



You'll generate earnings for valid clicks or impressions on the ads which appear. To use the new formats, you'll need to create new video units by visiting your AdSense Setup tab. To choose the new content for your video units, you can edit any of your players or set up new video units dedicated to this new content. Please keep in mind that video units are currently only supported for English or Japanese-language accounts in the following regions:

Australia, Canada, France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Spain, United Kingdom, United States

Finally, if you haven't edited or made a new video unit recently, you may not have noticed that you can now preview the kinds of video that will show up in the unit, based on the filtering choices you've made. We heard that you wanted more insight into the types of content that would display, and we think this will help.

While you can use video units like any other ad, they're also a great addition to the content of your page. So we encourage you to use video units as you may have used embedded YouTube videos in the past - to add variety and interest for your users.

Thanks for all the feedback that's helping us to make video units more useful to you. If you have more thoughts to share, please leave us a comment.

Posted by Ryan Hayward - AdSense Product Marketing

We're constantly looking for ways to improve AdSense by developing and supporting features which drive the best monetization results for our publishers. Sometimes, this requires retiring existing features so we can focus our efforts on the ones that will be most effective in the long term. For this reason, we will be retiring the AdSense Referrals program during the last week of August. We appreciate your patience during this transition and here are some alternative options to consider:

• Google Affiliate Network: As part of the integration of DoubleClick, the DoubleClick Performics Affiliate Network will now operate as the Google Affiliate Network for advertisers targeting users located in the United States. Similar to the AdSense Referrals program, the Google Affiliate Network enables publishers to apply for advertiser programs and get paid based on advertiser-defined actions instead of clicks or impressions. For further details, please visit: http://www.google.com/ads/affiliatenetwork/.
  
  
• AdSense for content ads: If you have less than three AdSense for content ad units on a page, you may wish to replace the referral ad units with standard AdSense for content ad units.
  

If you currently use referral ads, either to promote Google products or offerings from AdWords advertisers, AdSense Referrals code will no longer display ads beginning the last week of August. We encourage you to take the following steps before the product is retired:

• Remove the referral code from your site(s): Please take a moment to remove all referral code from your sites before the last week of August, so you can continue to effectively monetize your ad space.
  
• Run and save all referrals reports on your desktop: Create and save all reports related to the referrals program on your desktop, so you continue to have access to your valuable campaign information.
  

Thank you for your support of AdSense Referrals in the past. If you have any additional questions, please visit our Help Center.

Posted by Anuj Srivastava - AdSense Product Marketing

This week, the 50,000th person subscribed to the English AdSense Help Group. To mark this milestone, the AdSensePro Team would like to extend a special word of thanks to all the folks who use our forums, particularly everyone who takes the time to share their knowledge with other publishers. Thank you for providing useful help and advice, and for contributing to the AdSense community.

If you're not familiar with the Help Group, do check it out to share your AdSense experience. Members of the AdSensePro team will also be on hand to help answer questions, raise issues to our product and engineering teams, and collect your valuable feedback. And if you'd prefer to discuss AdSense in a language other than English, feel free to visit one of our international forums: Arabic, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Czech, Dutch, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, and Turkish.

Posted by the AdSensePro Team - AdSense Help Group Support

"I want to improve my AdSense performance, but I don't know how to get started!"

We hear you. The myriad of optimisation tools and options AdSense offers can be a bit overwhelming. Colors, placements, channels, ad sizes -- there are more options to choose from than you can poke a mouse cursor at! Ideally, we wish you could just click a button and have a fully optimised webpage published to the Internet. But until that magical day comes, we have a solution for you.

The Australian AdSense team has put together a short video that takes the confusion out of optimising. The video goes through a step by step guide to optimising AdSense performance - from analysing your page type, to choosing the right ad sizes and colors, and tracking your results. We also cover our most popular tips to increase eCPM, without adversely affecting your community's experience on your page.



So if it's been a while since you've refreshed your AdSense ad units, or if you're confused on how to use channels to optimise, invest ten minutes into the video. It's the closest thing you'll get to that magic button.

Posted by Mel Ann Chan - AdSense Australia Optimisation Team

Tomorrow, our engineers will be performing site maintenance from 10am to 3pm PDT. You won't be able to access your account during this 5-hour time frame, but ad serving and ad targeting will not be affected. In addition, your reports will continue to track your earnings as usual. We've converted the maintenance start time for a few cities around the world:

London - 6 pm Saturday
Pretoria - 7 pm Saturday
Mumbai - 10:30 pm Saturday
Kuala Lumpur - 1 am Sunday
Brisbane - 3 am Sunday

In the meantime, we hope you enjoy the first weekend of summer -- or winter, depending on where you are :)

Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

Back in 1995, Gary Rosenzweig published some of the world's first web-based games. Some of his early games as well as more than 100 created by CleverMedia, the company he later founded, are available at GameScene.com.

"Even in those early days, it was clear to us that web advertising was the best way to earn money from our content," says Gary. Revenue from ads offered him creative and financial freedom to be both a game developer and publisher. But the early ad banner market was volatile and fluctuated constantly. It wasn't until he joined the AdSense program in August 2003 that Gary was able to get consistent high-level performance from advertising.

"AdSense not only performs better than banner ads, but is also much better for site visitors," Gary notes. "The text ads and high-quality display ads used by Google were a far better experience than the pop-ups, pop-unders and interstitial ads still used today by our competitors."

At GameScene.com, CleverMedia uses 160x600 wide skyscrapers next to the games, and 300x250 medium rectangles on instructions pages. Gary encourages other publishers to test different ad formats and placements on their own sites, especially as their users grow and change. Having non-obtrusive but relevant advertising on high-traffic pages provides the revenue CleverMedia needs to keep making innovative web games.

Have your own success story to share? We'd love to hear from you.

Posted by Sunil Subhedar - AdSense Publisher Support

Following our recent testimony in front of the U.S. House Small Business Committee, we revisited Washington D.C. to deliver our first seminar for small businesses on the web -- specifically those in the Hispanic-American community. The Spanish-language seminar, co-sponsored by both the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and the League of United Latin American Citizens, focused on making the most of AdSense and other Google tools to effectively and efficiently manage a small business online. We know a number of our publishers are Hispanic small business owners, so we'd like to share the video of the event with you (in Spanish with introductory words in English):



If you're a small business owner, we also recommend taking a look at our small business resource page, available in both Spanish and English.

Posted by Carolina Shea - AdSense Publisher Support

You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. That's why our publishers know how important it is to make their sites sticky to keep users on their pages longer. If you're a savvy coder, love to build cool apps and mashups, and wonder what more you can do to enhance your website with video and increase the stickiness, then we'd like to cordially invite you to attend Powered By YouTube on Thursday, July 10!

Powered By YouTube is our first-ever developer gathering focused on bringing together a wide range of developers to learn more about YouTube's APIs and Tools. You'll spend the day at YouTube's headquarters and learn how to bring YouTube to your website, share best practices, and get hands-on with the APIs. You'll also meet fellow YouTube API developers across a wide range of companies, YouTube engineers and product managers, and hopefully leave inspired to enhance your user experience with the YouTube APIs.

Some important details about the event below:

Powered By YouTube
Thursday, July 10, 2008
10:30am - 5:00pm
YouTube headquarters at 901 Cherry Ave. San Bruno, CA 94066
Cost: Free!

Registration is extremely limited, so we encourage you to register now if you're interested.

Hope to see you there! And if you're interested in staying up-to-date on what's going on in the world of YouTube APIs and syndication, check out our blog.

Posted by Christine Tsai - YouTube APIs & Tools Team

It seems like every time I visit our AdSense colleagues in the Dublin office, I get invited out to celebrate a birthday or a promotion with that great Dublin tradition: the pub crawl. Today I'd like to dedicate a few words to another pub crawl. (I can hear your groans throughout the blogosphere.) That's right, I'm talking about the AdSense "publisher" crawl.

As you may know, it's important to allow the AdSense crawler access to the pages that display your ads. If our crawler can't see the content of your pages, your ad targeting may suffer, and with it your earnings. It's also important that we hold all pages to the same policy standards, and we may eventually stop serving ads to pages that the crawler can't access. With this in mind, I'd like to ask you two questions highlighting potential roadblocks to a successful AdSense crawl and let you know what you can do to correct them.

1. Are you using a robots.txt file on a site with Google ads?

If so, you might be inadvertently blocking the AdSense crawler from accessing parts of your site. If you aren't sure what a robots.txt file is, it's a text file that you include on your domain that allows you to block crawlers from accessing your site. You can find out if you're using a robots.txt file by going to example.com/robots.txt (replace 'example.com' with your own domain name) or by using Site Diagnostics. If you do use a robots.txt file to block certain crawlers from accessing your site, it's a good idea to add an explicit invitation to the AdSense crawler so it knows it's welcome to visit any page with AdSense code. Please keep in mind that the AdSense crawler is separate from the Google bot for our search index.

To give the AdSense crawler access, add these two lines to your robots.txt file:

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*
Disallow:

You can use the Site Diagnostics link in your AdSense Reports tab to see whether we're having trouble crawling any pages on your sites. If you're concerned about the privacy of some pages on your site, keep in mind that we don't publish any of the information retrieved by the Mediapartners-Google crawler, also known as the AdSense crawler, in any index, and it will only crawl pages of your site which contain the AdSense code.

2. Are your pages restricted by a login?

Our crawler will also get tripped up by any page that's only accessible to a logged-in user. If certain pages of your site are only available to users that have logged in, and you place ads on these pages, it's important to give the Mediapartners-Google crawler explicit access to view them too. In this case, the answer is site authentication, which you can find under your AdSense Setup tab. (Please note that you'll need to be migrated to Google Accounts to use this feature.) You can give our crawler access while continuing to prevent other users or bots from accessing the content on your site.

While using the Site Diagnostics tool, you may notice sites that are blocked for other reasons -- please review our Help Center for more information about why your site may be showing up as blocked. By allowing our crawler access to pages hosting Google ads, you'll get the most targeted ads for your pages in return. I think we can all toast to that.

Updated example site

Posted by Ben Ewing - AdSense Publisher Support

By now, our longtime publishers are likely well-versed in our regular maintenance -- so sing along if you know the words: Our engineers will be performing routine site maintenance tomorrow, June 7th, from 10am to 2pm PDT. During these four hours, you won't be able to log in to your account. However, ad serving will not be affected, and your reports will continue to track your earnings as usual.

We've noticed from past comments that many of you are concerned about public service ads (PSAs) or no ads appearing on your sites during the maintenance period. Please be assured that the maintenance does not affect the targeting or delivery of your ads. If you're experiencing difficulty with your ads, we recommend reviewing our Help Center for more information about PSAs, ad relevancy, and why ads may not appear.

If you're not located in the PDT time zone, here's the maintenance start time for a few other cities:

London - 6pm Saturday
Bucharest - 8pm Saturday
New Delhi - 10:30pm Saturday
Manila - 1am Sunday
Sydney - 3am Sunday

Have a great weekend :)

Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

Following the success of video units in a number of international locations, we're excited to announce the launch of video units for English-language websites in Australia. In addition, video units are now available to publishers who are located in Japan or who have Japanese-language websites. If you're not already familiar, video units are embedded, customizable video players which both enrich sites with relevant video content and enable publishers to earn extra revenue. Relevant and non-intrusive companion and text ads accompany the video content.

With this new launch, you can show videos from our YouTube content partners on your site. You can choose those videos by category, choose individual YouTube partners, or have video units automatically target your site with relevant video. You can also choose the individual videos to be displayed in your video units. Finally, if you have video content of your own, you may even be able to sign up as a YouTube partner to have your content distributed to other AdSense publishers' video units.

To set up video units on your site, log in to your AdSense account and visit your AdSense Setup tab; if you have a site in one of our supported countries and languages, you'll see the option to set up video units. For more information about video units, please feel free to re-visit our original launch post and our discussion of some of your most frequently asked questions. In addition, you might find the information in our Help Center useful. Finally, we'd like to note that we're working on expanding video units to additional countries, but we're not able to provide a timeline for when that may occur.

Posted by Elena Martin - AdSense Product Marketing

As we've mentioned on the blog before, your AdSense login is your ticket to accessing your account and receiving specific account information about your payments. But we know it can be difficult to keep track of all of those email addresses and online usernames -- whether they're for online banking, social networking, a retirement fund, or AdSense.

If you do happen to forget which email address you used as your AdSense login, we can help look the information up for you -- just fill out our Help Center form. If your information matches our records, we'll send you an email with details on how to access your account.

Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

We're happy to announce that publishers located in Hungary and Hong Kong can now sign up to receive payments by Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT). With EFT, your earnings will be directly deposited into your bank account so won't need to wait for checks to arrive in the mail and clear at the bank. Signing-up for EFT is a simple process, and just involves entering your bank account information, then verifying a small test deposit. Please keep in mind that all EFT payments will be made in your local currency, and the exchange rate is determined at the time of payment.

While EFT is currently only available in a limited number of countries, we're working on expanding our payment options and will announce any updates right here on the blog.

UPDATED for accuracy

Posted by Elodie Bodet - AdSense Publisher Support

We’re excited to let you know that Inside AdSense is now available in Traditional Chinese. The new blog, Inside AdSense: Google AdSense 中文網誌, caters to publishers in areas such as Taiwan and Hong Kong, and our Traditional Chinese team will use it to announce the latest product updates and news. In addition, we’ll be featuring local success stories and providing optimization tips to help improve your AdSense performance.

Visit the new Traditional Chinese blog today, and don’t forget to subscribe via email or feed!

Posted by Hailei Song – AdSense Taiwan/Hong Kong Publisher Support

As you may remember, we started asking publishers to update your AdSense accounts to Google Accounts last May. When you do that, you can manage all of your Google products using one login and password, and also take advantage of new features like Site Authentication and the recently improved AdSense for search.

In the next few weeks, we'll soon be requiring all publishers to update to a Google Account. If you haven't yet updated your account, we recommend doing so as soon as possible to avoid any issues with account access later. Just sign in and follow the instructions in the wizard that will automatically appear. If you don't see the wizard, it means that your info has already moved to Google Accounts.

In messages to us and in the Help Forum, we've heard a number of concerns about moving to Google Accounts. We'd like to take a moment to address them.

I don't want to update my AdSense account to the Google Account I use for all of my other products. I'd prefer to keep them separate.

That's okay -- you can maintain multiple Google Accounts, so you're welcome to migrate your AdSense account to a different Google Account than the one you use for other products. For example, you could maintain your 'publisher@gmail.com' account for services like Gmail and Webmaster Tools, but create a new Google Account associated with 'publisher@yoursite.com' just to use for your AdSense account. When prompted to pick the radio button that best describes you, select 'I have an email address and password (Google Account) I already use with Google services like Gmail, Orkut, or the personalized home page.', and then 'I'd like to choose a new login name and password just for AdSense'.


Is this secure? I already gave AdWords with my credit card information and AdSense with my bank account info. I don't trust this.

Please be assured that we take the security of AdSense accounts very seriously, and your AdSense information will never be shared across products. We don't have access to your AdWords credit card from our end, and AdWords doesn't have access to your bank account information (if you've set up EFT). Again, if you'd prefer to keep your two accounts separate, just follow the instructions above.

I tried to update my account in the past, but I saw this error message: 'The Google Account you've selected is associated with another user.' What do I do?

It means that the email address you chose had previously been used to apply for an AdSense account (which may or may not have been approved). However, we've just clarified the messaging in our wizard to help you understand which situation applies to you. In most cases, we've found that publishers are attempting to update their login to an email address associated with an unapproved application. We've just made it possible to continue with the update process from within the wizard in this situation. If you're attempting to update to an email address being used for a different approved AdSense account, you'll receive further options and instructions.

What happens if I don't update?

If you choose not to update your account after the requirement change, you'll no longer be able to sign in to your account. As a result, we encourage you to begin updating your accounts as soon as possible.

Finally, we recommend looking through our Help Center for more information about updating your account to Google Accounts.

Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

We're always delighted to hear how your AdSense payments have made a difference in your life, whether it's covering your web hosting costs, supplementing your school tuition, or helping you quit your day job.

This month, we hope that you'll consider making a difference for others by contributing a portion of your AdSense revenue to the cyclone relief efforts in Myanmar (Burma) and in China. Google.org is donating more than $1.5 million to assist in the relief and rebuilding efforts.

We especially encourage our US and UK publishers to use Google Checkout to donate:

http://www.google.com/myanmarcyclone
http://www.google.com/chinaearthquake

In addition to monetary contributions, the affected areas may also need tents, medicine, or other items. We encourage you to contact your local Red Cross to find out how to donate these items.

If you'd like to help out even more, you can add a gadget for China or Myanmar (Burma) to your website to encourage your visitors to make their own donations.



Naturally, we want to hear about your generosity, so please let us know if you're able to donate.


Updated with links to gadgets

Posted by Elizabeth Ferdon - AdSense Publisher Support

The Google content network now accepts display ads served from qualified third-party vendors. Third-party ad serving has been a longstanding request from top brand AdWords advertisers who use third parties to create and manage their online campaigns. Initially, we will be only accepting third-party ads in English, but we hope to expand to other languages soon.

Making the Google content network more accessible to large brand advertisers also benefits AdSense publishers and end users. Third-party ad serving will introduce a greater variety of advertising into the Google content network, increase the inventory of quality display ads competing to show on AdSense publisher sites, and offer more engaging ads for end users. In the long run, we believe the increased inventory and ad competition will result in increased revenue for many AdSense publishers.

Rest assured that ad quality on the content network will remain one of our highest priorities. Only advertisers with whom we have proven relationships and who've clearly demonstrated commitments to our quality standards may participate in this program. And our policies governing ad content and formatting are unchanged.

How to control third-party ads shown on your site
The same ad management features for Google ads also apply to third-party ads. You can use the Ad Review Center to filter specific placement-targeted ads from appearing on your site. To block contextually-targeted ads from a given advertiser, you can use the Competitive Ad Filter. (The Ad Review Center currently only shows placement-targeted ads, not contextually-targeted ads.)

Optimizing your site to allow third-party ads
To allow third-party ads on your site:

1. Opt into image ads - Currently, third-party ads are only available in image or Flash, so they won't appear in text-only ad units.
   
   
2. Enable advertisers to target your AdSense channels - Most advertisers who use third-party ads are brand-conscious. They prefer to specify websites where their ads will appear in order to optimize the targeting and effectiveness of their campaigns.
   
   
3. Opt into placement targeting - Placement targeting will allow advertisers to target their ads specifically to your site.
   

Following these steps will enable your site to accept third-party ads. However, we can't guarantee where or when third-party ads will appear on your site.

Want to learn more about third-party ads? Visit our FAQ.

Posted by Courtney Chin - AdSense Publisher Support

Tomorrow, May 17th, our engineers will be performing routine site maintenance beginning at 10am PDT. While you won't be able to access your account for 4 hours, your ad serving will not be affected and we'll continue to track your earnings as usual.

We've converted the maintenance start time for a few cities around the world:

London - 6 pm Saturday
Dubai - 9 pm Saturday
Mumbai - 10:30 pm Saturday
Jakarta - 12 am Sunday
Melbourne - 3 am Sunday

Thanks for your patience, and enjoy the weekend!

Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

Have you ever wanted to poll your website visitors on their interests or ask them for feedback on your site content? Now, using a Google Docs spreadsheet, you can create a simple form, collect responses from your visitors in an online spreadsheet, and publish the results on your website -- in a few easy steps. All of the data will be kept in your secure, password-protected spreadsheet.


Here's how it works:

Create a new spreadsheet, build your survey form, and invite users to fill out the form. You can send out an email to people you'd like to fill out the survey (maybe to a mailing list you have), or generate some HTML code that allows you to embed the survey directly on your web page.


Your visitors won't need to sign in to Google Docs to fill out the form. Responses are automatically added to your spreadsheet, and you can receive notifications by email when submissions occur. You can even keep a closer eye on responses by adding the Google Docs forms gadget to your iGoogle homepage.

Finally, in your spreadsheet, you can create graphs and charts showing the results, and then publish those charts back on your site as gadgets. As the responses trickle in, the published charts will update automatically.


Check out the Google Docs Help Center for more detailed instructions on how to create your own live survey. I hope you'll be better able to get feedback from visitors to your site using this tool.

Posted by Andrew Chang - Google Docs Marketing Manager

Last month, Google product managers and marketers held a workshop on video advertising and content monetization at the Ad:Tech conference in San Francisco. We thought our publishers would be interested in hearing some perspectives on industry trends, some new details about AdSense for video, and the opportunities that Google is offering advertisers to get their messages in video content. Here are some highlights to guide your viewing:

A state of the market: First, your friendly author takes you through trends in video consumption, users' consumption habits, and the estimated market size for video advertising.

History of video ad serving: Robert Victor uses conversations with "Joe and Sam" to describe the evolving needs of buyers and sellers, and previews how Google and DoubleClick In-Stream can fill the gaps.

AdSense for video: Shamim Samadi goes into detail about AdSense for video, describing the various formats we're supporting and recent success stories from Revver on the publisher side and HP on the advertiser side.

YouTube: Tracy Chan describes the compelling opportunities for advertisers on YouTube and how marketers and video creators can take advantage of the new Insights tool to gather a variety of data on viewership of their videos.

And if you want to snack on some more Google AdSense videos, check out our overview of options for publishers to make money from video content on their pages. You can also visit our video solutions site for publishers.

Posted by Ryan Hayward - AdSense Product Marketing