Ad Review Center available to all publishers

Many of you have been eagerly waiting for the Ad Review Center to arrive in your accounts, and we're happy to tell you that this feature is now available for all publishers. By enabling you to review all ads placement-targeted to your site, the Ad Review Center gives you more transparency and control, and ensures that ads are relevant to your site's content and users.

We wanted to share a publisher's thoughts about the Ad Review Center, so we chatted with Jennifer McDonald, Account Manager at RealNetworks for sites such as rollingstone.com and film.com. Before using it, Jennifer says that "the concerns Real had... were mainly concerns about running competitive ads on our sites." But she says that by using the Ad Review Center, her team has been able to keep competitive ads from running. As she notes, "We are able to quickly review the ads before they run on our sites and block any ads that are considered competitive to our services."

The Ad Review Center is now available for all publishers utilizing placement targeting. You can get started with this feature by visiting your 'Competitive Ad Filter' page, located under the 'AdSense Setup' tab.

Before getting started, we strongly recommend keeping your review preference set to the default of 'Run ads immediately.' This will let you allow or block ads after they have run. If you choose the other option of 'Hold ads,' the ads will await review for 24 hours before being allowed to run automatically. Using the 'Hold ads' setting will keep ads from participating in the auction while they await review, potentially lowering winning bids and your AdSense earnings. Ads that you have blocked can't compete in the auction either, so we ask that you keep in mind the revenue impact of blocking ads or switching from the 'Run ads immediately' setting.

For more information about using the Ad Review Center, please visit our Help Center, and to start using it, please log in to your account.

Earning revenue from youtube videos just got easier

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.

Make a date with data in Google Analytics

Here in AdSense, we’re big on data. From spreadsheets and graphs to weekly reports and metrics, we constantly turn to numbers when running our business. In a similar vein, we've heard your requests for more data to help you run your AdSense websites, which is why we’re excited to announce the integration of one of our personal favorite reporting tools, Google Analytics, with AdSense. We're gradually rolling out this functionality to publishers, and you'll see an invitation link at the top of your 'Overview' and 'Advanced Reports' pages when it's been enabled for your account.


By integrating your AdSense account with a new or existing Analytics account, you’ll have access to in-depth reports about user activity on your site. In addition to the wealth of metrics already available in Analytics such as unique visitors and visitor language, you'll now have access to granular reports that break down AdSense performance both by page and by referring site. Armed with this new data about user behavior, you’ll be able to make more informed decisions on how to improve the user experience on your site and optimize your AdSense units to increase your revenue potential.


We've highlighted a few ways to use the integrated metrics below, but we encourage you to be creative! Come up with your own to discover how useful (and fun) new data can be:

• Discover untapped markets. Use the geographies report to determine which regions are under-represented in your site’s user base. Optimize your site’s content to attract more of these under-represented users.
  
• Drive high-earning traffic to your site. Use the 'Referring sites' report to determine where the users who are making you the most money are coming from. Focus your efforts on getting traffic from these sources.
  
• Delve deeper into AdSense reports. Use the visualization feature to look at trends in your site's AdSense performance over time, or by time of day.
  

Again, this feature is not yet available to all our publishers, but please keep checking your account for an invitation. In the meantime, you can take a look at our demo to learn more about the reports you'll have access to:



Posted by Vineesha Malkani - AdSense Publisher Support

Wednesday, October 22, 2008 at 11:04:00 AM

Maximizing revenue by exposing your channels to the right advertisers

As you may know, you can set up your custom channels so that they're targetable by advertisers - these targetable custom channels are known as ad placements. By selecting the 'Allow advertisers to target this channel' checkbox on the channel creation page, you can enable brand advertisers to target their content to your audience directly on a CPM or CPC basis.

Creating ad placements allows them to show up in AdWords, so that advertisers who create placement-targeted campaigns can include your content directly. What many publishers don't know is that this also makes your content available to Google's internal sales teams, who work closely with many advertisers looking to target a certain audience or type of content. With this in mind, we thought it would be important to mention a few best practices which will help advertisers and our internal sales teams target your content to help you maximize revenue:

First, take time to make sure your channel names and descriptions accurately describe your content and audience. By including descriptions that closely reflect your content, you'll also attract advertisers from those areas. Naming and descriptions are important.


On that note, our second tip: be very careful about changing the name of an ad placement. If an advertiser has already targeted one of your specific channels, the channel will become unavailable to the advertiser once you change its name. If you wish to rename a channel, we recommend creating a second channel with the new name, and then attaching both channels to your ad unit. Remember, you can attach up to five custom channels to an ad unit.

Third, use the 300x250 medium rectangle, opted in to both text and image ads. This is one type of targetable ad unit that's in high demand by Google's CPM advertisers. We recommend placing these units in line with your content, and describing them as they relate to the content. This combination of format and placement enables advertisers to use image, text, or rich media (including gadget ads) effectively. In feeds, we recommend opting in to both image and text in all ad units, as many of these advertisers only target with image ads into feeds.

Finally, as always, the most important tip for maximizing revenue from your ad placements is to create quality content that is visually appealing and attracts a quality audience. Many brand advertisers look at all placements before placing an advertising order to make sure the destination sites are in line with their brand and attract the type of audience they wish to target for a particular campaign.

Which Option Strike Price Should I Trade?

Option Trading Question

Can you blog about the strategies that you use to pick the option strike price and expiration month once you have identified a possible stock? Also are there any tools out there one can use to identify possible profit and loss and probability of success for option trading?

Option Trading Answer

Throughout my blog you will find that your option strategy is a function of your opinion. You have to nail down the direction, duration and magnitude of the move. Then you need to assess your confidence in; the market, your analysis and your recent performance. All of these factors will lead you to the optimal strategy and trade size.

If I have a long term grinding move in a stable stock and the market is neutral, I would probably opt for an ITM call that has a few months of life. I will be buying intrinsic value and the option will move point for point with the underlying. This gives me the latitude to take profits along the way. This is almost like a surrogate stock position.

If I am looking for an explosive move in a short period of time, I will buy a front month OTM option. That will give me the biggest bang for my buck and I can buy more contracts.

If I am fairly confident in the stock’s strength, but the market is volatile (like now), I might consider selling an OTM put credit spread. This strategy will give me more cushion. If the market moves against me, the stock should hold up well and the puts will expire. If the market falls apart I should have time to buy back my put spread before things get ugly.

I trade relative strength and weakness within the market - that is my edge.

As for software, OptionVue has very good scenario analysis software. It will calculate your P&L based on many different outcomes. For most traders, this software is overkill. I like to keep things simple.

Know your stop before you place the trade. If your forecast was wrong, get out. When a trade is profitable, start getting out when the move stalls. Predetermined targets will often leave too much money on the table and you need to let your winners run as long as they are behaving.

Adsense for Domain

The Inside Adsense Blog has just announced that Adsense for Domains is now available to all publishers who owns several domains which are not really live sites. Whereas previously the only way that domain owners can earn from their registered dormant sites was to let third-party publishers to run their ads on those and then earn a miniscule of earnings. But with the Adsense for Domains open to all publishers, everyone can now run Adsense on their dormant domains regardless of whether they own only one or two domains.

By being available to “all publishers”, Google meant only those who are located in the U.S. Google Adsense is yet to roll this out to “all publishers” worldwide.

Although this would not make domain owners ultra-rich with revenues, it is however a better deal than letting other advertisers not connected with Adsense run their ads on those domains. This is for the simple reason that Adsense assumingly pays better.

If you opt to join Adsense for Domains, which you can do so by visiting your Adsense account, Google will run ads, links and search results on the dormant domains and will add more useful information in the near future.

This is a good way of making use of domains we bought but we haven’t really had the time to develop. Instead of paying them for nothing and hoping someday that somebody would buy it a high price, might as well run Adsense for Domain there.