Richer user engagement with the new 970x90 ad size

It’s been just a few months since we launched a new, larger 300x600 ad size, giving you the opportunity to attract brand advertisers looking for large spaces to engage with users. We’ve received a lot of positive feedback and are happy to let you know that we’ll be expanding our range of available ad sizes to include the brand-friendly 970x90 ad unit.

970x90 ad units are a newly adopted IAB standard and are also known as ‘super leaderboards’. This larger ad size is another visually impactful placement for advertisers to promote their products and services even on wider screens.

970x90 Text Ad

970x90 Image Ad

Please note that since the 970x90 unit is new to our network, you’ll currently see mainly text ads appearing in this format. The new super leaderboard ad unit can show up to four text ads organized in a column layout but, as with other ad sizes, the number of text ads per unit may vary per impression. When enabling image and rich media ads for this unit, display ads in the size of a 728x90 unit will be displayed initially. Over time, we expect that the inventory of image and rich media ads for the 970x90 will grow and you’ll see more full-size display ads being served.

As always, we strongly recommend considering your content when placing your ad units to ensure both users and advertisers have a great experience with your site. Please note that the limit for AdSense for content ad units still remains at three per page.

We look forward to hearing what you think about the new 970x90 ad size. Feel free to share your thoughts and feedback on our AdSense +page.

Posted by Omer Gimenez Llach - AdSense Software Engineer & Johan Land - AdSense Product Manager
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Preview landing pages in the Ad review center

If you're looking to manage the ads that can appear on your pages, be sure to check out the controls available in the Ad review center. To help save you time, we recently added the ability to find and review ads more efficiently. Today, we’re happy to announce a new feature which enables you to not only view a specific ad, but to also check the landing page where this ad leads -- all directly within your account.

If you're looking for more insight into your users' experience with the ads on your site, the landing page view offers you a quick and easy view of what users see when clicking on an ad. This in turn will help you make a more informed decision about whether or not an ad is suitable for your audience.

To try this new feature, simply log in to your AdSense account and navigate to the “Allow and block ads” tab. As you review individual ads in the Ad review center, hover over an ad and a small magnifying glass will appear in the bottom right corner. Click on the magnifying glass and you'll see the ad and its specific landing page.

Please note that this feature is currently only available in accounts with the language preference set to English. However, we’re planning to roll this feature out in other languages soon. In the meantime, please feel free to share your feedback on this new feature on our AdSense +page.

Posted by Pedro Diaz - AdSense Software Engineer

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Enhancing text ads on the Google Display Network

Text ads have proven to be a great way to help advertisers extend their Google search campaigns to sites in the Google Display Network, enabling publishers like you to earn revenue from your content. This is why we're continuing to work on improving text ads, even as we introduce new ad formats.

One change, rolling out this week, will make the look and feel of text ads more consistent as consumers and advertisers use screens interchangeably, and distinctions between devices fade. You'll notice a new clickable arrow icon, as well as slight optimizations to font size, spacing and text layout. These enhancements are among the largest that we have made to text ads, and our experiments indicate an uplift in clicks across publishers on the Google Display Network.

These changes will happen automatically for most text ads on your pages, and the color of the arrow icon will be based on the color palette you’ve selected for your ad units. For instance, if the background of your ad units is white, the icon will be grey; for other background colors, the icons will be a different shade of the background color. Consistent with our program policies, we ask that publishers refrain from mimicking these arrows or placing similar images around their ad units. Below are some example of this new text ad format in the 200x200 and 300x250 ad unit sizes.

200x200 Ad Unit

300x250 Ad Unit

We understand text ads are important to our publishers’ business and we’ll continue to innovate on new formats. Please feel free to share your feedback and suggestions with us on our AdSense +page; we look forward to helping you find new ways to grow your online businesses.

Posted by Johan Land and Stephen Yuan

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More flexible controls with site-level blocking

One of the top requests we hear from publishers who manage multiple websites is the ability to block different ads for different sites. For instance, you may want to block a category of ads from appearing on a children’s site you run, but allow those same ads to appear on a separate sports-related site you also manage. As part of our ongoing efforts to improve AdSense to meet your needs and help you earn the most possible from all of your sites, we’re happy to let you know that this level of granular blocking will be available for AdSense for content within the next days.

There are two steps to getting started with these new flexible controls, once they're enabled in your account:

1. Site management:
To allow you to take actions on a site-level basis, you’ll first need to let our system know which domains and subdomains you own. Under your ‘Home’ tab, visit the ‘Account Settings’ page and navigate to the ‘Access and authorization’ section. From here, you can create your Owned sites list which already contains domains from your existing URL channels and manually add further domains or subdomains. Or, claim a site from an automatically populated “Unclaimed” sites list, which shows all sites where your ads are receiving impressions. Note that manually entering subdomains into the list will enable you to block ads from those specific pages while still allowing the ads to appear on the top-level domain.

2. Site-level blocking:
Once you’ve set up your Owned sites list, visit your ‘Allow and block ads’ tab. You’ll notice some updates, including a new navigation bar, new horizontal tabs, and an option for site-level blocking; your Owned sites list will appear under ‘AdSense for content’ in the navigation bar. To block ads from a specific domain or subdomain, just select it from the list in the left-hand navigation and make updates. If you’d like to apply any blocking changes to all of your sites, just select ‘All my sites’ from the left navigation.

With site-level blocking, you can block by URL; if sensitive and general category blocking are available in your language, you’ll be able to apply these options as well. Please keep in mind that there’s a product-wide limit of 500 URLs that can be added to a block list. And as always, we recommend blocking ads with caution, since doing so decreases the potential revenue you can earn.

Ready to get started? Visit our Help Center for detailed instructions on how to manage sites and set up site-level blocking rules. We’d also love to hear your feedback on this new feature -- visit our AdSense +page to leave a comment and discuss your thoughts with other publishers.

Posted by Adomas Paltanavičius - AdSense Engineering

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Search for ads by image in the Ad review center

The Ad review center in your AdSense account is a powerful tool that enables you to control the ads that appear on your site. Earlier this year, we revamped the tool to provide you with even more robust controls, and today, we’re making an improvement that will help you find and review ads more efficiently. Using the technology behind Google Image Search, you’ll now be able to upload an image file from your computer to search for related image ads; you can then review and take action on the returned ads.

For example, you might want to find and block ads that contain the logo of a competitor. After you upload and search for the logo, we’ll return image ads that contain the logo and which are eligible to appear on your pages. Please note that you can upload images with a maximum file size of 2MB and a largest dimension of 1024 pixels. To try this feature, log in to your AdSense account and visit the ‘Allow and block ads’ tab.

As always, we recommend using filters sparingly, and only in cases where you’d prefer not to have the specific ad or advertiser appear on your pages. Please keep in mind that blocking ads isn’t a revenue optimization tool; it can have a negative impact on your potential revenue since it reduces the competition between ads eligible to appear on your pages.

This feature currently only returns image ads, but we’re planning to support more ad formats in the future. We’ll let you know as soon as any additional functionality becomes available -- in the meantime, feel free to share your feedback about this feature on our AdSense +page or visit our Help Center for detailed instructions.

Posted by Marcel Crasmaru -- AdSense Engineering

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Larger, brand-friendly ad sizes available in AdSense: 300x600

As screens grow and web content continues to become richer, the format and capabilities of ad units continue to evolve as well. One of the top requests from publishers in the last year has been to add larger ad sizes to our network, and today we’re excited to announce that the popular 300x600 unit will soon be available in your AdSense account.

The 300x600 unit, sometimes referred to as a half page unit, provides a larger space for advertisers to get their message across and can offer users rich engagement. As mentioned in our recently released Display Business Trends, the 300x600 is one of the fastest growing sizes by impressions and is indicative of a trend where publishers are offering more visually impactful ad sizes that are preferred by brand advertisers. Because this unit is new to our network, you’ll currently see a large number of text ads in these placements. Over time we’ll continue to build a wide range of text and display ad inventory eligible to appear in this full slot as well.

As with all ad sizes, it’s important to carefully consider the placement of ad units to ensure both users and advertisers have a great experience with your site. If you’d like more information on the performance of potential placements, check out our heat map in the AdSense Help Center.

If you have feedback about the 300x600 ad unit, feel free to leave a comment on our AdSense +page and discuss your thoughts with other publishers.

Posted by Omer Gimenez Llach - AdSense UI Engineer

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Ad blocking part II: Blocking unwanted ads

Happy Friday and welcome to the second installment of the ad blocking series! In our first blog post, we talked about different reasons for blocking ads and common myths about ad blocking. Today we’ll discuss how to block ads you don’t want to allow on your site. Once you’ve identified the ads you don’t want to show, there are a few ways to block them: by advertiser URL, general or sensitive category (limited language availability), ad network, and individual ad creative. Below, we’ll bust more myths commonly believed about blocking unwanted ads.

Myth: The ‘Allow and block ads’ tab of my account is the only place I can block ads.
In addition to blocking ads via the AdSense interface, you can install the Google Publisher Toolbar to block ads while viewing your pages in a Chrome browser. The Publisher Toolbar is a Chrome extension that lets you view up-to-date information about your AdSense account, offers an overview of your earnings and performance, and provides ad overlays with in-page reporting. For more details on this new Chrome extension, visit the Inside AdSense blog post.

Myth: Because the ad is an image or rich media, there’s no way to find the destination URL without clicking the ad and violating AdSense policy.
As a publisher, you have a few options when trying to find out which URL you want to block:

• If you’re using Chrome, install the Publisher Toolbar extension mentioned above, which allows you to block ads as you’re seeing them on your site. 
• In your AdSense account, you can opt into the Ad Review Center where you can see all of the ads shown on your site, including text, image, and rich media ads. 

Myth: I don’t see any ads in the Shown Ads tab of the Ad Review Center, but I see ads on my site. The Ad Review Center doesn’t work! 
The Ad Review Center is a tool that allows you to review individual ads and choose whether or not to let them be displayed on your pages. Ads in the Ad Review Center have shown within the last 30 days. If your site has not shown any ads within the last 30 days, no ads will show in the Ad Review Center. Also, if you have very low traffic on your site, you may not see ads in the Ad Review Center. After you’ve submitted the request to opt in to the Ad Review Center, please allow 24 to 48 hours for ads to begin showing under the Shown Ads tab. Read more information about the new and improved Ad Review Center in our previous Inside AdSense blog post.

We hope that this blog post has busted some of the myths associated with the ad blocking feature. Have more questions? You can submit them by commenting on the post on the Google AdSense +page. We’ll be answering those questions in a Google+ Hangout on Air on Tuesday, August 7th at 10am PDT. We hope you can join us!

Posted by: Wesley Houser, Inside AdSense Team

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Ad blocking part I: To block or not to block?

Think of your website as your kingdom. You’re in control of what will be shown. AdSense provides strong controls that enable you to allow and block ads on your website. Ad blocking shouldn’t be thought of as a means of account optimization, but as a way to make sure you’re satisfied with the ads that are shown. Over the next few days, we’ll be busting some of the most common myths associated with ad blocking that we’ve heard from publishers.

Myth: It doesn’t matter how many ads I block, they’ll just be removed from my site.
Ad blocking should be used sparingly. Displaying all ads creates the most competitive atmosphere in the ad auction, with the largest amount of ad inventory possible competing for an impression on your site.

That said, there are some good reasons for blocking ads:

• You’re sensitive to the content of a particular ad (or category of ad) and would prefer it not to show on your site (e.g., politics, sexuality, or religion).
• You want to block ads from a particular company because you already have a direct advertising deal from them.
• You want to block ads from a competitor of your business.

Myth: If I block low paying ads I'll make more money.
Even if a particular ad is only contributing a small portion to your revenue, blocking it will likely cause a lower revenue-generating ad to show. We'll always display the highest-paying ad, so if an ad appeared on your site, it meant that it was the highest-performing ad of all available.

Myth: I blocked some ads for a few days and my earnings went up. This means blocking helped my earnings grow!
Earnings in your AdSense account can constantly fluctuate. Your revenue depends on a number of variables from traffic changes on your site to advertisers changing their bids. Be careful when assuming that correlation indicates causation!

As mentioned in this Help Center article, we target ads based on your content and audience. The ads that you see aren’t necessarily the same ones your users see (e.g., interest-based advertising and geotargeting). Also, ads that may seem off-topic to you as a publisher might actually be the most valuable to the user in that browsing session.

Myth: If I block enough ads, I can essentially pick the ads that will show on my site.
As Hal Varian, the Chief Economist at Google, stated in a previous post, the ads that win in the auction are the ones that are expected to deliver you the most revenue, while ensuring a good user experience. The same ads don’t always appear on your site for a variety of reasons, ranging from changes in advertiser spend to geotargeting of users.

Now that we’ve addressed some common myths, we invite you to join us for a Google+ Hangout On Air focused on ad blocking. It’ll take place on Tuesday, August 7th at 10am PDT, and you’ll have the opportunity to learn more about ad blocking and hear answers to your related questions. To submit a question about ad blocking, simply leave a comment on the post on our AdSense +page. We also encourage you to +1 questions posted by other publishers that you’re interested in hearing the answers to.

Stay tuned for part II of our ad blocking series on Friday!

Posted by: Wesley Houser, Inside AdSense Team

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Manage your AdSense account with multiple users

Need to give AdSense account access to a business partner because you manage the account together? Today, we’re happy to let you know that this top-requested feature has been added to the AdSense interface.

From now on, you can invite trusted colleagues or partners to sign in to your AdSense account and also run reports, manage payment information, and generate ad code. In addition, this new user management feature can also be used to change the Google Account login linked to an AdSense account.

We currently support two types of users on an account: Administrator and Standard user. Both types of users have full access to the AdSense interface, but only Administrators can add or remove users. As a publisher with an approved account, your access level for your account has now been set to ‘Administrator’. You can invite other people to access your account, designate them as Administrators or Standard users, and later change these settings if needed.

Please note that when another person is invited to access an AdSense account, they’ll need to use a verified Google Account login that isn’t linked to any other AdSense account or application. In addition, please be aware that Google AdSense is unable to mediate access disputes between users. As a result, we recommend exercising caution when sharing account access.

You can learn more about inviting users and find answers to the most frequently asked questions from existing or invited users in our Help Center.

We hope that this feature will allow you to manage and share your AdSense account in a more efficient way. Feel free to share your feedback and suggestions on our Google+ page.

Posted by Nick Radicevic -- Product Manager

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Block ads on your site with the updated Google Publisher Toolbar

In January, we launched the AdSense Publisher Toolbar to help you save time and monitor account performance directly from your pages. If you’re one of the over 31,000 publishers who have already installed this handy Chrome extension, you’ve probably noticed that we’ve renamed it to the Google Publisher Toolbar, as it now supports DoubleClick for Publishers as well. We’ve also been working on other major enhancements, and today we’re excited to share them with you.

The biggest improvement you’ll notice in the toolbar is the addition of blocking capabilities, enabling you to block ads as you’re viewing your site. When you see an ad that isn’t suitable for your audience, you’ll be able to take action immediately without needing to navigate through your account or investigate which ad or URL to block.

Here’s how it works, once you’ve installed the toolbar: Just as before, you can view account performance in a widget in the corner of your Chrome window, as well as ad overlays on the page itself. Clicking on one of the ad overlays will now bring up additional information about that ad unit, including the name of the ad slot, performance metrics, the destination and display URL of the ad, and a preview of the ad. Below the ad preview, you can take action on either the ad or the URL: If you are using the Ad Review Center, you can choose to block the ad directly and your action will be reflected the next time you visit the Ad Review Center. If you block a URL, it’ll be added to your URL filter list.

Please be assured that clicking the ad overlays generated by the toolbar is permitted, and won’t generate any invalid clicks. Also, keep in mind that blocking any ad will lower your potential earnings, as it reduces competition for your ad space by removing advertiser bids from the auction. It’s a myth that filtering ads can prevent ‘low-paying ads’ from appearing, so as always, we recommend blocking only those ads that you feel are unsuitable for your users.

The Google Publisher Toolbar is now available in all AdSense languages, so we encourage all publishers to give it a try. If you’re already using the toolbar, no action is needed on your part as it’ll automatically update. Feel free to let us know your thoughts about the Toolbar on our AdSense +page.

Visit our Help Center for answers to questions related to the Publisher Toolbar, and stay tuned for more updates!

Posted by Gregory Block -- AdSense Engineering

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Mobile becomes a core component of AdSense

We launched AdSense for mobile content before the smartphone revolution when everyone had a flip phone. Our goal was to help pioneering publishers monetize their mobile content. Since then, we’ve seen mobile technology advance and an increasing number of consumers are viewing content from “smarter” mobile devices. To make it easier for publishers to use AdSense to monetize mobile web pages, we've migrated all mobile ad unit sizes, including the mobile banner ad unit, into the core product.

All mobile ad sizes, including the 320x50, will be available through AdSense for content.

The new AdSense ad code automatically formats the ads for the device. We will continue to support high-end ad requests from our AdSense for mobile content product until May 1, 2012. We strongly encourage publishers who have designed mobile web pages for high-end devices to use the new AdSense ad code to avoid disruptions to service. Note that publishers with mobile websites built for WAP browsers should continue to monetize using AdSense for mobile content.

We continue to be committed to helping our AdSense publishers monetize their content as the mobile ecosystem evolves. For more information about AdSense or to learn more about how this transition may impact you, please visit our AdSense Help Center.

Posted by Vishay Nihalani, Product Manager, Mobile Ads

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AdSense now speaks Indonesian

We’re glad to announce that Indonesian has just joined the family of AdSense supported languages. Let’s celebrate by raising our hands in a kecak dance, watching a wayang kulit show or cooking traditional Indonesian recipes.

If you have a website in Bahasa Indonesia, you'll now be able to earn money by showing Google AdSense ads. To get started, sign up for an AdSense account. We'll review your application and in the meantime, we recommend you get familiar with the basics of AdSense and our policies.

If you already have an AdSense account, simply implement AdSense on your site in Bahasa Indonesia to start displaying contextually targeted ads.

You can now also implement AdSense for Mobile content on your mobile sites in Bahasa Indonesia. Check out our Help Center to learn how to implement AdSense on a mobile site.

Selamat datang di program AdSense!

Posted by Emanuele Brandi, Product Sales Lead

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Account performance at a glance with the AdSense Publisher Toolbar

We’re always looking for new ways to make it easier for you to use our tools, help you save time, and better understand account performance. With this in mind, we’re happy to share with you a new Chrome extension called the AdSense Publisher Toolbar. When viewing your website, this feature will show you a snapshot of your AdSense account performance as a widget in the corner of your browser window. It also includes ad overlays that describe the recent performance of specific ad units, and gives you the option to access AdSense directly. At the moment this toolbar is only available in English, but we’re working to make it available in additional languages in the near future.

To start using this new toolbar, just follow these steps:

1. Visit the Chrome Web Store and download the AdSense Publisher Toolbar. This will add the toolbar icon to your browser.
2. You’ll then need to grant the toolbar access to your AdSense account. To do so, click the toolbar icon and then sign in to Google Accounts with your AdSense login and password.
3. Next, visit a website where you've implemented your ad code, and enable the toolbar by clicking on the toolbar icon again.

And that’s it! The AdSense account overview widget will appear and show you an earnings summary, broken down by recent and all time performance as well as your top channels.

You can also enable ad overlays directly on top of your ad units, which will tell you how a particular ad unit has performed today, yesterday and in the past seven days. Clicking on the ad overlay will bring you to the “My ads” tab in your account, where you can edit this ad unit. If you have ad units using the older version of the code, or ad units created on partner sites like Blogger, we’ll instead show information on the ad unit size or channel. Rest assured that clicking on the ad overlay generated by the toolbar won’t create invalid clicks.

For more detailed instructions on how to use this toolbar, visit our Help Center. We hope that this new feature provides a useful way to quickly check on your AdSense account performance while browsing the web. Stay tuned for updates as we work on adding new functionality to the toolbar.

Posted by Gregory Block -- AdSense Engineering

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Making ads smart -- Adapting ads to the device

As smartphones and tablets become more and more popular, your websites are being viewed on a wider variety of devices - with different screen sizes and features. We’ve recently discussed the importance of having mobile friendly sites and the best ways to monetize them, and also just released Custom Search Ads for Mobile to help you take advantage of this trend. As part of our focus on helping you monetize your content across all screen sizes, we’ll soon also be improving the way ads appear on different devices.

We’re making our text ads smarter and will soon display them differently so they perform optimally depending on where users are viewing them from: computers, tablets, or smartphones. The best part is that our ads do the right thing automatically - without any changes required to your web pages - by detecting what device your web page is being viewed from.

With this change, we’re taking advantage of the unique features of mobile devices to deliver more engaging, better-performing ads.  Since the screens are smaller, we’re reducing the number of ads per ad slot and increasing the size of the text to make them more legible and noticeable.

We’re also providing a big button on each ad to make it easy for users to select the ads using a touch screen. Here’s how the 728x90 leaderboard will appear differently on the different platforms.

Desktop

Tablet

Phone

We’re continuing to look for ways to improve ad performance for publishers, no matter what size screen your users are accessing your site from. Stay tuned to Inside AdSense for more updates.

Posted by Priya Gupta, Mobile Ads Engineering

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Smarter default font settings

When it comes to customizing the appearance of AdSense text ads, we’ve heard from many publishers that they aren’t always sure what combinations to pick. As a starting point, we offer a set of default options for ad colors, font size and font face, which are based on positive performance across all publisher sites.

Today, we’re announcing an exciting improvement to our default font settings, which will optimize your ad units for your unique site and users. For each ad unit that’s set to show the default font face and font size, our system will now automatically select and show the best-performing option. This best-performing option will depend on a variety of factors, including the user’s viewing environment (operating system, browser) and the ad unit itself (language, size, number of ads, etc). We’ve tested the effects of these factors on our AdSense fonts and incorporated the best combinations into our default font settings. Our aim with this update is to help improve ad performance on your site by automatically applying optimal font settings to your ad units.

Please keep in mind that this change will only affect ad units which have “AdSense default font family” and “AdSense default font size” selected. You won’t be affected if you’ve previously set your ads to a specific font face or size, but we encourage you to give our new settings a try. To change the font settings of any existing ad unit, simply edit it under the My ads tab. If you’d like to change the preferences for future ad units you’ll create, visit the Account Settings page under the Home tab, and edit the “Default ad display preferences” section.

We hope you’re as excited about this development as we are -- we’ll continue to bring you the latest in our research around text ad options.

Posted by: Stephen Yuan, AdSense Engineering

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Customize your AdSense personal contact information

As you may know, we periodically send out emails with tips for increasing your earnings, updates on the latest product improvements, and information regarding your account. In your AdSense account settings you can select which type of messages you’re interested in receiving.

We understand that some publishers may prefer to receive AdSense-related messages at a different email address than the Google Account used as their AdSense login. From now on, every user on an AdSense account can specify a personal contact email, contact name and optionally a phone number. It’s important to note that this contact email doesn’t need to be associated with a Google Account, and adding it to your account won’t update your login information or change the login you use to access your AdSense account.

To customize your personal contact information, log in to your account and visit the Account settings page under the Home tab. Under Personal settings, click “edit” and enter the desired data in the contact name and contact email fields. We encourage you to also take the opportunity to review your email preferences and then save your settings. Once you make any changes, you’ll receive a verification email to the contact address to confirm that you can receive messages at this address.

If you’d like to learn more about the messages we send to publishers and how you can benefit from them, visit this blog post. We’re looking forward to keeping in touch with you!

Posted by Dan Banfield -- AdSense Engineering

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New languages and categories in general category blocking feature

We know that being able to control the ads that appear on your pages is important to you, which is why we're excited to share some new enhancements to general category blocking. This feature is already available in English, French and German and from now on, publishers in Spanish-, Portuguese-, Italian-, and Japanese-speaking countries will be able to use it as well. What’s more, we’ve just added 88 new categories to the list of topics that can be blocked from your sites, including apparel, business, family and sports.

If you’re not familiar with the general category blocking feature, it gives you additional control over the ads that are shown on your sites. You have the ability to scalably block categories of ads that you might not find suitable for your audience.

You can block up to 50 categories in your account, and your choices will be applied to ads of all targeting types and formats in the seven supported languages, regardless of the language of the site where they’re showing. Before blocking a general category, please keep in mind that blocking ads can have a negative impact on your potential earnings, as it removes eligible ads from competing in the ad auction. To help you make informed decisions and understand the impact of any blocking choices on your ad performance, we show you the revenue and ad impressions for every category from the last 30 days.

We hope that these extended options help you quickly and easily control the ads on your sites, and we look forward to continuing to enhance these controls in the future.

Posted by Gavri Smith -- AdSense Engineering

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Highlighting ad titles

As we continue to improve and launch new features, we’re always interested in hearing your ideas and feedback. Many of you have shared that you want to be able to change the title color of ads when a user moves their mouse over the title link. After a period of testing, we found that this feature resulted in higher earnings for publishers while also increasing user and advertiser value. We are pleased to announce today that we have updated all text ads with this change.

As you can imagine, there are numerous combinations of link and background color across the ad units on all publisher pages. After extensive testing, we have found that the color of the change itself can make a big difference: the wrong shade can even be detrimental to clickthrough rate (CTR). To determine the color that the title link will change to when a user places their mouse cursor over it, we’ll take your chosen title color and find a nearly complementary color on the color wheel. For example, a blue title would change to red. These colors outperformed all the others we tested.

We’ll continue to keep studying the effects of color on CTR and ad performance to bring you more enhancements in the future. Please also feel free to keep sharing your product feedback and suggestions!

Posted by Stephen Yuan, AdSense Engineering

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A fresh face for link units

If you're using link units, you know that they're a great way to earn additional revenue from the smaller spaces on your site. We've made a few updates to this ad type in the past, but today, we're giving link units a well-deserved facelift. We decided that it was time to reevaluate the layout of the link unit and the landing page in order to give this ad type both a modern look and a great performance boost. Here’s an overview of what’s changing.

The link unit
We’ve heard feedback from publishers that it isn’t clear why they should choose to show four versus five terms in their link units. Most people pick one of these options by guessing the expected performance. We’ve actually found that link units with four terms almost always perform better than five. As a result, we’re reducing the number of topics in all link units to four for horizontal orientations and three for vertical orientations. If you’re currently using link units, this change will happen automatically. We’re also slightly increasing spacing between and font size of each term.

The ad page
Following the general makeover of Google pages, we’re giving link unit landing pages a fresh look as well. The color scheme, orientation, fonts, and number of ads are being updated to the following:

We’ll continue to work on improving link units and hope to share more exciting news soon! In the meantime, we recommend viewing this video to learn how to utilize link units.

Posted by William Chang - AdSense Engineering

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Prepare for the upcoming holiday season with placement targeting

With the holidays right around the corner, premium brand-name AdWords advertisers are preparing for the season by increasing their marketing budgets and scheduling targeted campaigns. You can prepare too by taking advantage of placement targeting to allow advertisers to directly target your site.

While all sites are eligible for placement targeting, there are things you can do to help increase the amount of placement targeted ads on your site. First, turn your custom channels into ad placements. Be sure to fill out a well-written title and description to help potential advertisers understand the audiences they’ll reach by bidding on your site. Some details to include in the description are your site name, vertical, ad position, ad size and site demographic.

Next, ensure you are using our most successful ad units and are placing them in optimal positions. Finally, claim your site in Ad Planner. Following these steps will help advertisers find your site to target and choose where to place their ads on a specific section or area. Placement targeted ads typically receive much higher RPMs, which results in higher earnings for you.

Creating targeted channels is easy and a great way to earn extra revenue, but it takes time for them to show up for advertisers, so act soon! Just follow the instructions in our Help Center. Once you've made the changes, not only will your ads be ready for this holiday season, but they'll also be targetable by advertisers for every premium campaign in the future.

Posted by Jamie Firkus, Inside AdSense team

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