More webinars on the way

Continuing with the series of webinars we've been hosting recently, we'd like to let you know about several additional webinars taking place over the next few weeks.

If you'd like webinars that take place in the evenings in North America or the early mornings in Asia, one of these might work for you:

Understanding the payment cycle
Learn about when and how you can expect to be paid.
Date: Thursday, May 21, 2009
Time: 6:30pm PDT (GMT -07:00)
Register at: https://googleonline.webex.com/googleonline/onstage/g.php?t=a&d=577510522

Channels and advanced reporting
Walk through the process of creating channels for more detailed tracking of specific pages and ad units.
Date: Thursday, June 4, 2009
Time: 6:30pm PDT (GMT -07:00)
Register at: https://googleonline.webex.com/googleonline/onstage/g.php?t=a&d=573170710

If you prefer webinars at a Europe-friendly time, you may wish to attend one of these:

Using Custom Search Engine with AdSense
Find out how your users and your revenue can benefit from Custom Search engine with AdSense for search.
Date: Monday, May 26, 2009
Time: 3pm GMT (PDT +07:00)
Register at: https://googleonline.webex.com/googleonline/onstage/g.php?t=a&d=570572716

Fundamentals of optimization
Learn about account and ad layout changes that can boost your revenue. (Recommended for new publishers or those who haven't optimized AdSense previously.)
Date: Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Time: 6:30pm GMT (PDT +07:00)
Register at: https://googleonline.webex.com/googleonline/onstage/g.php?t=a&d=573202418

As always, you can find dates, times, and details for our webinars in our Help Center.

Posted by Julie Beckmann - Inside AdSense Team

Calling all developers for Google I/O

Are you a developer, or are you interested in learning about developer tools and technologies like Android and OpenSocial? If so, we'd like to let you know about the Google I/O Developer Conference on May 27th and 28th in San Francisco.

As an AdSense publisher, you may be interested in learning how to spice up your site with our APIs, or how tools like App Engine and the Google Web Toolkit can help you focus on your content and code rather than maintenance or scaling issues. At Google I/O, you'll have the opportunity to learn about these topics from Googlers and also meet other developers.

Over 2,000 are expected to be in attendance, and if you'd like to be one of them, we hope you'll register for the event. For more information, check out the official site or follow us on Twitter.

Posted by Christine Tsai - Google Developer Programs

Temporary ad serving issue resolved

For about an hour this morning, beginning at 7:48am PDT, we experienced a global network routing issue. As a result, fewer or no ads were served to some publishers during this time. Our engineers have since resolved the issue, and we're working to ensure that this doesn't recur. We're very sorry for the inconvenience.

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

Site maintenance on Saturday, May 16

Our engineers will be performing regularly scheduled maintenance this Saturday, May 16th. You'll be unable to access your AdSense and Ad Manager accounts between 10am and 2pm PDT, but your ad targeting and serving won't be affected. In addition, we'll continue to record your clicks, impressions, and earnings as usual.

Here's the maintenance start time, converted for a few cities around the world:

London - 6pm Saturday
Dubai - 9pm Saturday
Mumbai - 10:30pm Saturday
Taipei - 1am Sunday
Auckland - 5am Sunday

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

What the Display Ad Builder means for publishers

We've been working to make it easier for advertisers to show display ads on the content network -- which benefits you, because it results in more budgets devoted to advertising on AdSense sites like yours. (As a reminder, "display ads" include all types of image-based ads, such as banners, rich media, and video ads.) In addition to recent launches such as DoubleClick Studio, third-party ad serving, and expandable rich media ads, we also launched the AdWords Display Ad Builder last October. This tool allows AdWords advertisers to create display ads using customizable templates and to target them to AdSense sites in a matter of minutes.

Since its launch, the Display Ad Builder has been extended to advertisers in over 100 countries and 40 languages. With over 90 customizable templates and thousands of active users of all sizes, the Display Ad Builder has quickly become what we believe is the largest platform for self-serve display ad creation on the web. Its usage varies from the largest digital agency, like Razorfish, to smaller advertisers like the Wilshire Grand Los Angeles. We'd like to take a few minutes to tell you more about the impact of this tool and how it can benefit you as a publisher:

• More advertisers creating display ads: In just six months, the Display Ad Builder has significantly increased the number of AdWords advertisers using image-based ads. Many of these advertisers were already advertising with text ads on Google.com and AdSense sites, but have now found the visual elements, interactivity, and animations of display ads to be effective at increasing clicks, conversions, and overall ROI.
  
  
• Higher quality, more relevant display ads for your site: With simplified display ad creation now available to advertisers of all sizes and industries, the display ads that show on your site are likely to be even more relevant to your content and audience. For sites with niche content or with an advertiser base that would be less likely to have the budgets to invest in display ad creation, this is especially true. The templates that we offer also vary well beyond simple static banners, including interactive rich media templates that allow users to scroll between or roll over multiple product images, in addition to multiple templates with animated text and images.
  
  
• Higher potential earnings: As the reach of ads created with Display Ad Builder grows, we've seen encouraging results -- ads created with the Display Ad Builder have average click-through rates that outperform industry averages. We believe that this is due to the combination of advanced contextual targeting on AdSense, combined with templates that encourage best practices in effective display ad creation. We've also heard from many advertisers that they're finding improved cost per conversion efficiencies with the tool, meaning that more of their marketing budgets can be effectively deployed online, on your sites.
  

So what can you do to take advantage of the many newly created display ads? First, make sure that your ad units are opted into image ads. And, since many publishers are advertisers too, you may be interested in getting started with the Display Ad Builder yourself. To learn more, you can also view our series of how-to videos or read our feed of Display Ad Builder announcements.

Posted by Ryan Hayward - Display Ad Builder Product Marketing

Register for our next AdSense Optimization Webinar

We invite you to join us at our next Optimization Webinar tomorrow, where we'll show you how to experiment with different formats and colors to improve the performance of your ads. We've heard that you'd like us to hold our webinars at different times of the day, and we hope that this helps accommodate those of you who weren't able to attend our last optimization webinar. Remember, we're only able to accommodate a maximum of 500 publishers, so please sign up soon.

Here's the information you'll need:

Date: Thursday May 7, 2009
Time: 6:30 pm PDT (GMT -07:00)
Registration: https://googleonline.webex.com/googleonline/onstage/g.php?t=a&d=366085742

As a reminder, you'll be asked to enter your publisher ID number when registering. For more information on this, and all upcoming webinars, please visit our Help Center.

Posted by Ashutosh Satpute - AdSense Publisher Support

Showcase your site with Google Ad Planner's Publisher Center

To help you increase the visibility of your sites to potential advertisers, we've just launched the Publisher Center in Google Ad Planner. This will allow you to provide details about your sites to help attract advertisers. Though the Publisher Center is only available in English at this time, any publisher can use the tool.

As a quick reminder, Ad Planner is a media planning tool that helps agencies and advertisers find sites that cater to their target audiences. In the new Publisher Center within Ad Planner, you can claim sites you own and customize the descriptions for each. For each site, you can also add up to five categories that describe your site's content, and the types, sizes, and formats of ads that your site supports.


In addition, you can share your Google Analytics data with Ad Planner to provide advertisers with additional details about your site, such as the number of unique visitors and page views. By replacing Ad Planner traffic estimates with data measured directly by Google Analytics, you'll be able to provide advertisers with more accurate site traffic information.

Based on this information, agencies and advertisers using Ad Planner will be able to identify appropriate sites to include in their placement-targeted campaigns. As more advertisers become aware of your sites and bid to show ads on them, the competition among your ads will increase and so should your earnings potential.

We encourage you to visit the new Google Ad Planner Publisher Center to begin claiming sites you own. For more information about the Google Ad Planner Publisher Center, visit our Help Center, or watch our video below:



Posted by Wayne Lin - Product Manager, Google Ad Planner