10 for 10 publisher stories: Sportonline.de’s winning approach

In each of the 10 weeks leading up to AdSense’s 10th anniversary on June 18th, we’ll be sharing a new publisher success story. Read on to meet this week’s featured publisher, and feel free to submit your own success story to our team. 

While managing a number of technology-related websites, Matthias Sandner and two colleagues decided to create a new site to address one of their shared passions: soccer. They brought this vision to life in 2011 with the launch of German site Sportonline.de, which they now run with a small team of employees. Matthias had been an AdSense publisher since 2007, so implementing AdSense on Sportonline.de was one of the first things he did on the site.


(To enable captions in a number of languages, click on the ‘Captions’ link in the bottom right corner of the YouTube player once the video starts playing.)

AdSense currently generates between 50 and 60 percent of Sportonline.de’s total advertising revenue, and has helped financially support the new site. Matthias has found that the 728 x 90 Leaderboard with both text and image ads enabled performs the best on his site. Since Sportonline.de is still new and growing, the team mainly invests the AdSense earnings into new content and employees. “Not only does AdSense offer a convincing performance,” says Matthias, “but it’s also clear and easy to use.” As a result, the team can focus on developing the website rather than devoting time to selling ads.

Matthias has been happy about the performance of AdSense, and is currently working to continue growing the user base and revenue from the site. He makes uses of other Google products like Analytics, which provides insights to help the team continue improving the site. In addition, Sportonline.de has already developed a large following on Google+, where the team shares content and interacts with over 35,000 fans.

For more on Sportonline.de’s start-up success, read the full story. Join us here again next Tuesday for another inspirational publisher story, and feel free to share your comments on our AdSense +page.

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team
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Join our Policy Refreshers

In order to help you better understand our policies, we’ll be holding a series of policy refreshers online in the coming weeks. We’ll discuss the policies we’re asked about most, explain how we enforce them and share tips on how to stay compliant.

In this series, we’ll review:

• Our general policies
• How to keep your content family- safe
• How to ensure your ad placements are policy compliant 

Check the schedule below to sign up for our Hangouts on Air, and look out for more blog posts on AdSense policies in the coming weeks.

View our Hangouts schedule

Posted by Pamela Malone - AdSense Policy Specialist
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Doing more with the reporting dimensions in your account

The performance reports in your AdSense account are key to understanding your earnings and to identifying optimization opportunities. We’re continuously reviewing your feedback in order to improve the reporting functionality for you. Today, we’re excited to announce the launch of two new, long-awaited features that provide you with a more detailed segmentation of traffic in your reports.

Combining different reporting dimensions
The Countries report shows your performance broken down by the country of users who engaged with the ads on your pages. In addition to viewing a country breakdown for reports by ad type, bid type, and targeting type, you’ll now also be able to see a Countries report when viewing the reporting dimensions URL channel, custom channel, and ad unit. This will allow you to segment your traffic further and get a better understanding of your account performance in different locations.

Please note that the country breakdown of reports by URL channel, custom channel, and ad unit will only be available for reports with date ranges starting March 9th and later.

Introducing a new reporting dimension
In order to help you get more granular insights into your performance on a site level, we’re introducing a new reporting type for Owned sites. “Owned” sites are all sites specified as owned in the site management feature, and the new reporting dimension for Owned sites will be a subset of the Sites report. In contrast to the Sites report, however, you’ll be able to combine the Owned sites report with the Countries report. This will allow you to segment your traffic in more detail and understand the performance of your sites across different countries

Please note that historical data in Owned sites reports will be available from the date that a site was added or claimed as “owned”. You’ll only be able to view country breakdowns for Owned sites for reports with date ranges starting March 22nd 2011 or later. If a site is removed from the “Owned” sites list, it will no longer show in the report.

We hope that the improvements to our reporting features will help you better segment and understand where your users are coming from and whether there are performance differences across different countries.  You can also use this information to isolate potential invalid activity. Unexpected use can be a sign that you are receiving potential invalid activity. Please share your feedback on our AdSense+page and let us know what you found out thanks to these new functionalities.

Posted by Matt Goodridge - AdSense Product Manager
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10 for 10 publisher stories: Expat blog expands horizons and its business

In each of the 10 weeks leading up to AdSense’s 10th anniversary on June 18th, we’ll be sharing a new publisher success story. Read on to meet this week’s featured publisher, and feel free to submit your own success story to our team. 

After finding few sites devoted to expats around the world, in 2005 Julien Faliu decided to launch a community platform for that audience. An expat himself, Julien has since grown his site into a company based in Mauritius that now employs 15 members of staff. Expat blog receives 12 million pageviews per month and is now available in four languages.

Julien initially turned to AdSense as a way to cover the costs of running his website, but as his revenue increased, he decided to focus on advertising. Today, Julien is responsible for all of the advertising space on the site. “At the start, AdSense allowed me to get my website set up by covering my costs,” Julien says. “Now, I can truly say that AdSense has enabled me to grow and recruit staff.”

Beyond AdSense, Julien also uses a number of other Google tools to continue developing his business. For instance, Analytics enables him to view his site’s growth, and DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) Small Business helps him manage all of the advertising on the site.

What’s next for Expat blog? Julien and his team are currently developing a strategy to monetize their mobile site, and looking towards bringing private investors on board to fund the next stage of growth.

For more details about Julien’s success with Expat blog, be sure to read the full story. We’ll be back again next Tuesday to introduce you to another AdSense publisher.

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team
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AdSense now speaks Vietnamese

The Google AdSense team is pleased to announce the official launch of Vietnamese language support for AdSense for content.

Why Vietnamese language is important to Google
Vietnam is one of the fastest growing online markets in the world, with huge potential ahead. The online landscape has evolved rapidly in the last few years, becoming as vibrant and colorful as the streets of Hanoi.

We hope that introducing Vietnamese language support will help fuel even more great quality content creation, while helping advertisers reach out to a booming online user base through display ads.

How to get started

1. Please start by familiarizing yourself with the AdSense program policies. Need a refresher? Update your understanding of the policies by taking this AdSense policy quiz.
     
2. Sign up for an Adsense account by enrolling your Vietnamese language website.
     
3. Once your AdSense account has been approved, congratulations, simply add the AdSense code to your site to start displaying relevant, contextually targeted ads.

Chào mừng đến với chương trình adsense!

Posted by Emanuele Brandi - Product Sales Lead
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10 for 10 publisher stories: Canal Sur thrives with digital tools

In each of the 10 weeks leading up to AdSense’s 10th anniversary on June 18th, we’ll be sharing a new publisher success story. Read on to meet this week’s featured publisher, and feel free to submit your own success story to our team.

Seville’s Radio y Televisión de Andalucía (RTVA) broadcasts TV and radio programs online as well as the news via its website, Canal Sur. The site, which employs 18 people and receives about 6.5 million visits a month, joined the AdSense program four years ago. According to Antonio Manfredi, Director of Interactive Media at RTVA, “the economic crisis affected us like the rest of the media throughout Spain, so we decided to look for new ways to improve. We realized that AdSense was the simplest and most profitable option.”

(To enable captions in a number of languages, click on the ‘Captions’ link in the bottom right corner of the YouTube player once the video starts playing.)

Since joining AdSense, total global advertising revenue has increased by 40 percent, and AdSense has played a major part in making the website profitable. Looking ahead, the company is planning to work more closely with YouTube and to improve its TV-on-demand services.

Read the full case study to learn more about Canal Sur’s experience with AdSense. We look forward to seeing you next week for the second half of our ‘10 for 10’ series!

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team
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Increasing the accuracy of AdSense reporting

We know many of our publishers use multiple Google products on a regular basis, and one of our top priorities is to ensure that each interaction across our products provides a seamless experience. To better align the way we report performance across all of our publisher products and ensure accuracy, we’re updating the way certain data is shown in AdSense accounts.

As you may know, your earnings at the end of each month currently reflect the amount you've earned less any deductions for invalid activity. This is a step we’ve always taken to ensure advertisers are not charged for such activity. Until now, however, clicks and impressions associated with this activity still appeared in AdSense performance reports. Starting May 1st, we'll remove those associated clicks and impressions to address this discrepancy and provide you with the most accurate reporting.

So what does this mean for your AdSense account? First and foremost, this change will not impact your earnings in any way. In most cases, removing the invalid activity from your reports means you can expect to see a slight decrease in clicks and impressions, causing a slight increase in CPC (cost-per-click) and RPM (revenue per thousand impressions). The clicks and impressions that we’ll no longer show in reports include activity like accidental clicks, so metrics like your CTR (clickthrough rate) will more accurately reflect your site's performance. You might also see a more noticeable difference in your AdSense reporting when compared with your own account statistics measured through other tools. Please note that this change won’t affect the way we screen for invalid activity.

As a reminder, we encourage you to keep up to date on ways that you can monitor your website for such activity – we have a lot of resources in our Help Center covering this topic. Finally, note that reports for dates prior to May 1st will be unaffected.

Posted by Matt Goodridge - AdSense Product Manager
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10 for 10 publisher stories: Pronounced success for Forvo

In each of the 10 weeks leading up to AdSense’s 10th anniversary on June 18th, we’ll be sharing a new publisher success story. Read on to meet this week’s featured publisher, and feel free to submit your own success story to our team.

For those learning a new language or just wondering how words are pronounced in different parts of the world, Forvo provides a solution. Launched in 2008, the online pronunciation guide offers recordings of over 1.5 million words in 36 languages, uploaded by native speakers. A team of four based in Guipúzcoa, Spain maintains the site, which has 250,000 registered users and receives around nine million visits a month.

According to CEO Félix Vela, “the income from AdSense has allowed me to take on two new employees over the past couple of years.” Félix has been happy with the quality and relevance of the ads, and regularly uses other Google tools like Analytics to understand the site’s visitors.

Looking ahead, Félix plans to continue improving the site and increasing the number of pronunciation examples available. “There’s absolutely no doubt that AdSense will continue to play a fundamental role in this growth,” he says.

Read Forvo’s full story, and join us here again next week to meet our next publisher.

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team
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A tenfold revenue increase in just three months - nanapi.jp's success story

nanapi.jp is a Japanese site which provides helpful tips for everyday life.  From tips on romance to how to use web services, it has all sorts of advice for everyone.

Recently, nanapi started using AdSense and has seen a steady revenue increase. We spoke to Mr. Furukawa, the CEO, and Mr. Saito, the Director of Ads, and asked them about their experiences with AdSense.

■ Inside AdSense (IA): Please tell us the history of nanapi and how you built your site.  
We established nanapi in September, 2009.  We realized that there was a need for an information site where people could find tips for everyday life, so we decided to provide this content in the form of articles on various topics.

Initially, we only had a desktop site but now we’ve created a mobile site for smartphones too. As of August 2012, we receive 42 million page views and 9 million unique users per month.  The number of unique users is bigger on the desktop site, but the smartphone site receives more page views.

■ IA: How and why did you start using AdSense?
When we first established the site, we decided not to implement ads as we wanted to focus on creating quality content first. After our number of monthly visitors reached 10 million, we implemented a medium rectangle (300x250) in the upper right corner of the site.  As a result, we earned higher revenue than we’d anticipated.

We were surprised by the quality of the ads and how well they matched the content of our site. We’d been concerned that ads might damage the design or usability of our site, but we didn’t feel that way about the site post-implementation.  That’s why we decided to use AdSense more.

■ IA: What results did you see after implementing AdSense?
We started to use AdSense more after the pilot in April 2012.  More specifically, we switched from another ad network to AdSense, and increased the number of ads per page. Our revenue increased more than ten times in just three months!

nanapi covers a lot of topics, and it can be difficult to show relevant ads, but with AdSense's contextual targeting, relevant ads are shown automatically.  People visit nanapi before they take action, and that's why it's natural for our visitors to click relevant ads and leave the site. We implemented 336x280 ads below our articles to capture this kind of user behavior.

■ IA: Did you have any issues after implementing Google AdSense?
We didn’t have any difficulty in implementing or setting up AdSense. Compared to the ad network we used before, AdSense’s account interface is easy to use. It was also very easy to implement AdSense on our smartphone site. We pasted the ad code from the account interface, just as we’d done for the desktop site. It’s very good that AdSense allows us to check performance by platform too.

As for resources, we only need one person to manage AdSense. The account interface is very easy to use. For example, when we experiment with changing an ad format, we can check its performance immediately.

We were concerned that ads would deteriorate the usability of our website.  However, ad quality was very good and we didn’t have to worry.  Since the ads match our content, they enhance the information on the site and we haven’t received a single complaint from our users

■ IA: Please tell us about your plans for the future.
We plan to keep adding more and more articles to our site. Our goal is to make users think that “if you visit nanapi, you’ll find answers for all kinds of topics.” From an ads perspective, we’re considering using DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) to manage our ad units more easily.

Posted by Ayaka Sakakibara - Strategic Partner Manager
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Understanding the dynamics of the AdSense auction - Part II

Earlier this week, we started a two-part series to help you better understand the AdSense ad auction and how it helps you earn the most money possible. We shared how text and image ads compete in the same auction, and that our system selects either ad type based on the predicted value -- sometimes resulting in one image ad winning out over multiple text ads. Following on that discussion, today we’ll turn our attention to just text ads.

If you’re using one of our large ad unit sizes like the 300x250 medium rectangle or the 160x600 wide skyscraper, you may have noticed that you’ll sometimes see multiple text ads in the ad unit, while only one or two ads at other times. As we noted earlier this week, our system predicts the value of each competing ad for every impression, based on historic performance and comparison across a variety of scenarios. There can sometimes be cases where our system determines that one or two specific text ads are significantly higher-performing than the other eligible text ads, and that showing them separately would result in higher performance than if the ads were shown together with lower-performing ones. When this occurs, we’ll show them alone, and this means you’ll see less than the full number of text ads in the ad unit.

We know that it can sometimes be confusing to see fewer text ads appearing in an ad unit, and that it can create extra white space, but please know that this behavior is intended to help you earn the most from all of your impressions. As we continue to make improvements to the rendering of the ads and develop new ad formats, we’ll keep you posted right here on our blog.

Thanks for joining us for this series. We hope you found it useful; please feel free to share your thoughts and suggestions on our AdSense +page.

Posted by Johan Land - AdSense Product Manager

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