You may have noticed that some of your ad units have started to look a little different lately — we’re happy to announce that, just in time for spring, we’ve given our standard ad units a fresh makeover. After extensive testing and research, we’ve found that the new formats are not only visually appealing to users, but they also perform even better for publishers and advertisers. We’re in the process of rolling out this change to all ad unit

If you’ve logged in to your account today, you’ve probably noticed the new ‘Recent messages’ section in your AdSense account. We’re happy to let you know that this is your personal inbox where we’ll send you customized optimization tips. More specifically, our system will automatically analyze your account and ad settings. Based on these findings, you’ll receive a notification each month in your AdSense account if there are changes you can make t

Following our recent series of referrals announcements, we’re happy to announce that you can now earn $5 per referral for Google Apps.With Google Apps, we’ve taken Google’s most powerful communication and collaboration tools, and packaged them together so businesses, schools and other organizations can work more effectively while spending less time and money on IT systems. Google Apps provides customized email addresses (powered by Gmail), Google

If you’re a web developer or host, you may remember that we introduced you to the AdSense API last May. With the AdSense API, your users can create their own AdSense accounts on your site, and display ads alongside the content that they have created. They can also manage their accounts and view ad performance and earnings reports, all on your site.In addition, you can enhance your customers’ user experience by helping them to make money from thei

As of today, it is now possible to assign multiple custom channels to a single ad unit. This feature enables you to track your ad performance with greater flexibility and view more granular information. When generating your ad code, you’ll be able to add up to 5 custom channels to a specific instance of ad code.What’s the benefit of tracking with more than one custom channel? Well, multiple channels can be very useful when you want to track one a

Even if your site is well-designed, with colors that look great and ad formats that your users respond well to, you still might hear a nagging voice inside your head that says, “There must be more I can do!” If this sounds familiar, then we’ve got a cure — link units work wonders when you’re looking for additional ways to give your AdSense performance a pick-me-up. They offer your users fresh, new content and can be customized and tracked just l

This week we bring you two key improvements to AdSense that came about directly from publisher feedback.First off, you’ll be happy to hear that we’ve completely revamped the Channels page under your AdSense Setup tab. Besides cleaning up the design by housing each product on its own sub-tab, we’ve also made it easier for you to take action on your channels. Just select the checkbox next to a channel and then choose to activate, deactivate, remove

A few weeks ago, we told you that publishers can display AdSense for search results within their own sites. Now AdSense Product Manager Shirin Oskooi explains the benefits and provides a short demonstration in this video. Interested in implementing search results within your own site? Just visit our Help Center for instructions.

For today’s optimization tip, I’d like to focus on a site targeting feature: Onsite Advertiser Sign-up. This enables advertisers to quickly and easily target cost-per-impression (CPM) ads specifically to your site, from your site.As a publisher, you’ll be automatically opted in to Onsite Advertiser Sign-up. You can also customize the landing page advertisers will see when they click on the ‘Advertise on this site’ link within your ad units

If you haven’t tried our AdSense for Search feature yet, now might just be the perfect time to put it to use — we’re pleased to announce that you can now display AdSense for search results within your own site. This way, you have the freedom to offer users web search while still maintaining the look and feel of your site. For example, you can keep elements like the header, footer, and site navigation panel the same for the search results page yo

Back in May, we launched our new and improved referral buttons. Now these new buttons are available for additional products and languages. You can choose from several different colors and options, and the buttons are in a sleeker, web-friendly GIF format — all the better to blend in with your site. Publishers have found that it’s most beneficial to place referrals where they’re relevant. Do you run a photo blog? Try using a Picasa referral but

Since we received positive feedback about the new AdSense for content and AdSense for search code generation wizards, we’ve created a referrals code wizard to help guide you through the process of implementing referral buttons on your site. Simply choose Referrals from the AdSense Setup page of your account and select the product of your choice.And don’t forget, now you can display referral buttons in a text link format as well.

There’s good news for those of you who are partial to Square (250 x 250) and Large Rectangle (336 x 280) ad formats: Now they support image ads! This means that if you’ve opted to display image ads, the pool of ads competing to show on your site is about to expand — and with more ads available, your revenue potential will also grow. Check today to make sure you’re opted into image ads.

I’ve heard some ugly rumors circulating about image ads, and I want to separate the myths from the facts so publishers don’t miss out on an important revenue opportunity. Myth: Image ads take too long to load and I hate those ‘Shoot the Duck’-type adsFact: We have strict guidelines for both animated and static image ads restricting them to a maximum size of 50 kb, so they’ll load quickly on your site – and no Shoot the Duck ads allo

Rowland asks:I signed up for AdSense with my blog URL, but I’d like to paste AdSense on my forum site as well. Do I have to submit a new application?Inside AdSense says: You don’t have to submit a new application to add your code to a new site. As long as your pages comply with our policies, you can put your code on them - whether they share the same domain name as your original site or not. We’ll detect the new pages once the code is there, an

Yesterday we talked about the site targeting feature that was released within the past few months. As we introduce new ways of targeting ads, we also need new ways of capturing user and advertiser value. That’s why our system now supports cost-per-impression (CPM) bidding. This lets advertisers try out their best ideas while we make sure that that the right economic incentives are in place.Regardless of bidding method and format, all ads compete

We launched site targeting a couple of months ago. Why site targeting? Well, to put it succinctly, because machines can’t dream. We’re proud of our engineers and their work, but even they can’t make computers dream. They can’t make a machine feel the emotions that people feel, experience the desires that people have, or imagine all the concepts that might resonate with users (we think they do a pretty good job on this last one, though).We want to

You may have noticed a new feature in AdSense ads this past week - variations in the number of text ads we show in any ad unit. We caught up with Brian A., a product manager for AdSense, to pick his brain about this new feature.How have Google ads changed?”We’ve updated AdSense to now vary the number of text ads that appear in a given ad unit. When we have a set of highly relevant and useful ads, we give them more of a presence in the ad unit by