We want to get you paid by the fastest means possible. As many of you know, we offer Western Union in 23 countries and courier service in many other countries.

We'd like to take a minute to remind our North American publishers that the fastest way for you to receive your payments is via Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT). EFT is quick and easy to set up. When payments are issued, there's no need to wait for the delivery in the mail -- the funds appear in your bank account shortly after they're issued. That means if we processed a payment for you this month, your earnings would be in your bank account already.

Also, EFT is good for the environment, since a check doesn't need to take a ride by sea, plane, or land to reach you. In available locations, it's the Google-recommended form of payment, so we hope you won't hesitate to sign up. You can learn more in our Help Center.

To our publishers in regions where we don't offer EFT yet, please know that we're always working towards expand our payment options, so stay tuned to Inside AdSense to learn when new forms of payments launch in your location.

These days, user-generated content is everywhere, from the comments below newspaper articles, to the photos and videos shared on social networks. So it's no surprise that many publishers are monetizing this type of content with AdSense ads. But, while you're familiar with types of content which are compliant with the AdSense program policies, your users might not be. We understand that it's not always easy to monitor hundreds of new comments, posts, user profiles, videos, or photos every day, so here are a few ideas on how to maintain an advertiser-friendly environment on your pages.

As a quick note before we head into the tips, remember that inappropriate content can come in many forms -- images, forum posts, comments, links, and so on. For example, adult content isn't only limited to pornographic images; it can also be sexually explicit forum posts or spam bot comments with links to adult sites, which aren't permitted by our policies. We recommend reviewing our previous Inside AdSense post on this topic for further clarification and a few tests you can try on your content.

Now for the tips, which we've divided in two sections - 'Prevention' and 'Monitoring'.

Prevention

Here are some recommendations for ways to prevent your ads from appearing alongside user-generated content that isn't compliant with our policies:

1. Publish clear content guidelines and policies that your users will have to accept and adhere to in order to sign up and use your site's services.
   
   
2. If you own a photo or video sharing site where users are permitted to upload adult or other non-compliant content, clearly structure your content to avoid placing your ad code in sections/categories containing this type of content. The same idea could also be easily applied to online stores with adult sections or to classifieds sites which offer adult dating classifieds.
   
   
3. Ask users to tag their inappropriate content (e.g. sexually suggestive pictures or videos) as being non family-safe. This can help you perform human evaluations of potentially inappropriate content for AdSense ads. You can also try installing keyword filters for content related to adult topics, violence, or drugs, for instance. While we're unable to provide you with details about setting up these filters for your site, we recommend searching for terms such as "keyword filtering" or "content filtering" on Google.com.
   
   
4. Implement spambot protection for your comment forms, forums, and guest books. If you need more information on this topic, try a Google search for "spambot protection".
   

Monitoring

We suggest these tips to ensure that your existing user-generated content pages remain compliant with our policies:

1. Set up ways for your community to monitor itself. For example, try adding a "Report inappropriate content" link to your pages, to allow users to flag content for you to review.
   
   
2. Proactively review pages, videos, photos, etc. with high pageviews on a regular basis.
   
   
3. Spot-check content based on keywords, content search, or related user accounts. For example, try entering keywords related to inappropriate content in your own search engine and checking the results. Alternatively, you can search on Google.com using the following parameter, replacing 'example.com' with your own site's URL and 'keyword' with a specific word or phrase: "site:example.com keyword".
   
   
4. Create editorial policies and exercise moderator control in your comments, forums, and guestbook sections.
   

We hope you find these tips helpful. You can also read related information and suggestions from our Search Quality Team in a recent post on the Webmaster Central Blog. If you have any other ideas, or if you've already implemented similar measures on your sites with user-generated content, please feel free to leave a comment below and share your experience.

In March 2008, we launched Google Ad Manager, our ad management solution for publishers with small direct sales teams. Following the rapid growth of this product, we're excited to announce that we're now devoting a new blog to Ad Manager at http://googleadmanager.blogspot.com . The Ad Manager team has lots of information to share, and we encourage you to visit the new blog for the latest Ad Manager news, tips, and resources.

For those of you new to Ad Manager, it can help you sell, schedule, deliver, and measure all of your directly-sold and network-based ad inventory. It offers an intuitive and simple user interface, Google serving speed and reliability, and significant cost savings. Best of all, Ad Manager can be optionally integrated with AdSense to offer you an automated way to maximize the revenue of your unsold and network-managed inventory. If you don't have an account yet, visit http://www.google.com/admanager. We also recommend looking through our two-part series on getting started.

Thanks for following our Ad Manager posts here on Inside AdSense for the past year; we hope that you'll stop by and visit the new Ad Manager blog for the latest announcements and tips.

We've been working to enable local currency reporting in more countries, and are happy to announce that this feature is now available for publishers located in Denmark and Norway. As a reminder, switching to these new reports means that all earnings generated from advertisers paying in other currencies will be converted to your local currency each day. If you receive payments in your local currency, there won't be any additional conversions at the end of the month, but you can still update your payment method and currency at any time.

If you're located in one of these countries, we recommend that you first download and save copies of your past reports in U.S. dollars for your records. Once you're ready to switch to local currency reports, sign in to your account and look for the green prompt in the upper right hand corner of your Reports Overview page. Click on the link, and you'll then be asked to agree to a new set of Terms and Conditions. If you have questions or need legal advice on interpreting the new Terms, please don't hesitate to contact your attorney.

We encourage you to switch to local currency reports soon, as we'll be requiring this change in the future. To learn more about these new reports, visit our Help Center or review common FAQs in a recent Inside AdSense blog post -- all references to 'Euros' in the post now also apply to your local currency.

Updated for accuracy

In the final week of our educational series about speeding up your business in a slowdown, you'll hear tips from Christian Ashlock, an AdSense Optimization team manager, about attracting additional advertiser spend. If you have any final suggestions for growing your business, we hope you'll leave them as comments. If you missed a week or want to re-read tips from our team, you can revisit the series at any time at www.google.com/ads/speedingup.

I'm Christian Ashlock, and I manage an AdSense optimization team at Google that works to help publishers get the most out of their AdSense accounts. Once you create a site with great content and great ad inventory, the best way to earn additional revenue is to make sure advertisers can find you. Today, I'll share two tips to help attract advertisers to spend money on your site, and a third tip to help you access a new pool of advertisers you may not currently be reaching.



Tip #1: Define ad placements in AdSense so that AdWords advertisers can find them and bid directly for them.

Ad placements are simply custom channels that you can expose to advertisers to encourage more placement targeting spend on your site. Ad placements are most effective for sites with lots of different topics or with different sections like articles, a blog, and a forum. You can set up ad placements based on specific categories of interest on your site, like fine arts or sports. You can also set up ad placements to cater to advertisers who are more interested in specific ad unit locations, like above the fold placements, or popular ad unit sizes including the 300x250 medium rectangle or 728x90 leaderboard.

Tip #2: Help advertisers find your inventory outside of AdWords.

Google Ad Planner is a media planning tool that advertisers use to find sites for their media buys. With the recently launched Publisher Center in Ad Planner, you can claim your site and provide information that helps advertisers better understand your content, audience and advertising options. You can also share your Analytics data with Ad Planner to ensure that advertisers see the most accurate traffic numbers for your site. All of this will help advertisers who use Ad Planner as a media planning tool understand the value of your site, and may even help new advertisers learn that your site exists!

Tip #3: Tap into a new set of advertisers: search advertisers.

Google has relationships with many advertisers -- some advertise on Google.com, some advertise on our partner sites through the AdSense program, and many do both. You can tap into advertisers who choose to advertise on our search partner sites by using AdSense for search. AdSense for search lets your site's visitors find what they're looking for on your site and across the web. Just like on Google.com, we'll display ads targeted to what your visitor is looking for along with the search results.

Additional Resources:

• Learn more about placement-targeted advertising, and read about best practices for setting up ad placements.
  
• To get the most out of AdSense for search, try our five optimization tips.
  

Thanks for following our educational series for the last five weeks. We hope you've gained a better understanding of the tools and resources you can use to improve your site and your AdSense earnings.

As an AdSense publisher, you manage and develop websites. Google Sites is a free product that simplifies the process of creating secure group websites, whether you're building a family website or a company intranet. You can publish pages with the click of a button, edit web pages like documents, and add videos, presentations, and calendars to your pages. Information is stored securely online, and you decide who can edit or view the site. And now, with a recent integration, you can place AdSense ads on Google Sites to earn money.


If you're new to Google Sites, we encourage you to take it for a test drive today. After you've built out your site and ensured that it complies with our program policies, follow these instructions to add AdSense to your pages. You'll have the option to place ads in the sidebar as well as the main content of each page, and you can choose the formats that work best for your site. If you're not sure where to start, we encourage you to check out our optimization tips to make sure you're maximizing your site's revenue.

For more information about getting started with Google Sites, watch this video:

It's week four of our five-week educational series about speeding up your business in a slowdown, which we kicked off three weeks ago. Today, you'll hear tips from Mel Ann and Tim, two AdSense Optimization Specialists from our Sydney, Australia office as they take you through a complete optimization. The series will conclude next week with tips to attract more advertiser spend. Keep on commenting with your own suggestions for growing your business! You can also follow the series at www.google.com/ads/speedingup.

Mel Ann and Tim are two AdSense Optimization Specialists from the Google office in Sydney, who work with publishers to help them improve the performance of their ads. Today, they'll walk you through a 5-step process to optimize the AdSense ads on your sites, and will also share tips that many publishers have found successful.



Step 1: Analyze your webpages

The first step to a successful optimization is to analyze your webpages. Ask yourself the following questions as you think about where to place ads on your site:

• What type of content do you have? People interact differently on articles, forum, and video sites, for example, so think about how people will be interacting on your site.
  
• Where is visitor attention likely to be focused? You should place ads where your users are most likely to look, but as Ricardo Prada mentioned in week two of this series, make sure that they won't get in the way of users trying to complete tasks on your site.
  
• How can you integrate ads into an area without getting in the way of your users? You can view a heat map we've put together showing where ads perform well, and keep in mind that above the fold ads and ads close to primary content tend perform better.
  
• Don't forget to think about how advertisers would like to appear. If you can make your site more appealing to advertisers, while keeping the above tips in mind, you're more likely to be able to attract advertisers and placement targeted ads.
  

Step 2: Set up custom channels

Custom channels will help you figure out how different ad units are performing based on a number of variables you can choose, like placement, size, and color. Create a channel for individual ad units and categorize them to see how they're performing. For example, you can track your leaderboard and medium rectangle to see which performs better, and use this information in step four below. Custom channels will also allow you to track and measure results from your optimizations.

Step 3: Optimize your ad unit design and placement

The next step is to look at color, position, and size of your ad units and optimize these for user experience, advertiser experience, and performance. We've found that the medium rectangle (300 x 250), wide skyscraper (160 x 600), and the leaderboard (728 x 90) tend to perform best. You can also opt in to image ads to receive rich media and video ads, which tend to perform well too. It's important that you implement your ads in a consistent manner and in a way that is desirable to advertisers. Use colors effectively. Blend ads in, but not too much that users don't see them. Borderless ads tend to work well, as does highlighting the link and URL. Test different colors and placements, and then keep the changes that perform best.

Step 4: Maximize revenue from multiple units

We recommend adding multiple ad units to your pages, while still keeping the user experience in mind when deciding on placements. You can use custom channel reporting to determine which ad unit performs best, and structure your page to optimize performance based on that. The highest paying ad we have for your site will be shown in the first ad unit that shows up in your HTML code. If you have a leaderboard at the top, but learn with custom channel reporting that a medium rectangle halfway down the page is outperforming it in terms of CTR and eCPM, try putting the medium rectangle first in your HTML code. You can do this by switching the location in the HTML if you're comfortable editing the code, or by changing the actual location of the leaderboard on the page.

Step 5: Track and measure results

The last step is to understand whether your optimizations have made a difference. Here, use the custom channels you set up earlier to generate reports on your different ad units. Generate reports on your custom channels and group results by channel (remember, this depends on how you've set them up) to see how different sizes, colors, and placements are performing. You can also look at placement targeting reports to see which ad units are receiving placement-targeted ads, and if they've resulted in improved performance.

We hope these steps and tips are informative, and strongly encourage you to take the time to try an optimization on your own.

Additional Resources:

• We'll be re-hosting the optimization webinar from last month again on Thursday, July 23 at 11am PST. Sign up if you're interested in attending.
  
• You can also see valuable information in Analytics after linking your AdSense and Analytics accounts.
  
• For more advanced optimization, you can use Website Optimizer to run live experiments based on ad placement, format and more.
  

We're well under way with our five-week educational series about speeding up your business in a slowdown, which we kicked off two weeks ago. This week, you'll hear tips from Jack Herrick, the founder of wikiHow.com, about attracting new visitors to your site. As we share more tips over the next two weeks about increasing your revenue potential and attracting more advertiser budget, we hope you'll leave comments with your own suggestions for growing your business. You can also follow the series at www.google.com/ads/speedingup.

Jack Herrick is the founder of wikiHow, a collaborative writing project to build the world's largest, highest quality how-to manual. wikiHow is a wiki, which means that any visitor to the site can create or edit wikiHow articles. wikiHow is currently ranked as the 100th most popular site on the web by Quantcast, and receives over 16 million unique visitors each month. Today, Jack shares three of his favorite tips to attract visitors. We hope they'll help you come up with new ways to entice visitors to your sites as well.



Tip #1: Produce great content

The first tip is obvious, but it's also the most important. The articles on wikiHow vary widely in quality. We have some of the highest quality how-tos on the net, for example How to Hard Boil an Egg, and we also have some fairly ugly, unfinished drafts we call stubs. Interestingly, the high-quality articles don't get just a little more traffic than the mediocre articles, they get hundreds of times more. When you can produce the single best page on the Internet on any given topic, people will find it and share it with their friends. Don't settle for acceptable content, always strive to produce amazing content that your readers can't resist sharing.

Tip #2: Learn to share

My second tip is more counterintuitive. To attract more readers to your website, consider putting your content under a Creative Commons license so it can be widely distributed. Everything on wikiHow is under a license that allows other websites to publish and even modify or adapt our content for re-use on their sites. In fact, we have a button at the bottom of every article that allows webmasters to copy and paste the HTML right onto their site. Many webmasters are afraid to share their content, because they worry they will only be aiding competition. By sharing, what you are really doing is encouraging your competitors to provide free advertising for you. The more people who see your content on other sites, the more likely they are to eventually come straight to you.

Tip #3: Make your community a team

Finally, I'd encourage you to allow real collaboration on your site. Lots of websites try to create online communities. To use a basketball analogy, most online communities are just groups of individuals shooting freethrows alone. On wiki websites, people play together as a real team. Humans are hard wired to want to work in groups and collaborate. By allowing this to happen, you can create a passionate community of people that will build something bigger than any one person could accomplish on their own. And that will in time attract a large audience.

Hopefully Jack's tips will help you come up with some new techniques to attract visitors to your site. In addition to Jack's tips, here are a few extra resources focused on attracting more visitors.

• Learn the basics of Search Engine Optimization with Google's SEO guide.
  
• Submit your content so that Google can help you distribute it across Google Web Search, Maps, Product Search, iGoogle, and more.
  
• Drive more traffic to your site with programs like AdWords.
  

If you develop iPhone or Android applications, we're happy to let you know about the beta launch of AdSense for mobile applications. Participants in the beta will be able to display text and image ads in their mobile applications to earn revenue. We've seen positive results in our trials, and we're excited to roll this out to new developers to continue supporting the growth of mobile applications.

You can visit our new microsite to learn more about AdSense for mobile applications, see our beta requirements, or sign up. If you're selected to participate in the beta, we'll be in touch with you shortly with next steps for getting started.

You can also learn more about the program by watching the video below, in which Howard Steinberg, Director of Business Development at Urbanspoon, describes how he tested AdSense for mobile applications:

Last week, we kicked off a five-week educational series about speeding up your business in a slowdown. This week, you'll hear tips from Ricardo Prada, a user experience researcher at Google, about designing for the user. As we continue to share tips about attracting more visitors, increasing your revenue potential, and attracting more advertiser budget, we invite you to share your own suggestions for growing your business by leaving comments on each post. You can also follow the series at www.google.com/ads/speedingup.

Hi, I'm Ricardo Prada. As a user experience researcher here at Google, one of the things my colleagues and I are responsible for is making sure that Google websites are efficient and fun to use so that visitors keep coming back to them. I'd like to share three tips we think about daily as we do our jobs. Ultimately, they all fit into our guiding principle: if you focus on the user, everything else will follow.



Tip #1: Design for the tasks that visitors complete on your site.

Think about tasks on your website first and layouts second. It's tempting to want a flashy design that exercises your CSS skills, but remember that vistors come to your site with specific goals in mind, like reading your essays, or checking out your collection of sports photos. Write down the top three tasks your users might want to accomplish on your site, and design to make those tasks quick and efficient.

Tip #2: Use ads as potential exit paths, not interruptions.

Ads should complement your site, not distract from it. The most natural place for a user to evaluate an advertisement is after they've completed their goals on your site. Instead of interrupting your user's main tasks, try to offer ads as potential exit path for users who were probably ready to leave anyway by placing them at the end of completed tasks.

Tip #3: SEO - only if it makes sense.

Only do search engine optimizations that benefit your users. For example, page titles that are relevant to the page content make it easier for your visitors to understand what your articles are about. On the other hand, there are lots of sneaky strategies out there for improving search engine rank. Most of those don't work anymore, and they might actually harm your site's reputation.

Additional Resources:

• Our Help Center has more suggestions about where to place ads.
  
• The Google Webmaster Tools team shares their design and content tips.
  

As a follow-up to last week's launch of font size controls, we'd like to let you know that we've just increased the default font size for AdSense ad units. This change will affect your ad units if you haven't yet customized your font sizes, or if your ad units are set to 'AdSense default font size' -- you'll notice that the text in your ad units is now the equivalent of 'medium' instead of 'small'. We decided to make this change based on publisher feedback and our testing, which showed that this increased font size improved performance.

If you'd like to change the font size in your ad units, you can do so on an account-wide basis or by individual ad unit -- just follow the instructions listed in our Help Center. Again, we recommend testing these new font size options with your existing customizations to determine which combinations perform best on your pages.

Today, we're kicking off a five-week educational series about speeding up your business in a slowdown. We'll be revisiting the basics of online publishing to help you grow your business, and we'll share tips about using AdSense and other Google products that you can apply to your business now. In the coming Thursdays, you can look forward to tips for making your site more user-friendly, bringing in more visitors, increasing your revenue potential, and attracting more advertiser budget. Along the way, we invite you to share your own suggestions for growing your business by leaving comments at the end of each post. You can also follow the campaign at www.google.com/ads/speedingup.

In today's post, you'll hear from Avinash Kaushik, Google's own Analytics Evangelist, about the importance of understanding your traffic, analyzing how your site performs, and using data to make decisions. Here are a few small to mid-sized ideas that -- in Avinash's own words -- can add up to remarkable results for your website. They're all things you can do today with free web analytics tools, like Google Analytics.



Idea #1: Discover what content and traffic sources keep people coming to your site again and again.

How many times does a visitor have to visit your site to be considered valuable? Use the Visitor Loyalty report in the Visitors section of Google Analytics to pinpoint the visitors who come to your site that many times or more. Put that data into an advanced segment and apply that segment to your core reports to understand things like where these valuable visitors come from and what content they consume. You can then use this information to optimize how you acquire new visitors and the content on your site for loyal visitors.


Idea #2: Figure out which pages to improve on your site.

Many people ask the question: "How do I know which pages on my site to improve?" Take a look at the Top Landing Pages report in the Content section of Google Analytics. This report tells you the first page people see when they enter your site. Sort this report by bounce rate. Bounce rate measures how many people come to your site, only see one page and leave right away (or as Avinash calls it: "I came, I puked, I left"). Once you identify which of your top landing pages are not able to get a single click from your visitors you know which pages need to be improved.


Idea #3: Find out where AdSense performs best on your site.

If you've linked your AdSense and Analytics accounts, the Top AdSense Content report in the AdSense section of Google Analytics will tell you where on your website AdSense ads get the most clicks. This is a win-win for your business and your customers, as it helps you identify what type of content to produce more of based on what content people are most interested in as well as where people most often click on your AdSense ads.


If you haven't already, link your AdSense and Analytics accounts in order to take full advantage of what Analytics can offer. If you don't yet have an Analytics account, you can sign up today.

Additional Resources:

• Read more from Avinash at his blog, Occam's Razor, which has more tips like the above and additional ways to use Visitor Loyalty metrics, or on the Official Google Blog.
  
• To learn more about using Analytics on your website, visit Conversion University.
  
• See great ways to use AdSense and Analytics together by watching this video.
  

Since February, you've been able to change the font faces of your ad units. We're now happy to announce the launch of a related feature you've been asking for -- the ability to change the font size of the text in your ad units. You can now select from small, medium, and large font sizes for ad units on pages in Latin-character languages. Just like with the current font face options, size options appear in every account but will only be applied to ad units on pages primarily in Latin-based characters for now.

The font size you choose will be applied to the body of the ad, with the title scaled appropriately. In order to fit the ad text correctly, the actual font size will vary for each format size, font face, and user-specific settings such as browsers and operating systems. In addition, some formats sizes currently have very limited room, so the font size application will be most apparent in cases where the number of ads appearing in your ad units varies automatically in order to maximize your performance. Here's an example of what the three font sizes could look like in a 336x250 large rectangle:


Your ads are currently set at the default size for AdSense, which is the equivalent of 'small'. You can select a new font size on an account-wide basis in the Ad Display Preference section of your My Account tab, or on an individual ad unit basis for new and existing ad units.


If you're creating new ad units, you can choose between the AdSense default font size, your new account-wide font size (if you've selected one using the instructions above), or a separate size. To update existing ad units you've created using the Manage Ads feature, visit the 'Manage Ads' page under your AdSense Setup tab. Any font size changes you make on an individual ad unit basis will be maintained even if you change your account-wide default in the future.

Also, a bit of advance notice: soon, we'll also be changing the default font size across AdSense in ad units from 'small' to 'medium'. We've heard from some of you that the current font size can be too small, and our testing also showed that slightly larger font sizes improved performance. Any ad units set to the default font size will automatically be updated to display the larger setting. If you'd prefer to stick with today's font size, you can set your desired font size as 'small' across your account.

We encourage you to combine these new font size options with the other customization options in your account to test the optimal layout for your pages. We're excited about this launch, and we'll be sure to follow up with another post to let you know once the default font size has been changed.

Updated to include an example of each of the three font sizes

Following our launch of Euro reporting for publishers in five European countries, we're happy to announce that local currency reports are now also available in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Finland, Greece, Portugal, South Africa, Switzerland, and the UK.

If you're located in one of these countries, you can now update your account to display earnings in your local currency. After you've updated your account, any earnings generated from advertisers paying in currencies other than your local currency will be converted daily. If you receive payments in your local currency, this means that there also won't be any additional conversions at the end of the month. However, you can still choose to receive payments in U.S. Dollars or change your payment method at any time.

Before enabling local currency reports in your account, we recommend downloading and saving copies of your past reports in U.S. Dollars for your records. You can then update your account by signing in to AdSense and clicking the link in the green prompt on your Reports Overview page. You'll be asked to review and agree to a new set of Terms and Conditions. Unfortunately, we're not able to interpret the meaning of changes in our legal documents for publishers -- if you have questions or need legal advice on interpreting the new Terms, please don't hesitate to contact your attorney.

We'll be requiring this change in the future, so we recommend updating your account to report earnings in your local currency soon. You can find answers to common FAQs associated with these new local currency reports in a recent Inside AdSense blog post -- all references to 'Euros' in the post now also apply to your local currency. In addition, detailed information about these new reports can be found in our Help Center.

Good news! We’ve expanded Western Union Quick Cash as a payment method to 7 new countries: Barbados, Bolivia, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Nepal, Uruguay, and Vietnam. If you live in any of these locations, you can now sign up to receive your AdSense payments from your local Western Union agent. With Western Union, you’ll receive your earnings sooner, since you won't have to wait for checks to arrive in the mail or clear at the bank. Plus, AdSense won't charge you a fee to use this payment method.

Please keep in mind these important points:

• Payments will continue to follow our normal payment schedule and will be available for pickup at your local Western Union agent the day after they're issued.
  
• You'll need to present a government-issued ID that matches your AdSense payee name when picking up your payment. If you need to update or correct the payee name listed in your account, please follow the instructions in our Help Center.
  
• Right now, only individual payee names can receive payments by Western Union, not businesses.
  
• Payments must be picked up within 60 days of issue or they'll expire and be credited back to your account.
  
• Payments will be made in US dollars, but depending on your local Western Union agent, they may be picked up in your local currency.
  

These instructions will help you to sign up, and our Help Center has more info about picking up your payments and other countries where Western Union payments are currently available. We're working towards making this payment option available to publishers in additional countries, and we'll be sure to announce any updates here on the blog.

A few weeks back, we announced that all publishers can now integrate their AdSense accounts with Google Analytics. If you're not very familiar with Analytics yet, you might be interested in reading a recent post on the Analytics blog that addresses ten common myths about the product. For example, did you know that you can use Analytics to segment visitor data in real time, or that you can use the new Analytics API to tie your website data to your financials? Check out the post to learn more about these features and other ways you can use Analytics to better understand your site stats.

If you haven't yet linked your AdSense account with Analytics, follow these steps:

1. Sign in to AdSense.
   
2. Click the link that says "Integrate your AdSense account with Google Analytics" on your Reports Overview page.
   
3. Follow the onscreen instructions, and watch our video for additional guidance.
   

Even if you use AdSense in a language that's not supported by Analytics, you can still link your accounts and view your Analytics reports in a different language.

Social networking features are all the rage these days. (AdSense has even joined the trend with Twitter!) Now your site can be part of the social web by using the features offered through Google Friend Connect to awaken and strengthen your community of visitors.

With Friend Connect, your visitors can join your site using credentials they've already created with Google, Yahoo, AOL, and others, and link in the people they know on services like Google Talk, Plaxo, Twitter, and more. There's also a gallery of gadgets where you can choose from features like commenting, ratings and reviews, and the social bar to add to your site. Just like AdSense, you can simply copy and paste a few snippets of code to add these features to your site. Or, if you want to do some deeper integrations, you can use the Friend Connect APIs.

Watch this video to learn more about Friend Connect:



We're constantly adding more social gadgets, such as the event gadget, the Polls gadget, and the Get Answers gadget. To learn more about Friend Connect and other Google products helping to make the web -- and your site -- more social, check out the Social Web Blog.

Posted by Mendel Chuang - Google Friend Connect Team

If you use link units, you may have noticed a small addition to the page users see after clicking a link unit topic. We recently added an image ad to the bottom of each of these pages, after our testing showed revenue improvements for many publishers.


These image ads are contextually targeted, based on the link unit topic users clicked to reach the ads. If no image ads are available for the given topic, we'll only show the original text ads -- in other words, we won't show a PSA or insert a blank space in place of the image ad in this case. Advertisers can bid on these image ads on a cost-per-click (CPC) and cost-per-impression (CPM) basis, so you'll generate earnings for valid clicks and impressions. You can review the performance of image ads on your link unit pages by generating a link unit report on your Advanced Reports page.

If you aren't using link units on your pages, we encourage you to give them a try. They don't take up much space and can help add to your AdSense revenue -- learn more in our Help Center, or visit your AdSense Setup tab and select 'AdSense for content' to get started.

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

Since introducing reports in Euros for publishers located in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Spain, we've received a number of questions about this launch. For publishers in these regions, we've addressed some of your concerns below.

How will my earnings be converted to Euros?
Once you switch to the new reports, earnings generated from advertisers paying in currencies other than the Euro will be converted. This will happen on a daily basis using the prevailing market rate from the previous day. If you generate earnings from an advertiser paying in Euros, they won't be converted.

When I'm issued a payment, will my earnings be converted again?
If you've switched to Euro reports and are receiving payments in Euros, there will be no additional conversions when your payments are issued. However, if you're receiving payments in U.S. Dollars, your payment will be converted from Euros to U.S. Dollars at the end of the month.

When I switch to Euro reports, will that automatically change the currency of my payments?
No, your selected payment currency and method won't change after you switch to Euro reports -- unless, of course, you want them to change. (You can update them by visiting the 'Payments Details' section under your My Account tab.)

Will there be a delay in receiving my unpaid earnings once I make this change?
No, making this change will not affect the timing of your payments. After you switch to Euro reports, your unpaid earnings in U.S. Dollars will be converted to Euros before the next upcoming payment selection deadline (typically the 15th of each month). For instance, if you make this switch on June 3rd, your unpaid earnings will be converted by June 15th; if you make this switch on June 20th, your unpaid earnings will be converted by July 15th.

How will this change influence VAT and any taxes I have to pay?
While you may receive your payments in your local currency, all payments are being made by Google Ireland, a company incorporated under the laws of Ireland, in accordance with the terms of your agreement with Google. Unless your business is in Ireland, you shouldn't have an obligation to charge Google VAT or treat any of our payments to you as VAT that needs to be paid to any VAT authorities. If your billing address is located in Ireland, you may have an obligation to charge Google Irish VAT. For more specific answers, we suggest you head for your local tax adviser.

I'm not located in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, or Spain. When will you include other countries?
We're working to offer Euro reports to publishers located in additional countries. When we do, we'll be sure to post any updates here on Inside AdSense.

Do I need to update my account if I'm eligible?
Although this change is currently optional, in the future we will require that publishers located in eligible countries make this switch. Eligible publishers who haven't yet updated their accounts will currently see an interstitial page with additional information after signing in. We understand that some eligible publishers would like to continue receiving payments in U.S. Dollars; while you can still choose to be paid in U.S. Dollars, it will be mandatory to view your reports in Euros.

If you're eligible to make the switch to Euro reporting, we encourage you to review the updated Terms and Conditions and update your account soon. To get started, sign in to your account and look for the prompt, "See your daily earnings reported in Euro amounts!" on your Reports Overview page. You can also find more information in our Help Center.

Posted by Arlene Lee - The Inside AdSense Team

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

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.

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

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: