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.