Make Money Online

Have you checked your AdSense email preferences lately? If not, you may be missing out on important information and special offers without realizing. Take a minute to log in and update your email preferences under the ‘My Account’ tab.

Want to be invited to upcoming events like AdSense In Your City? Make sure you check the box next to Special Offers when you edit your email preferences so you can stay up-to-date with giveaways and other special programs in your area.

Want tips from the AdSense team for how to earn more with your AdSense account? Check Customized help and performance suggestions and/or Newsletters so we can offer personalized guidance to improve performance and maximize your revenue.

Want to help us improve AdSense by testing out features like the new AdSense interface? Check Google Market Research and you’ll be able to share your valuable feedback with us through surveys and beta tests.

Want promotions and key updates for other Google products that can help you grow your AdSense business? Check Information about other Google products and services which may be of interest to you so we can send you news and coupons based on your potential needs.

We want to help you earn more with tips and promotions, invite you to in-person events, and gather your feedback so we can continue to improve AdSense. So log in, update your preferences, and take advantage of the opportunities coming your way from the AdSense team!

Posted by Katrina Kurnit – Inside AdSense Team

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AdSense email preferences: Get the most from your account and from Google

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Brands and marketers are always looking for the magic bullet that turns a normal campaign into an overnight success. So it’s no surprise that $11 million in revenue from a single merchandise promotion generates a lot of interest in a company. It’s the kind of success story that gets marketers talking.

That success story belongs to Groupon whose national promotion for Gap last week resulted in income of $11 million from sales of a $25 coupon worth $50 of store merchandise to over 440,000 shoppers, according to AdAge. While Gap has yet to see how many coupons are actually redeemed, Rob Solomon, Groupon’s president said,

“I’m pretty sure if they ran a national TV campaign, they wouldn’t have gotten nearly 500,000 paying buyers in the store.”

Less than two years old Groupon began as a locally-oriented service offering a “deal a day” to subscribers in particular cities who give Groupon their email addresses. The twist is that an offer is only redeemable if enough people express interest in it. With redemption rates exceeding 80 percent on average, Groupon’s growth is easy to understand since it often splits the value of the offer as part of its revenue. It is the local focus that got Groupon to where it is today. The company is obviously unafraid to think beyond localization. “There’s a lot of room to remain hyper-local,” Solomon tells Reuters, “but to introduce super-specials, like for the Gap. Gap is a testament to demand for the big guys.”

Such success is necessary for Groupon to show its model cannot only attract large brands, but that it can retain its position of dominance within its own model now that a slew of copycats have followed on the heels of its success.

Groupon has already spawned several look-alikes – LivingSocial and ScoutMob are competitors. Yelp just launched a similar service, as did Travelzoo. But as with Facebook in social networking and Foursquare in location-based services, Groupon has first-mover status – something it will clearly take advantage of as it grows.

In the last five months, according to AdAge, Groupon has grown from 3 million to more than 15 million subscribers, has gone from 300 to more than 1,500 employees, and has expanded from the U.S. to 28 other countries. The week following the Gap promotion, an additional 750,000 subscribers signed on. Solomon says Groupon expects to have over 20 million subscribers by the end of this year and generate some $400 million in gross sales. The company is well funded by venture capital and shares in the revenue it generates for retailers.

Groupon currently makes localized offers in 29 countries in Europe, Japan, Latin America, North America, and Russia. According to Reuters, Groupon expects to expand from 85 markets to 200 in North America by the end of 2011.

There is no question that Groupon’s model can generate a successful crowd effect driving a glut of conversions based on a coupon. However even though the model is obviously a hit among advertisers, there is legitimate concern among brands that are worried about “training” consumers to only wait for, or buy with, an offer. Not all case studies of the model have had positive results.

1. Advertisers have experienced product shortages that have created customer service nightmares.
2. When examining the buyers often it was discovered that Groupon did not generate new-to-file customers.
3. Poor customer service from Groupon itself.

As Augustine Fou, the chief digital officer at Omnicom’s Healthcare Consultancy Group, is quoted by Mashable in saying that stores like The Gap are exactly the type of advertiser who shouldn’t be using Groupon. He estimates that their loss on such a campaign $7.5 million revenue which is a hefty expense for publicity.

Groupon is, of course, all about driving traffic – and what it did in terms of traffic generation for Gap is now generating a lot of interest among retailers. Advertisers seem enamored with Groupon and many will be lining up to try the service this holiday season. The experience with Gap has proven that Groupon can sustain its business model with a national as well as a local audience. Solomon tells AdAge that he expects Groupon to hold another national promotion “pretty soon,” and that there will be more to come in the last quarter of this year.

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Attention all Bloggers! We know many of you use AdSense to monetize your blog, and we wanted to be sure you didn’t miss out on the invitation to Blogger’s 11th Birthday party. Using Meetup Everywhere, you can find a party in your area that will be filled with local bloggers like you. We hope you’ll take advantage of this great opportunity to swap stories about your readers, learn about some new sites, share tips about earning with AdSense, and get to know other passionate bloggers. Details are highlighted below, but check out the official Blogger post for more information.

• What: Blogger’s 11th birthday celebration!
• How: Sign up for a Meetup near you or get one going in your town.
• Where: Anywhere you are.
• Who: Everyone! You never know who might show up.
• When: Any time on Tuesday, August 31, 2010
• RSVP: www.meetup.com/bloggerfiesta

Posted by Katrina Kurnit – Inside AdSense Team

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Editor’s Note: The following post is an excerpt from material Jim Kukral, former Managing Editor of ReveNews and author of Attention! This Book Will Make You Money, used during his keynote at Affiliate Summit East 2010. It is published here with Jim’s permission. Rumor has it the Affiliate Super Friends appeared during the keynote, that indeed is all Jim’s fault. Enjoy.

Did you know that 4.6 million bottles of 5 Hour Energy Drink are sold each week in the USA alone? According to The New York Times, Bill Pecoriello, chief executive of Consumer Edge Research, estimated that energy shot sales could reach $700 million this year, nearly double last year’s $370 million. Today, 5-Hour Energy accounts for about 80 percent of the rapidly expanding market.

The question is how did a relatively new product gain such traction with the US consumer? Here are five valuable lessons you can take away from this product and their marketing.

#1 Reason – “Energy” Is In The Product Name

I’m a huge fan of saying what you do. If you are a plumber and your name is Angel, your business name should be Angel’s Plumbing. If you are the world’s best expert at databases, then you should be calling yourself The Database Diva, not “Aviva, LLC” which was her original name. If you are an amazing resource of tax information for small businesses owners, you should be calling yourself TaxMama, not Eva Rosenberg Tax Services.

Lesson: Say What You Do

#2 Reason – It Helps You Get Energy

You’re tired,  you’re down. You need energy. You can go and drink coffee all day long, but then your breath smells and you have to pee every five minutes. In other words, it solves problems which is what every successful product does.

Lesson: Solve Problems For Your Customer

#3 Reason – It Helps You For Five Hours

Not one hour, not 12 hours, not a half hour. Five hours. When you think about it that number is of significant importance to their marketing because people find it believable. A product with a claim that sounds outrageous, no matter how true, won’t sell. Consumers have to believe it to buy it. If it was 12 hours, nobody would buy it, they’d think it was fake or like a speed pill. If it was one hour, again, people wouldn’t buy it, they’d say “Who needs one hour of energy only?”

Five hours is exactly what you need, and want, and they know it. Need a pick me up after lunch to get you through the rest of the day? Drink 5 Hour Energy Drink. Need to hit the clubs at Midnight in Vegas and dance the night away? Drink 5 Hour Energy Drink.

Lesson: Think About What Your Customers Really Need

#4 Reason – It’s Very Portable

You can drink it in seconds. Not like a giant Monster energy drink that you have to chug-a-lug around with you all day. Not like a big coffee mug you have to carry around. You don’t feel bloated after drinking it. While all their competitors went big, five hour energy was smart enough to go small.

Lesson: Be The Alternative

#5 Reason – It’s Convenient

You can stick it in your gym bag or your work backpack. You can leave it in your glove compartment or put it in your coat pocket. Since it’s small, it’s convenient.

Lesson: Make It Easy

Whether you are a business or a brand, or you sell a product or a service, you can learn quite a bit from 5 Hour Energy. People look for new things all the time. Are you creating them for them? Not everyone loves coffee you know.

Now is your chance to take these important lessons and work them into your own strategy. Pretty soon you might just find yourself owning the majority share of customers in your industry.

Source:
Five Marketing Lessons You Can Learn From 5 Hour Energy Drink

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By this time most online marketers understand that good landing pages are a key driver of business. I had the pleasure of speaking with Anne Holland, founder of MarketingSherpa, who is up to her old tricks, teaching us how to be better marketers with her awesome quiz site WhichTestWon.

Wondering whether testing landing pages is worthwhile? Well the math is quite simple: as a marketer you buy 100 clicks.   If you convert two people to customers and make $100 from each customer you’ve just made $200.  Now, if you do some testing and increase your landing page conversion by 100 percent and get  four customers from the same 100 clicks, you’ve just doubled your revenue. Every week there is a new A/B test on landing pages where you get to guess the winner and then see what the true results of the test were online.

Anne (pictured below) shared some best practices with me, then we talked about the future of landing page testing and online marketing.

WhichTestWon is about a year old now. Why did you decide to launch it and in this format?

I’ve always loved A/B and multivariate testing because it’s the easiest way to get big results and improvement for your landing pages, your lead generation forms, your eCommerce carts – as well as your email campaigns – without spending lots of money and without having to drive more traffic. It freaked me out when I discovered 73 percent of marketers aren’t doing any testing whatsoever these days. A friend of mine says that’s like driving with your eyes closed.

So, one day after I’d retired from MarketingSherpa, it just hit me — why not a fun site to show A/B testing? Sort of like Hot or Not, only what you see are two different creatives, and then you vote on which one in reality did better. Then, we show you the real results data and you learn how far off you were.

What are the three or four best practices that you can recommend to people?

Use bigger, more prominent buttons.

Test your headline copy and your button copy. Test stripping off the navigation bar, extra columns, and all extraneous content from your key conversion pages.

It’s pretty simple really.  And when your IT team tells you the site’s “already been tested”, you have to educate them that usability testing has NOTHING to do with A/B testing. Usability testing is great, but it doesn’t tell you how to stop people from abandoning your site, your registration forms or your cart. Usability testing doesn’t help you learn how to convince people to convert.

What is most overlooked  in landing page testing?

Aside from the fact that it’s not done?!

Obvious stuff like match your headline to the headline of the ad or offer that drove the traffic, make your buttons bigger, get rid of extraneous navigation, etc.

I also think mainstream marketers have overlooked the possibility of overlays; they look like a pop-up but are not blocked by pop-up blockers. It’s a great way to garner email opt-ins, among other things. Make them look classy and they can work for your brand. And probably not enough people have tested added video, let alone all the related permutations like sound off, sound on, auto-play, etc.

What are the most common mistakes?

Tracking only to the click on the page tested. We see a lot of test data showing when the marketer tracked beyond the initial click the true winner of the test was revealed. What you want to encourage are qualified clicks. You can test to improve your qualified click rate, but you have to be able to track further down the funnel. It’s not impossible; you can even do it with Google Web Optimizer which is free technology.

The second biggest mistake is testing a really badly performing page. It’s a lot harder to get conclusive results if you have little conversion data to base the math on. Test a page that already has conversions, so if you raise them by say 20 percent, you’re going to look like a hero to the CEO. That’s what you want.

What are your favorite tests from the past year and why?

The ones where I got the answer wrong; probably a dozen of them I guessed totally wrong.. The point is no matter how big an expert you are, you’re going to guess wrong sometimes because you’re not a true representative of who the marketplace, the page or email was designed for. Your ideas don’t matter. What matters is the marketplace. They are the ones you’re trying to convert. You have to test. Period.

Here are some of my favorites.

#1 Which PPC Landing Page Increased Telephone Inquiries by 42 percent?
The thing I liked about this was that the marketers didn’t just measure clicks. They know that prospects who can be convinced to pick up the phone are much more likely to convert to buying their service. This is true of many pricier B2C offers. So the whole test was geared toward getting more qualified phone calls. Too many marketers forget to measure phones as one of the response media. Each of your test panels needs a different phone number!

#2 Online Video Voiceover A/B Test: Which Accent Convinced More
Global Visitors to Click for a Free Download? (Brit vs. Yank) The results of this test were really fun because the marketers measured conversion rates by country. It turned out people in Australia, for example, preferred a completely different voice-over accent than people in India did. It was also different for the US vs. UK. If the marketers had picked one single “winner” for the entire world some countries would have significantly depressed responses! This test proves that different demographics can and will respond very differently to the exact same creative. You have to test and measure separately by key demographics.

#3 Profile-Pimp.net Tests Giant Button & Landing Page Designs. Which Version Increased Clickthroughs?
I love this test so much I actually invented an award category just for it in last year’s Testing Awards at our site. In this test, the marketers took a very nice fat button and expanded it to be the biggest button possibly in history. It was a button that had wandered too near the nuclear power plant, if you know what I mean. You can see the creatives and the results are eye-opening.

What tests surprised you most and which were counter intuitive?

I’m a former copywriter, so I think I “know copy”, but the wording tests are often nearly impossible to guess at. There was one where a colon versus a dash was used in the subject line of an email, which really made a difference in responses, and I totally guessed wrong. Who knew such a tiny factor would make a difference?

Also, sometimes images can throw me. A happy smiling human: will that help or depress responses? It completely depends on the market and the product.

Lastly, I really hate the idea of auto-play video; you know the ones that start blaring at you when you enter a site or landing page. I think it’s dreadful. But by golly, they can really work for some marketers.

How should we be thinking about the pre-click and post-click experience for the user and optimizing for conversion?

Start measuring further down the conversion path than the immediate click. The marketers who are able to measure farther get amazing data. An  A/B test on one page can send reverberations through the rest of the conversion path! Relevancy. We’ve heard that word so many times in speeches and articles it’s not really sinking in any more. I think if you come to WhichTestWon.com and look at a few of the 65+ tests we have in the library, you’ll start to get it.

Let’s talk about cutting edge practices. What are the future of landing pages?

What surprises me the most when I talk to marketers about landing page testing is they seem to think theirs is a one size fits winner for landing pages. As we well know, not all traffic is equal and behaves differently. Should we be segmenting our landing page testing? If so, how should we be thinking about it? And is there technology out there to help us?

Marketers who want to use a single landing page for everything are a perennial problem as are marketers who want to use their homepage as their PPC landing page or who send traffic for a specific keyword to a general “category” page. I think these marketers know better, but are hamstrung by budgets and politics.

The CMOs of this world have some work to do on this front. They need to cut down the jungle of problems around getting new landing pages created. They need to enable their teams to build and launch landing pages on the fly… and to test them! This is a problem of internal company politics, nothing more. Cheap and easy technology has been here for more than a decade.

How does it compare to the segmentation done in search and other marketing channels?

In every channel, from search to email, audience segmentation is the golden arrow which can make a tremendous difference in conversions. To pick segments, I always say look at the current customer base. How do they segment out? Any segment that’s more than 10% of sales is probably worthy of its own campaigns, offers,  and landing pages  tested to appeal to that segment. This is true for B2B and B2C.

Plus, of course, there are the always popular recency and relevancy segments. What you mail your customers vs. hot prospects vs. not-so-hot prospects, etc. That’s all classic direct marketing stuff.

That’s stuff catalogers were doing in the 1980s and it still applies. The tactics are still powerful. It’s just that a lot of online marketers didn’t grow up in that world so they don’t know this type of marketing science already exists.

Finally, do we need to get the point where landing pages are dynamically generated based on the user for the best converting experience by channel, time of day, key words etc?

Depends on how famous and trusted your brand is, how much traffic you’re driving, etc. There’s no general answer to this. Remember, you need a certain level of conversions per month just to run a conclusive test.

We have algorithms powering so much of our online marketing that at this point very little dynamic content is on landing pages. Do you think this is the future of landing page testing? Does landing page test technology need to catch up with other online marketing technology?

I know some fairly dinky B2B marketers, folks with small budgets and an entire marketing department of just two people, who have been doing dynamic landing pages with headlines that change based on PPC keyword for five years. This isn’t rocket science. It doesn’t have to be enormously expensive. Again, I think the hold-up is office politics more than anything else.

That’s why I wrote a white paper (pdf) all about how to overcome office politics and get your testing ideas and budget approved by the CEO, the IT department, etc. It’s posted on our site under ‘Free PDFs’.

See the original post here:
MarketingSherpa Founder Anne Holland Talks Landing Pages and WhichTestWon.com

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We’re always focused on improving AdSense by bringing more advertisers to your sites, giving you more control over the ads that appear on your sites, and giving you more transparency into how much revenue you’re earning. Over the past year, much of our focus has been on attracting more display advertisers and display advertising spend to your sites. We’ve added new advertisers and introduced options that help these advertisers reach your sites. At the same time, advertisers have continued to run ads on YouTube and our own properties. To make our display media offerings clearer to advertisers and agencies so that we can continue to bring more display spend to your sites, we’re creating a new umbrella name for all these properties, the Google Display Network.

The Google Display Network will comprise all of the sites where advertisers can buy ads through Google, including the over one million AdSense and DoubleClick Ad Exchange partners as well as YouTube and Google properties such as Google Finance, Gmail, Google Maps, and Blogger. As an AdSense publisher you’re already part of the Google Display Network. We’re not making any changes to how AdSense works, so no action is required on your part. If you use AdSense for search, your AdSense for search ad space won’t be part of the Google Display Network. Advertisers will continue to be able to purchase ads on your search results pages in the same way they always have.

While this new name reflects our significant investment to bring more display advertising to your sites, we want to make sure you know that we are still committed to delivering relevant text ads. If you receive text ads on your sites today, rest assured that you will continue to do so. The Google Display Network offers all ad formats – text, image, rich media, and video ads – enabling advertisers to unleash their creativity and engage visitors on your websites in various ways. If you haven’t opted into receiving image ads, we encourage you to do so in order to benefit from the investments we’ve made.

We’re working hard to offer the best display advertising solutions, and we look forward to continuing to introduce new features on the Google Display Network that help advertisers reach their goals and that help our AdSense publishers earn more revenue.

Posted by Neal Mohan, Vice President of Product Management

Source:
Introducing the Google Display Network

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It’s that time of the year again, we’re sharing this year’s AffiliateBenchmarks Questionnaire.
The folks over at NETExponent, including ReveNews contributor Peter Figueredo, have been working on refining the questionnaire to reach more segments of the industry. So what’s new for the 2010 AffiliateBenchmarks Study?

• The study is more streamlined
• Separate surveys for advertisers/merchants/agencies
• With larger distribution this year from various partners, including ReveNews, this years survey promises to provide even more data analysis when the 2010 report is issued

As in previous studies, any participant who answers every question (not just required questions) will receive the full survey results and participants who answer all of the required questions will receive a copy of the executive summary. The questionnaire runs until 5pm EST, July 16th.

In our opinion it is well worth participating in.

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Based on your feedback about the category filtering feature, we’re happy to announce that there’s no longer a limit to the number of categories you can filter from your sites. You can now filter as many of the 11 available categories as you’d like.

The category filtering feature allows you to prevent ads that fall into specific categories like ‘religion’ and ‘dating’ from appearing on your pages. You can filter categories by visiting your Ad Review Center, located under the AdSense Setup tab. Click the ‘change’ link to view available categories to filter. Your selections will be applied to ads in English, French, German, and Spanish, no matter how they’ve been targeted to your site.

We also recommend taking a look at the columns showing how much of your recent revenue and ad impressions are generated by each of the categories. This will give you an idea how applying these filters may affect your account.

Thanks for continuing to provide your feedback about category filtering. We’ll be sure to keep you posted with any additional updates. In the meantime, please feel free to visit our Help Center for more information about the feature.

Posted by Arlene Lee – Inside AdSense Team

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Limit removed from category filtering feature

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While there’s a ton of hype about micropayments and their role in virtual goods, many economic trends don’t really sink in until there’s a high-profile success story that people can dream about. It doesn’t matter that less than 10% make any serious money, since it’s easier to buy the dream of riches than to face the reality of the statistics.

The real money in virtual goods isn’t found in the iPhone App Store, it’s in social network games and virtual worlds. While I’ve personally seen 20,000 limited edition items sell out on Mafia Wars in one day, that’s just a tiny spec in the new digital economy of digital goods.

Want an idea of what that tiny spec was worth?  The math goes like this: 20,000 items at 42 points/credits each. 42 rewards points costs $10 (source in game marketplace), so 20,000 x 10 = $200,000 retail value in one day. While that item may have been special and not everyone pays cash or PayPal directly for the points; it’s a very suggestive revenue statement – virtual goods are serious business.

But before the bandwagon starts cheering that virtual goods gold rush, I respectfully submit that this is the same trend expanding from virtual worlds to games and has been building momentum for a decade.

Let’s consider some virtual goods economies where there are indeed several high profile success stories to dream about. Forbes discusses the topic, but I’ll point out some highlights with my thoughts. The first goes back to 2004 and is all about an ROI of nearly 400% and a cash outlay of $26,500, but keep dreaming as there huge sums of money to be made in virtual goods:

• Do you seek rare virtual animals or cater to those who do? Then Amethera Treasure Island should peak your interest. This business in virtual world Entropia costs $26,500, but returns ~$100,000 per year.
• Do you want the own the latest hotspot asteroid? Then Club Neverdie in Entropia is your type of business. Purchased for $100,000 in real money in 2005, the nightclub, shopping mall, and sport stadium based on an asteroid is estimated to be worth $1 million.
• If asteroids are too low class for you and you’d rather cater to the luxury minded types? Keep your eye on Crystal Palace Space Station in Entropia which Forbes reports was sold for $330,000 in hopes of charging the wealthy crowd fees to visit and experience the latest in space station luxury.

While the previous examples showcase the money made in virtual real estate and experiences, others are putting the sweat and blood into other ways to earn money:

• Skilled artist or just a collector? Consider dropping north of $11,000 on an Anatomically Correct Virtual Skeleton available only in virtual world Second Life. I’ve met virtual clothing designers who reported that they earned smaller, but respectable monthly incomes selling clothes in Second Life as well.
• White collar criminal or just a hacker? A hacker in Second Life stole the real equivalent of $10,000 when he hacked into Second Life’s stock exchange.

Back in 1999 I remember users of The Palace creating and selling props on eBay. These props could be used by in-world avatars to dress up and show your personal style. Many people made and exchanged virtual goods for free, but even then, people bought, sold, and even stole the virtual good props.

Virtual goods not only are hot, they’ve been hot since 1999, been breaking bank accounts since 2004, and are now becoming a significant factor in reshaping the way we think about making money online. More is happening in this space, so stay tuned.

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The return-on-investment question always dogs proponents of social media marketing. Businesses want to, no, need to know the ROI of campaigns.  Will time spent on social networks mean more customers through the door and more money in the bank?

Researchers at Rice University feel the answer is yes. At least when it comes to Facebook fanpages.

According to the Harvard Business Review, a study by Rice University finds that social media marketing using fanpages on Facebook has a positive impact on customer loyalty and purchases.

Researchers Utpal Dholakia and Emily Durham followed the change in customer activity for one business, Dessert Gallery of Houston, Texas, as it went from no Facebook presence to an active one.

The study based its findings on surveys of more than 1,700 respondents over a three-month period. Dessert Gallery customers who become Facebook fans turned out to be the store’s best customers and increased their purchases after engaging with the store online

Speaking directly to ROI those who were Facebook fans spent 33 percent more than non-fans. Also Facebook fans had 41 percent greater psychological loyalty toward Dessert Gallery, which underlies the promise social media that connections are lasting ones that will continue to benefit the business long after the account has been set up.

But there are questions that this study leaves lingering.

First, whether the results are applicable to larger companies. Since small stores already have a more people-focused, flesh-and-blood relationship, they usually have some customer loyalty to build from. Large “faceless” corporations may have tougher times building loyalty and also face customer service problems often exacerbated by their own redtape (see Lois Whitman debacle or the recent Kevin Smith vs Southwest saga as shining examples).

Secondly, will this small business be able to keep up and sustain the social media interaction it had at launch which enticed the customers to begin with. According to the article, the Facebook page was updated several times a week with photos, promotions and contests. Is that manageable for the internal staff over the long haul?

“We must be cautious in interpreting the study’s results,” Dholakia said. “The fact that only about 5 percent of the store’s 13,000 customers became Facebook fans within three months indicates that Facebook fan pages may work best as niche marketing programs targeted to customers who regularly use Facebook. Social-media marketing must be employed judiciously with other types of marketing programs.”

The promise of social media marketing has always been that conversations with engaged customers would have some real-world reward – let alone a reputation, by amplifying the impact of word-of-mouth. Now, in at least one case, that has proven to be true.

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Rice Study Gives Facebook Fanpages a Passing Grade

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You asked for it, you got it! AdSense for Domains, which launched a year ago to help publishers earn revenue through ads placed on undeveloped domains, now uses optional keyword hints more often. These keywords are suggestions supplied to Google by domain owners about the types of content users are looking for when they arrive on an undeveloped domain. They are used to help our system determine the best ads to place on these domains. For example, with the domain www.rockstarsand.com, a publisher might suggest the keywords “bitumen” and “mining” so that ads may appear from advertisers offering oil extraction products.

Keyword hints remain optional. When keyword hints are provided by the publisher, our ad-matching systems will use them more often. As always, we aim to provide the most relevant ads for the user, the best value for advertisers, and the best returns for publishers. This means in some cases, keyword hints will be ignored when we have evidence that other targeting approaches perform better.

Instructions for setting keyword hints for your domains can be found here.

The AdSense for Domains team is continuing to work on additional product improvements, that we will be announcing in the coming months.

Posted by Randy Heath – AdSense for Domains

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AdSense for Domains Expands Use of Keyword Hints

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We’ve posted a couple times about how the Custom Search Element can help provide a more customized search experience for your users while enabling you to earn money. Today we’re excited to announce two new features for the Custom Search Element that will enable you to further customize your website search to the look and feel of your site: themes and rich snippets.

Themes

You can now customize the layout and styles of your Custom Search Element. To select a theme for your Custom Search Element, just go to your Custom Search Engine account at http://www.google.com/cse/manage/all and click Control panel. On the Control panel page, in the left-hand menu, click Look and feel.

Custom Search Control documentation.

Rich snippets

Rich snippets are another new feature that allow you to customize the actual Custom Search Element search results with additional relevant content, like thumbnail images and actions. We like to think of rich snippets as a way to add more flair to your Custom Search Element search results.

Here’s an example of search results from a Custom Search Element which uses both themes and rich snippets. The thumbnail image next to each search result shows rich snippets in action.

Rich snippets require you to mark up the page with metadata. For more information, check out the Custom Search Developer’s Guide.

If you have any feedback for us on either of these new features or on the Custom Search Element itself, please leave a comment. We love hearing what publishers have to say about Custom Search!

Posted by Christine Tsai, Google Web Elements team

Continued here:
A more customized search experience for your website

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This Thursday, October 22nd, our Dublin-based AdSense team will host a webinar geared towards publishers with sites related to education. We welcome you to join us for an hour, starting at 9am PST/5pm GMT, and learn how you can improve your ad performance. We’ll talk you through our top tips and show you sample implementations, and you’ll be able to put your questions live to an AdSense specialist. Please be sure to sign up via our Help Center if you’re planning to attend.

Posted by Siobhan McCormack – AdSense Optimisation Team

Excerpted from:
A learning opportunity for education sites

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In April, we gave you a sneak peek into category filtering, a new feature we’ve been developing to give publishers more control over their ads. Today, we’re excited to announce that we’re extending the beta to publishers in a number of English-speaking countries including, but not limited to, Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, the U.K., and the U.S.

As a reminder, category filtering lets you prevent ads from up to 5 specific categories such as religion, politics, and dating from appearing on your pages. Your filters will be applied to ads in English, regardless of how they’re targeted. In addition, you’ll be able to see the percentage that each category contributes to your earnings, which can help you understand any revenue impact you might notice as a result of filtering.

Based on feedback from our initial beta testers, we’ve also made a few improvements to the feature:

• Ad impression impact: To give you a better sense of how many ads you’d be filtering, we’ve now added an extra column to show you the percentage of ad impressions on your pages which fall into each category.

  : We’ve added details about each category directly within your account to help you understand the types of ads that may fall into each.

To see whether category filtering has been enabled for your location, sign in and visit the Ad Review Center, located under the ‘AdSense Setup’ tab. We’re working on expanding this beta to additional languages and countries, and will be sure to announce any updates here on the blog. If you’d like to learn more about category filtering, please visit our Help Center.

Posted by Arlene Lee – Inside AdSense Team

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Extending the category filtering beta for English-language ads

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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

Read the original post:
Euro reporting and you: your questions answered

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