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This QuickTip is about AdSense's new custom-size-advertisement option, which lets you choose the height and width of each advertisement that you show on your site.

Today, AdSense announced that we can now make ad-units in any size that we want - within certain restrictions.  

They don't use the phase in the text of their announcement, but the post-URL for their says that this feature is  "the-next-evolution-of-responsive-ads" - so I guess it can be seen as part of the efforts to cater to mobile-readers and mobile site-publishers, even though these ads themselves don't adapt to according to the size of your visitor's screen.

What will custom-size text ads look like:

For text ads, AdSesne, will work out the best number of text ads to show in each ad-block, and the individual ads will be shown the same way they that the look inside the standard ad-sizes.

Note that they say

"For unique ad unit sizes, our system will need some time before it can optimize the number of ads shown."

My guess is that this means that initially they will just fit a standard text-unit ad within your custom size, but may manage to figure how how to fit in more content over time, as they observe what display options make most money for you (and thus for them).

What will custom-size display ads look like:

For display ads (ie ones that show pictures which the advertiser has created), AdSense will work out the best size ad to show in the custom space that you select; the only guarantee is that "the selected ad will not be larger than the space requested".

There are some accompanying  rules about maximum and minimum AdSense ad-unit sizes, and any custom ad size that doesn't satisfy these restrictions simply won't appear on a page.  These rules may change (so do go and check the official version) - but to start with they say that:

• Only one dimension can be greater than 300 pixels
• The minimum width is 120 pixels
• The minimum height is 50 pixels
• Neither height nor width can exceed 1200 pixels.

One more point:   a while after the 300x600 ad-unit was introduced, they also added a rule saying there could be no more than one of these units per page.   With custom ads, they simply say:

As always, please use your best judgement when using custom-sized ad units; ad units similar in size to the 300x600 ad format will be subject to similar placement restrictions.

How to create a custom-sized AdSense advert for Blogger

1. Log into www.adsense.google.com using your AdSense account.
2. Start to create an ad unit in the usual way,
3. Select "Custom ad size" from the Ad size drop-down and enter the width and height that you want for for your ad unit.
4. Copy and paste the ad code into the HTML source code provided by AdSense, and add it to your blog in the usual way.

Note: you will only be able to do this if you have gone through the full AdSense sign-up process. If you do not have a custom-domain and signed up for AdSense after the fast-track process for hosted-content was introduced, then your only option is to choose standard ad-sizes from the regular Add-a-gadget > Adsense process.

This article is about a new, faster, type of AdSense code which is available, and how you can add it to your blog.


AdSense have announced that they are now providing a new, faster, type of code for their ads.

This code is "asynchronous", which means that other content on the page will still keep on loading, even if the advertisement is delayed.

This a good thing, because it lets your blog's visitors see your posts more quickly.  Also, if SEO matters for your blog, then having it load as quickly as possible is important, because Google likes pages that load quickly.

How to put asynchronous Adsense ads into your blog

Blogger have not commented, but I am 99.99999% certain that the new asynchronous ad-code has not be implemented into the AdSense gadgets that are available from Blogger's Add-a-gadget tool.

So to put it into your blog, you need to:

• Follow the standard instructions for getting AdSense code for a website.

• When you reach the Ad code box, choose 'Asynchronous (BETA)' from the Code type drop-down menu

• Install the code into your blog in the same was that you install any other 3rd party HTLM .

You may also want to use techniques like centering gadgets on your blog - but remember that the changes which you are allowed to make to AdSense code are very limtied.

Troubleshooting

AdSense are still describing this new code as "beta" - this means they're pretty sure it's ok, but it might still have some glitches.   So if you do use it, check out your blog in a variety of browsers (ie Chrome and Firefox) to make sure that it's working, and keep an eye on your AdSense earnings too - if they drop unexpectedly, you might want to switch back, and check if that was the problem.

They recommend that if you are going to use the asynchronous code, you should change all the ad-units on your site at once. This could take a while if you've installed ads inside your blog psots but may be worth the effort.  That said, personally I'm going to wait until the new code isn't described as "beta" anymore before I put into the posts in one of my blogs.

Does it work?

Just before I published this post, I replaced the AdSense ads on this blog with the new versions of the code.  Do you think that it makes Blogger-Hints-and-Tips load quicker?

Has it made your own blog load more quickly?

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Related articles:

How to put AdSense ads inside Blogger posts

How to add a gadget to your blog

Installing 3rd party HTML into Blogger

Does search-engine traffic matter for your blog? 5 reasons why not

Tools for measuring how quickly your blogger pages load

How to centre-align gadgets in Blogger

Allowable changes to AdSense ad code

• Must Read:- How To Get An Approved Adsense Account Within 2 Hours
• Must Read:- How To Make Money With Internet Marketing In Few Easy Steps

Here am going to share with you the top 5 best alternatives for Adsense. And the good thing is that; you don't even have to worry whether you're account will be approved or not, because your approval is guaranteed if only your blog has fully been setup and you also have some useful contents in it.
NOTE:- Make sure that before applying for any of this Ads networks you must have already gone through their terms and service, so as to know their policies and to abide by it.

1. Media.net

Media.net is definitely one the best alternatives for adsense. Media.net is a contextual Advertising network powered by Yahoo! and Bing program. Media.net has gain popularity all over the internet as the best substitute to Adsense. It enhance Bloggers with the opportunity to explore the web and generate huge revenue online via blogging.

Requirements:- To make it big on Media.net, you must receive a high quality traffic. That is, traffic from search engines like Google, Yahoo!/Bing. Traffic from Canada, UK, U.S.A will also make your earnings grow rapidly.

Method Of Payments:- You must reach a threshold amount of $100 before requesting for payout/withdrawal. Payments are made via Bank Wire.

How To Apply:- To apply for this Yahoo! Bing advertising program, simply go to http://www.media.net and signup for a publishers account. Approval basically takes up to a week. Make sure you provide all the necessary information correctly.

• Must Read:- 5 Most Essential Tips To Get Adsense Approval Fast!

2. Infolinks Ads

Infolinks is certainly one of the best alternatives for adsense which has proven its capability on InText Ads for quite sometimes now. The type of Ads display on your blog solely depends on the keywords used around that particular niche.
How To Apply:- It s very easy to apply for Infolinks InText Ads as a publisher. Just go to www.infolinks.com ==> Click on Publisher and below it click on Get It Now. And the good thing about Infolinks InText Ads is that; without even applying through the form provided, you can easily connect it to your facebook account. To apply for these program simply follow the steps as shown below:

As you can see the clear view of the above image there's nothing more to explain, it's quite self explanatory.
NOTE:- Make sure all the required information are entered correctly. Provide a valid email address during registration because that's where your verification message would be sent to. Also your name must be real, don't use any fake information; be real.

Payments Method:- Infolinks provide its publishers with varieties of payments options whereby you can withdraw your earnings with ease after you've hit the threshold amount of $50 to $100. You can choose to be paid by the following:- Bank wire, Paypal, Western Union, eCheck.

3. Chitika Ads

Chitika Ads:- Chitika is another powerful Advertising network that have some nice features that would enable you earn some dollars through your blog. What really makes me like this Ads is for the fact that it displays both on High-End and Low-End mobiles. Therefore boosting your earnings. Chitika is easy to use, and you can use it alongside with other Ads network as well.

How To Apply:- To apply for chitika go to www.chitika.com and click Learn More as shown above. Now click on Signup! as shown below.



Note:- You must fill all the required field. And make sure you fill the form correctly. Though i only implemented this Ads in my first blog and it was doing well. I also recommend it for you! Just give it a try and see if its works for you too. Most of my friends also used these Ads and they are happy with what the amount of revenue being generated from the program.

Payments Method:- Here you have only two payments option to choose from. Paypal and Check. You can request for payments once you've reached the threshold amount of $50 for Paypal and $100 for Checks.

4. Addynamo Ads

Addynamo Ads:- With Addynamo program a publisher can tweet and get paid! Their Ads is almost everywhere on the internet. Like in goal.com, box.com and other popular sites. As a publisher you get paid per click and per tweet. No much explanation, just go to www.addynamo.com and seee things yourselve.

How To Apply:- Login to www.addynamo.com and click on the Become Publisher's button. Now follow the instructions provided to join the program.

Payments Method:- They offered three method of payments at the time of writing these post. They pay via Bank Wire, Paypal and Debit Card. So, you can withdraw your earnings once it is $20. 

BidVertiser Ads

Feedback!

Am glad to share this much awaited topic on how you can actually get an adsense account within 2 hours. On my previous post i listed out 5 Effective Tips To Get Adsense Approval, and today am sharing with you the most used tricks of getting a genuine Google adsense account within 24hours; it's sounds cool, right? I know you might be worried about adsense strict Terms Of Services, but this tricks which am going to show you would not in any way violates adsense TOC, though it's required simple tricks.

• Recommended Reading:- 5 Essential Tips To Get Google Adsense Approval Fast!

Preamble:- I always advice any Blogger who really wants to make it big online never to rely on one source of revenue. You should always try to focus more attention on increasing your blogs traffic, doing so will definitely make your blog popular which in-turn may draw advertisers attention to your blog. So, working on your blog traffic should be your first priority before applying for Adsense.

• Recommended Reading:- Increase Backlinks With Over 60+ CommenLuv Enabled Blogs
• Recommended Reading:- 10 Secrets Using Social Media To Drive Blog Traffic

Here We Take Our First Step:-

1.  Create a fresh/new gmail account, and link it with youtube. You don't know how to link your gmail account to youtube? Just go to http://www.youtube.com in your browser, and sign in using your new gmail account you created.

2.  Go to google.com and search for technology related videos and download it to your computer, though it would be nice if you search for new videos that has not yet been index or crawled by google's search robots. The reason for these is that, new videos would not be considered as copyrighted materials.Or better still, you can upload your own videos that has not been published online to youtube.

3.  Hoping that you've downloaded the videos to your computer, it's now time for you to upload the videos to your youtube account. On this step, you'll need to provide some useful title and tags for each of the video.

4.   Once you've successfully uploaded your videos to youtube account, click on monetization  button just below "Account Settings" to enable your account. Note:- Adblock should be disabled before setting up monetization for your youtube account.


6.  Go to "Create a new account for adsense" under payment section to create your adsense account. Note:- You must provide accurate information of yourself in this area; your address must be valid, also the payee name must match with your bank account name so that you can get paid once your earnings reached the threshold of $100.

7.  Now to start displaying adsense on your blog, you still have to take some steps further to authorized your blog in displaying adsense Ads. Login to your adsense account account with your email and password using this link: http://www.google.com/adsense. Click on "Account Settings" just by the left-side of your screen, scroll down to where you find "Authorization" and click on it; a text field will open, just type in your blog url ex: www.BlogStable.com and hit Save button, that's all!

8.  Here you must have to create your first Ads channel so as to start making money fast! Follow their instructions to create your Ads. Once the Ads is created, copy and paste the code you'll be given to where you want the Ads to display.

9.  Make sure to link your adsense email to your blog by inviting your adsense email to your blog as an author, and later changing it to an admin, then delete the initial email address.

If you find these useful consider sharing with your friends on facebook, twitter, digg and stumbleupon. Don't forget to subscribe for our future updates! Do you have any query regarding these tricks?  post via comment.
Happy blogging pals.

This QuickTip is about a change to AdSense's policies about modifying their ad code: in short, you are now allowed to change the code in certain way, to achieve certain things.

AdSense have announced changes to their "Modifying ad code" policy.

In the past, publishers weren't allowed to change AdSense ads in any way other than what could be done through the AdSense ad-code generator or Blogger's Add-a-gadget / Adsense tools.

Now, however, some changes are allowed, so you can do things like:

• Responsive design: creating a single webpage that adapts to the device on it’s being viewed on (eg laptop, smartphone or tablet).
• A/B testing: creating multiple versions of a page and comparing how they are used to see which page is the most effective.
• Setting custom channels dynamically:
• Ad tag minification: Enabling your site pages to load faster by reducing the amount of data to be transferred.

In several places, AdSense say that the goals of these changes should be to "maximize ad and user experience" - and most of their Terms and Conditions about what you're not allowed to do still hold, so it's clearly not carte blanche to make any changes you want.

Provided you have enabled a mobile template then responsive / adaptive website design isn't and issue which Blogger users have to worry much about - although there are some things you can and should do.

A/B testing is certainly relevant- and I'll be looking to see how much support their code offers for this.

Right now, I'm not sure how relevant dynamic custom channels and minification are for Bloggers - will be investigating this over the coming weeks.

See AdSense's help-centre article for details and the specific code snippets related to the these types of changes.

• You must replace your personal e-mail address with  ("YOUR E-MAIL ADDRESS HERE")

Privacy Policy

We take your privacy seriously. This policy describes what personal information we collect and how we use it. (This privacy policy is applicable to websites falling under the primary holder, ("YOUR E-MAIL ADDRESS HERE")

Routine Information Collection

All web servers track basic information about their visitors. This information includes, but is not limited to, IP addresses, browser details, timestamps and referring pages. None of this information can personally identify specific visitors to this site. The information is tracked for routine administration and maintenance purposes, and lets me know what pages and information are useful and helpful to visitors.

Cookies and Web Beacons

Where necessary, this site uses cookies to store information about a visitor's preferences and history in order to better serve the visitor and/or present the visitor with customized content.

Advertising partners and other third parties may also use cookies, scripts and/or web beacons to track visitors to our site in order to display advertisements and other useful information. Such tracking is done directly by the third parties through their own servers and is subject to their own privacy policies.

Controlling Your Privacy

Note that you can change your browser settings to disable cookies if you have privacy concerns. Disabling cookies for all sites is not recommended as it may interfere with your use of some sites. The best option is to disable or enable cookies on a per-site basis. Consult your browser documentation for instructions on how to block cookies and other tracking mechanisms.

Special Note About Google Advertising

Any advertisements served by Google, Inc., and affiliated companies may be controlled using cookies. These cookies allow Google to display ads based on your visits to this site and other sites that use Google advertising services. Learn how to opt out of Google's cookie usage. As mentioned above, any tracking done by Google through cookies and other mechanisms is subject to Google's own privacy policies.

About Google advertising: What is the DoubleClick DART cookie? The DoubleClick DART cookie is used by Google in the ads served on publisher websites displaying AdSense for content ads. When users visit an AdSense publisher’s website and either view or click on an ad, a cookie may be dropped on that end user’s browser. The data gathered from these cookies will be used to help AdSense publishers better serve and manage the ads on their site(s) and across the web. Users may opt out of the use of the DART cookie by visiting the Google ad and content network privacy policy.

Contact Information

Concerns or questions about this privacy policy can be directed to e-mail address: ("your e-mail here") for further clarification.

Getting a fully approved AdSense account nowadays is not a child's play, unlike before where you can just create a bloggers blog with some contents on it then apply for AdSense and you get approved in less than an hour, but today it's a different story since your website/blog has to undergo two different verification processes before finally get approved, i.e if only your website/blog comply with the Google AdSense Terms Of Service (TOS).

• Must Read:- How To Get Adsense Approval Within 2 Hours

Thousands of blogs are been created everyday and majority of them are "Newbies" bloggers who setup a blog majorly to make money with it through Google AdSense program. The funny part is that most of them won't even mind glancing through Google AdSense policies to know what exactly should be put in place before applying for AdSense, what they do is to quickly apply for "Google AdSense" without even one unique or original content(s) found on their blog(s), but these are bloggers who may have possibly published 100 Posts in two days, at the end they'll be disappointed with AdSense feedback that their application cannot be approved because of plagiarize content(s) or some other reasons.

• Must Read:- Top 5 Best Alternatives For Google Adsense

Getting approval into Google AdSense program is not that difficult as it may seems, but you just need to put their programs policies into consideration if you really want to get approved.

To get an approved Google AdSense account within 24hours just follow the steps outlined below! That's exactly what i did to get mine.

1. CREATE PAGES:

Google AdSense policies guidelines stated that as an AdSense publisher you need to create pages for: About Us, Contact Us, Privacy Policy, Terms And Condition & a Site Map. All these are necessary if not mandatory for you to get approved into the AdSense program.

2. USE A CUSTOM DOMAIN NAME:

Please and please, never you attempt applying for Google AdSense with a sub-domain like: softvie.blogspot.com because AdSense will never approve your application, you must have to apply with a Top Level Domain (TLD) which would be something like: mysite.com instead mysite.blogspot.com. So, you need to apply for AdSense with a "Custom Domain".

2. PLAGIARIZE/DUPLICATE CONTENT:

If you really want to get approval for AdSense program, don't ever try copying and paste content(s) from other blog(s)/website(s), if you try, Google will know, and that will lead to your account not getting approved. My little advice is that you should always make sure your content(s) is original/unique, once you've written about 40 to 100 unique posts, you can then apply for AdSense!

3. ADD ORIGINAL META TAGS:

Before applying for Google AdSense, go to your blogger template and check if you've added the proper meta tags that gives the best description of your blog.

4. TRAFFIC FROM SEARCH ENGINES:

You should first work to improve your blog traffic before applying for Google AdSense, make sure your blog receive a decent amount of traffic from search engine like: Google.

 5. APPLY FOR ADSENSE:

Once you have put into consideration those tips mentioned above, then you can now apply for AdSense! Make sure to provide a correct information when applying, this tips works for me, i believe it will also work for you. Happy blogging pals.

If you find these tips a bit useful, consider sharing with your friends on facebook, twitter, linkedin, digg and others.
Do you have any query regarding these tips? share with us via comments, also remember to subscribe bellow for our Newsletter.

This article is about setting up Google Analytics on your blog in a way that includes data for AdSense clicks and behaviour.

Google Analytics and Blogger.

Analytics is Google's tool for measuring website performance:   how many visitors, how long do they stay for, what pages do they look at - and if you use AdSense, where are your earnings coming from. It's a major step up from Blogger's Statistics displays, and has far more details eg where the visitors came from, what browser they are using.

When people first started using Analytics with Blogger, they followed the standard Analytics instructions to edit their template and add the tracking code to it.

However if they switched to use a different template, the tracking code was lost unless they remembered to re-install it - and many people didn't remember.

So some Google engineers started telling people to put the code into an HTML/Javascript widget instead, because widgets are kept through template changes.

This worked well, until mobile templates were introduced. By default, mobile templates don't show HTML-Javascript gadgets. And while this can be changed, it involves editing your template (so brings back the "what if the template is changed" issue) - and it relies on the mobile-visitors using devices that run  Javascript.

So Blogger added a field to the Settings tab where you can enter the Google Analytics profile ID for the blog:   GreenLava over at BloggerSentral wrote an excellent post about using this, including how to
check if your existing template has the code needed to make use of this new field.

But recently I've noticed that while setting up Analytics this way collected data about visitor numbers, it doesn't always get data about AdSense (eg how many ad-impressions, what page do "clicks" come from, what were the keywords, what browser were getting the AdSense clicksetc). In fact, this data has been missing for all but one of my blogs recently.    So I did some investigation and found that this is deliberate - but that you can fix it.

Getting AdSense data from Analytics

If you only have one blog, and you have linked your AdSense and Analytics profiles, and  put AdSense ad units in your blog by getting the ad-code from AdSense and adding it as code, then you should be seeing AdSense data in your Analytics account.

To check, log in to Analytics and check the Reporting > Standard reports > Content panel:   when you expand it there should be a line for AdSense, and when you click that line some data should appear in the middle report panel (assuming your blog has some non-ad-blocked visitors).

But if you have more than one blog or website, then AdSense data is only put into Analytics for the one that is identified as "primary" in your Analytics profile. (For me, this is was the first blog that I added AdSense to.)

To get AdSense data in Analytics for more than one site, you need to get the tracking code-snippet for non-primary website from Analytics and install it in your blog.  See below for exact instructions for this.

I've found that AdSense ad units that were added from Blogger's Add-a-gadget wizard don't report data through Analytics even if the tracking code is installed - and this support article from Google confirms that this is expected behaviour.   I haven't been able to find any way to work around this, as yet.

How to get the AdSense tracking code for non-primary websites and blogs

Log in to Analytics with the Google account that owns your AdSense profile, and in which you have linked AdSense and Analytics.


Click on the Admin tab in the top right hand corner of any page.


In the Accounts section, click on AdSense Linking.


In the Secondary Analytics Properties list, find the name of the site you want the tracking code for (if you have more than one account).  


Click the Code Snippet link to the right of the chosen profile name.


Copy the code that is shown, and install it to your blog.   As menioned above, there are two choices for doing this:

• Edit your template and add it to the header (ie somewhere between <head> and </head>) -  but remember that it will be lost if you change templates again in future.

• Add it using an HTML-Javascript gadget which you put near the top of the page - but note that you won't get AdSense data from mobile visitors.

Repeat this for any other blogs, except your primary one, which you want Analytics to track AdSense data for.

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Related Articles:

Adding a HTML-Javascript gadget to your blog

How to edit your Blogger template

Showing gadgets on mobile templates

AdSense and AdWords - what's the difference

Setting up AdSense for your blog

This QuickTip shares a feature that I just noticed inside Blogger's Add-a-gadget > Adsense option.


Previously I've mentioned that rather than using the AdSense gadget offered by Blogger's Add-a-Gadget wizard, I usually get ad-code from AdSense and put this code into my blog as an HTML widget.

This gives:

• Access to a wider range of ad-unit sizes, 
• Better control over the gadget alignment, 
• Ability to re-use  AdSense's colour palettes that I've saved before
• Access to an "image ads only" option that Blogger doesn't have.

The downside that if I have enabled a mobile template for the blog, then visitors who look at it using a mobile device don't see any ads.   I did find work-around for this, but it had a nasty side effect if I wanted to add another gadget to the template - and that's a story for a different post.

Tonight I happened to look at the options in the Add-a-gadget > AdSense  option again, and was delighted to notice that the newer ad-sizes (eg 300x600 wide skyscraper) are now available there.    I have no idea how long they've been there - but I haven't seen it mentioned on any of the other blogs I read, so thought it was worth a mention here.




This doesn't solve all my issues, but did mean that I could use a standard AdSense gadget on a blog where I was particularly keen to have one that filled the whole width of the sidebar.

Like they say in Tesco - every little helps!


Update:   shortly after I wrote this post, AdSense announced a new ad-size (970 x 90 pixels) - and unfortunately it's not included in Blogger's AdSense widget.  

This Quick-tip is about some new help resources and options that Google has recently introduced for AdSense publishers - including ones who use AdSense through Blogger.

If you put AdSense ads into your blog or website, you are known as a "publisher", because you "publish" materials where advertisements, placed by people known as advertisers, can be placed.

Recently Google announced a simplified, personalized contact options page for AdSense publishers, backed by an an email-based "help" service.

This is a single source for many commonly used AdSense troubleshooting tools and articles, which often help you to resolve problems very quickly.

Some troubleshooters lead to "issue-specific contact forms that generate emails to our team". These are backed by automated tools, that help to fix problems very quickly.

Google say that "The new contact options page, troubleshooters, and specialized contact forms are available to all publishers with an approved AdSense account".

Also, publishers who usually earn $US25 or more a week are now eligible for consultations via email, to help with

• Managing your AdSense account
• Discussing strategies to grow more business.

Account-holders who qualify see an alert about this on the contact options page. Google target a 2-day response time, although they note it may be slower during peak times.

It's not clear whether publishers who were signed up quickly via a publishing partner (like Blogger) will qualify or not.  I cannot test this, because I signed up using the older full-sign-up process - but I'd suspect that they won't.

This Quick Tip describes a new rule that AdSense is introducing to their terms and conditions, about how often the new 300x600 ad unit can be used on a single page.


Recently AdSense introduced two new sizes of ad-unit, the 300x600 Large Skyscraper and the 300x50 mobile-banner.

These aren't available from the AdSense add-a-gadget or ads-between-posts options in Blogger - but once you've been fully approved for AdSense, it's easy enough to add them to your blog by getting the code from AdSense, and installing it to Blogger the same way you install any other 3rd party code.

Personally, I like the 300x600 - it looks much more natural in several of my blogs, because it's more like the other things in the sidebar. Many of the ads it is showing at the moment are text-ads, because advertisers are still developing image-ads in the new size.  But even the text ads look better, especially in sites where I am trying to blend ads with other content. (Believe it or not, I have one niche where many of the ads work the way Google originally thought of them, providing additional information that is genuinely useful to my readers.)

But you can have too much of a good thing.

AdSense have always had a rule that each screen should have no more than

• 3 ad-units and
• 3 link-units.

Now they have announced that from 10 January 2013, the rule is that each screen can have no more than

• 1 300x600 ad unit
• 3 ad-units
• 3 link-units.

This isn't a big issue for me, but obviously there are some publishers who have taken the p*** and devoted "too much" of their screen-real-estate to ads.

Notice that there are no changes to the rules about how many ads you can show from other advertisers and affiliate programmes.

This quick tip is about a new feature that AdSense have just announced, which lets you control the types of ads that are banned - by website, instead of just for your entire AdSense account.

For a long time, I've recommended that Blogger-users who use AdSense should:

• Protect their account from malicious use, and 
• Stop sexual-content ads from showing to be sure that they meet Blogger's Terms and Conditions.

The second of these steps is basically about telling AdSense not to show certain categories of ads on your blog. One of the bug-bears with this is that, until now, it's been all-or-nothing:  you could ban ad-categories from either all your sites or none of them.     For example, one of my sites is likely to be visited by people who are unhappy with the idea of dating agencies using suggestive photos of young women in the ads.   Until now, I've had to ban this category from all my sites, to be certain that they weren't show on the sensitive site. But now AdSense have announced that they support site-level blocking:  this means that you can tell them not to show particular categories of ads on certain sites, but leave them on others. To use the feature, you will need to

• Tell AdSense what URL / domains / web-addresses you manage (if you haven't done it already) and then 
• Set up blocking for individual sites as required.

The good news is that you can still choose "all sites" - and you can block by category from just sub-domains if you want to. It maybe that you cannot use the website-level blocking yet:  Google started rolling it out in AdSense accounts late last week, and it will get to everyone eventually - I don't have it yet myself, but am looking forward to it eagerly.

This quick tip describes an announcement from Google about an upcoming simplified process for applying to use AdSense on Blogger or Hubpages.

New simpler AdSense application process

Google AdSense have announced that from today there is a change the application process for new publishers who apply to use AdSense through a "host partner site". Currently Blogger and Hubpages are AdSense's "host partner sites" - meaning ones where the "host" provides internet space to store the monetized content, rather than the content-owner buying the internet space themselves.

They say that

"publishers approved for AdSense accounts via a host partner site will be able to place ads on and earn from policy-compliant content they’ve created on any host partner site. If they then decide to show ads on their own domain, ... they’ll need to complete an extra approval step similar to the application process at www.google.com/adsense."

What this means is that if you sign up for AdSense with a host-partner, you will only be allowed to use AdSense ads on host-partner sites. If you want to use AdSense elswhere later on, then you need to do a 2-step verification process, which involves:

• Applying to become a "full" publisher
• Generating ad code,
• Implementing it on a live page of a non-host-partner site.
• Someone from the AdSense team will reviews that site and the ad in it.

If Adsense approve your other site, they give you permission to put ads on any sites other than host-partner sites (of course they still need to meet the AdSense Terms and Conditions). If they don't approve, you can still put ads onto host-partner sites (ie Blogger blogs or Hubpages pages), but you cannot use AdSense on other sites until you have fixed the problem(s) that stopped you from being approved..

Google have said that these changes don't affect people who are already approved as AdSense publishers - so I won't be able to see their effects first hand.

But I'm wondering if perhaps people who are only approved as "host partner publishers" won't have access to www.Adsense.google.com at all? This would be painful, because:

• The reports on the Earnings tab are not nearly as good as the ones in the Adsense interface.
• Some options (eg showing image-only ads, or re-using custom colour palettes, or accessing new mobile-friendly ad-sizes like 300x15) are not available from Blogger's Adsense ad generator.

Also, I'm wonder if perhaps Google have any plans to pay lower rates to people who they provide hosting and unrestricted bandwidth for?  Nothing has been said, but I can see why they would think this is reasonable.

How to sign up

If the site that you want to put AdSense ads on has a blogspot address   (www.example.blogspot.com), then the only way you can now sign up for AdSense is from Blogger's earnings' tab.

If it has a custom domain, then I don't know if it's possible to use the regular AdSense sign-up process, or if you have to use the Blogger one.

Either way, I still recommend that you should protect your AdSense account from malicious use, and also make sure that the ads you display meeting Blogger's Terms and Conditions too.

This Quick-Tip is about the Google Advertiser Network widget becoming available for Blogger users based in the UK.




Today, Google Advertisers Network announced that their Blogger widget is now available for some Blogger users in the United Kindgom.

You don't control whether you see the widget or not.  If you:

• have an AdSense account, and 
• have linked it to your blog's Earnings tab, and 
• are blogging in an appropriate niche (ie one that Google Advertiser Network has advertisers for), 

then the widget will show up in your post editor (I'm guessing on the right hand panel) when you are editing a post.

I can't see it myself at the moment, so I have no idea whether you can get rid of it, like you can with the Zemanata post-editor gadget.

Actually, I'm wondering how Blogger decides where someone is based, and why it's relevant: one of my blogs is very specific to Ireland (where I live) but gets a lot of interest from the UK - and lots of people from Ireland buy things direct from the UK anyway.  So I could see some of the UK GAN advertisers being quite relevant.

And as I've mentioned before, this gadget makes it easy to put ads into a post.  But if you can see the gadget, you could easily enough put them into a widget (ie sidebar header or footer) by taking the HTML from the post editor's HTML view, and putting it elsewhere in your blog just like any other 3rd-party code.

A year ago, I planned a trip to New Zealand. I Googled "NZ camper vans" and similar things a few times, found a company and had a great trip (thanks, Jucy Vans)

For about three months after I got back, Google remembered that I'd looked for this and kept showing me ads from other van-hire companies. Not only were they irrelevant (since I wasn't looking for a hire-van anymore), they really reminded me that I in the office on the other side of the world in wintertime, instead of on the beach in the sun at home. This didn't exactly generate warm-fuzzy feelings towards the advertiser (NZ Van Hire, I hate you with a passion .. and you didn't even do anything!)

This was a lose-lose-lose-lost situation:

• The advertiser was wasting ad-impressions showing me ads even though I was no longer in the market to hire a camper-van. And they really annoyed me to the extent that they're unlikly to get my business next time I go home, because I've linked their brand to negaive feelings.
• The publisher - was wasting valuable screen-space showing me ads that there was no chance I would click - so they lost potential income.
• Google: there was no chance that I'd click those ads for something I didn't want any more, so they didn't get a cut of the revenue either.

To help address this, Google are introducing a “mute this ad” icon on AdSense ads. This will let us tell Google which ads we don't want to see.

How will it work:

• A small [x] will be put in the corner of some display ads on the Google Display Network.
• When a website-visitor clicks the [x], sees confirmation page shows, explaining that the advertisement has been "muted", and linking to the Ad Preferences Manager. And after that, ads from that campaign aren't shown to that person in future.

This is being rolled-out over the next few weeks, and won't be applied to all ads to start with. (And I'm describing it based on Google's description - haven't actually seen it myself yet.)

It's not a guarantee you won’t see that ad again -- the ad could be shown by a different company or in a separate campaign. But it's a start.

If you are already an AdSense publisher, then today's announcment about Google Affiliate Network: Introducing Google Affiliate Ads for Blogger may be of interest.

Google Affiliate Network (GAN) is a different type of advertising programme:  instead of getting paid per click, you get paid per purchase (or whatever other key action the advertiser decides).

So far, it's limited to Blogger users who are based in the USA - presumably because this is where most advertisers are.   It's also limited to "select bloggers" - this seems to mean ones whose blog is a good fit with the available advertisers, and the criteria for "a good fit" is as decided by Google.  This is unlike regular use of the Google Advertisers network, where you apply to a particular advertiser based on your own assessment of the fit.

After you have signed up for AdSense (and, I guess been approved!):

IF GAN options are available to you
THEN they will be shown when you are editing a post, in a gadget that appears in the right-hand Post Settings area.   

This means they will only available from the "new", ie post-Sept-2011 blogger interface.

I guess you will be allowed to copy the HTML code for the GAN advertisement from the post editor, and put it into a regular gadget - since you can put regular GAN adverts into your blog in this way.  But this is a detail that should be checked against their terms and conditions:   as with AdSense, the additional requirements for GAN are glossed over when you are accessing it via Blogger, but I expect that they will still apply.

AdSense have decided to stop offering AdSense for Domains - a product that let domain owners show AdSense ads when someone tried to visit a URL that's not currently pointing to any website. (Because, of
course, they cannot use regular AdSense for Content ads on URL like this because the Terms and Conditions say it can only be shown on websites that actually have "real" content.)

There hasn't beean a public announcement (that I've seen), but AdSense publishers who are currently using AdSense for Domains have been getting individual emails about the change, which has these timeframes:

• March 21: Cannot put AdSense on any new Hosted domains
• April 18: Existing hosted domains will become inactive and AdSense advertising won't be displayed when someone looks at them.
• June 27: Hosted domains will no longer be available in AdSense accounts (Meaning we need to have downloaded any necessary information about them before then).

They also say that: "going forward, undeveloped domains will only be served through our existing AdSense for Domains distribution network" - but I haven't yet been able to work out exactly what this means.

To continue monetizing existing undeveloped domains, we need to migrate them to a new domain parking provider - so I'm looking for recommendations for these at present.

There is a Migration Guide: to help people move existing Domains monetized through AdSense to other places here:  http://www.google.com/appserve/mkt/5pn7W99IR8ElM3.

For more information see the Help Center: http://www.google.com/appserve/mkt/DhXnVfFp9Ihuw4.

AdSense has introduced some new ad-unit sizes.

The mobile banner is 320px wide by 50px high, and designed for mobile applications.    However if you get your ad-code from AdSense (rather than using Blogger's AdSense gadget), it's available to put onto any type of site.  I've put an example of it, and a regular 468x60 banner to show the comparison, at the bottom of the page on this site.

There are also some new widths for link-units:  these are available from Blogger's add-a-gadget wizard too - but as always, if you use this you have only limited formatting control, ie cannot use AdSense color palates and cannot centre the text.

I think that Google are doing some experiments with mobile-ad units (ones with big buttons, and a slightly different look) at the moment:  I saw some when I used a smartphone to look at a non-mobile-enabled site the other day.   Since then, I've enabled the site for mobile access ('cos I discovered that a quarter of the visitors were using mobile devices) - but now when I look at it, the ads inside posts are not mobile, and there are none at the top of bottom (where they were before).    So - no conclusions about what we should be doing at the moment, but I suspect that the best-practise here might be changing.  

This week, Blogger announced they are redirecting blogspot.com blogs to country specific URLs.

This means that when someone in India looks at http://blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.com/, they will actually be directed to http://blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.in - and similarly for other countries, so far I know it's been applied to Australia and New Zealand too.

This is likely to have affects on other products:

AdSense:

If you have protected your AdSense ID from malicious use (and really, you should if you care about it), then you will find some new entries in your unauthorised sites list:   I just went into mine and authorised

• blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.com.au 
• blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.in
• blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.co.nz

and I expect to be doing some more as it rolls out further.