Five steps to optimising your AdSense performance

"I want to improve my AdSense performance, but I don't know how to get started!"

We hear you. The myriad of optimisation tools and options AdSense offers can be a bit overwhelming. Colors, placements, channels, ad sizes -- there are more options to choose from than you can poke a mouse cursor at! Ideally, we wish you could just click a button and have a fully optimised webpage published to the Internet. But until that magical day comes, we have a solution for you.

The Australian AdSense team has put together a short video that takes the confusion out of optimising. The video goes through a step by step guide to optimising AdSense performance - from analysing your page type, to choosing the right ad sizes and colors, and tracking your results. We also cover our most popular tips to increase eCPM, without adversely affecting your community's experience on your page.

So if it's been a while since you've refreshed your AdSense ad units, or if you're confused on how to use channels to optimise, invest ten minutes into the video. It's the closest thing you'll get to that magic button.

Site maintenance on June 21 at 10am PDT

Tomorrow, our engineers will be performing site maintenance from 10am to 3pm PDT. You won't be able to access your account during this 5-hour time frame, but ad serving and ad targeting will not be affected. In addition, your reports will continue to track your earnings as usual. We've converted the maintenance start time for a few cities around the world:

London - 6 pm Saturday
Pretoria - 7 pm Saturday
Mumbai - 10:30 pm Saturday
Kuala Lumpur - 1 am Sunday
Brisbane - 3 am Sunday

In the meantime, we hope you enjoy the first weekend of summer -- or winter, depending on where you are :)

Game on for GameScene

Back in 1995, Gary Rosenzweig published some of the world's first web-based games. Some of his early games as well as more than 100 created by CleverMedia, the company he later founded, are available at GameScene.com.

"Even in those early days, it was clear to us that web advertising was the best way to earn money from our content," says Gary. Revenue from ads offered him creative and financial freedom to be both a game developer and publisher. But the early ad banner market was volatile and fluctuated constantly. It wasn't until he joined the AdSense program in August 2003 that Gary was able to get consistent high-level performance from advertising.

"AdSense not only performs better than banner ads, but is also much better for site visitors," Gary notes. "The text ads and high-quality display ads used by Google were a far better experience than the pop-ups, pop-unders and interstitial ads still used today by our competitors."

At GameScene.com, CleverMedia uses 160x600 wide skyscrapers next to the games, and 300x250 medium rectangles on instructions pages. Gary encourages other publishers to test different ad formats and placements on their own sites, especially as their users grow and change. Having non-obtrusive but relevant advertising on high-traffic pages provides the revenue CleverMedia needs to keep making innovative web games.

Speaking the language of small businesses

Speaking the language of small businesses
Following our recent testimony in front of the U.S. House Small Business Committee, we revisited Washington D.C. to deliver our first seminar for small businesses on the web -- specifically those in the Hispanic-American community. The Spanish-language seminar, co-sponsored by both the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and the League of United Latin American Citizens, focused on making the most of AdSense and other Google tools to effectively and efficiently manage a small business online. We know a number of our publishers are Hispanic small business owners, so we'd like to share the video of the event with you (in Spanish with introductory words in English):

Join us on July 10 for 'Powered By YouTube'

Join us on July 10 for 'Powered By YouTube'
You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. That's why our publishers know how important it is to make their sites sticky to keep users on their pages longer. If you're a savvy coder, love to build cool apps and mashups, and wonder what more you can do to enhance your website with video and increase the stickiness, then we'd like to cordially invite you to attend Powered By YouTube on Thursday, July 10!

Powered By YouTube is our first-ever developer gathering focused on bringing together a wide range of developers to learn more about YouTube's APIs and Tools. You'll spend the day at YouTube's headquarters and learn how to bring YouTube to your website, share best practices, and get hands-on with the APIs. You'll also meet fellow YouTube API developers across a wide range of companies, YouTube engineers and product managers, and hopefully leave inspired to enhance your user experience with the YouTube APIs.

Some important details about the event below:

Powered By YouTube
Thursday, July 10, 2008
10:30am - 5:00pm
YouTube headquarters at 901 Cherry Ave. San Bruno, CA 94066
Cost: Free!

Registration is extremely limited, so we encourage you to register now if you're interested.

Hope to see you there! And if you're interested in staying up-to-date on what's going on in the world of YouTube APIs and syndication, check out our blog.