In an effort to provide you with more transparency and control over the ads appearing on your pages, we’ve developed the Ad Review Center. This new feature, which we’ll be rolling out to publishers over the next few months, will allow you to review ads placement-targeted to your site and ensure those ads are relevant to your site’s users.

When you first opt into the Ad Review Center, you’ll be able to see all placement-targeted ads currently targeted to your site, and a couple of days later you’ll be able to review placement-targeted ads that have previously run on your site. If you think an ad is not relevant for your users, you can prevent it from appearing again by blocking it in the Ad Review Center. We recommend you carefully consider the revenue impact of blocking an ad, since blocked ads won’t compete in the auction on your site, and advertisers whose ads you block may choose not to target your site again in the future.

In addition to letting publishers weigh in on the relevance of placement-targeted ads, the Ad Review Center will also help advertisers improve their placement-targeted ad campaigns. When you block an ad, you’ll be prompted to select a reason. We’ll share this constructive feedback with advertisers so they can use it to improve the quality and relevance of future ad campaigns.

As we’ve done with past features, we’re gradually launching the Ad Review Center to all publishers over the next few months. When it has been enabled for your account, you’ll see a green notification box at the top of your ‘Competitive Ad Filter’ page, located under the ‘AdSense Setup’ tab. By default, the Ad Review Center will let you review all placement-targeted ads after they have run on your site. However, if you have a strong need to manually review ads before they appear on your site, you may do so by clicking on the ‘update settings’ link in the Ad Review Center. You’ll then have 24 hours to review ads before they are automatically allowed to run on your site. Please note that you can also return to the Ad Review Center and allow a previously blocked ad, or block a previously allowed ad.

We strongly recommend you keep your review preference set to ‘auto-allow’ and review ads after they have run. Ads don’t participate in the auction while they are awaiting review, and ads that you have blocked cannot compete in the auction either. The actual revenue impact will vary in each publisher’s situation, but when using the Ad Review Center, please consider the revenue effects of blocking ads or switching from the auto-allow setting.

To learn more about the Ad Review Center, please visit the Help Center. We hope you find this new feature useful and look forward to hearing your feedback.

One of the ways ads are targeted to AdSense publisher websites is through placement targeting. Placement targeting allows AdWords advertisers to choose specific ad placements where they’d like their ads to appear. An ad placement can be an entire website or a specific sub-set of ad units within that site, such as only ad units on sports pages or all ad units at the top of the page.

Advertisers find ad placements in several ways, including by listing websites where they’d like to advertise or by searching for placements that match the themes and topics they’d like to target.

If your site is part of the AdSense network, it should automatically be visible to advertisers as an available ad placement when they search for themes or topics related to the content of your site. You can also define your own ad placements using specific sub-sets of ad units on your site.

Learn more about defining your own ad placements.

When I started my online ventures a few months ago, I was so excited about MLM’s and afilliate marketing. I thought that I was going to be able to quit my day job in no time. Boy, was I wrong. Although it is true that you can make a living (and even a killing) off afilliate marketing, it is a much more tedious process than just setting up a website and placing other peoples codes on it.

It’s all about traffic and quality content. You can’t have one without the other. You cannot be succesful without both. It’s as simple as that. Take my online store Sanzmart.com - I set this store up in June 2007 (I paid for the setup) and after a couple of months I had to put up some Google Adsense just to break even with my hosting costs.

My other store is an afilliate marketing website: ShopNow.ws - This one makes me more money than my own store Sanzmart! But even then, I just couldn’t break even without having to resort to Google Adsense.

Google has been so generous that I decided to set up Adsense on all my websites and blogs. Google Adsense has been the easiest way to make money online for me. I just hope other people learn from my mistakes and monetize their sites with Adsense before they lose too much money.

Today, we added support for 20 more languages to the web-based Google Talk Gadget. The new languages are: Chinese(Simplified), Chinese(Traditional), Danish, Dutch, English(UK), Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese(Brazil), Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish and Vietnamese.

To access the Google Talk Gadget in your language, go to the Google Talk homepage, select your language in the drop-down menu in the top right, and click on the ‘launch Google Talk Gadget’ link. Or you can simply add the Google Talk gadget to your iGoogle home page.

As usual, we would love to hear your feedback. Anything we can do to improve the experience for your language? Let us know.

Monday, November 26, 2007 11:41 AM

Katya Rogers
Software Engineer

 Similar to what Google has been doing with ads in search results, they also now restricted the clickable area in AdSense (the kind of Google ads webmasters can include on their pages). Instead of allowing a click to be triggered in a broad rectangle around the text – which used to include whitespace in that area – you must now click specifically on the underlined title or the colorized URL below the snippet.

I’ve marked the old and new clickable areas below – note these are just approximations to get the point across, it’s not pixel-perfect:

With this change, Google wants to decrease accidental clicks. This has the short-term potential of lowering your AdSense revenues, but I think it’s a good move. Not only because it’s more ethical, but also because in the long run advertisers will be more likely to pay for services that work, and accidental clicks are a kind of system bug. I’m curious how much my AdSense income will drop, I guess all those of us using AdSense will see in a day or two.

Graphic/ Flash ads in the meantime I suppose aren’t affected by this, but I asked Google just in case, and will update if I get a reply