Starting a new program can be overwhelming. What steps should you take to get off on the right foot and make the most of your account? To help you make your way with AdSense, we're delighted to introduce the AdSense Checklist to publishers viewing our U.S. Help Center.


If your language preference is set to U.S. English and you are logged in your Google Account, you'll find the checklist in the left navigation bar of the Help Center. You can recognize it by the progress bar. The checklist is divided into five parts, offering basic recommendations, required steps, and tips to help you grow your account to its full potential.


When you check an item, you'll see the progress bar update accordingly. This will help you in several ways. If you're new to AdSense, you'll get a clear overview of what steps to follow to make the most of your account. If you’re already an experienced AdSense publisher, you'll also have the chance to revisit the basics, and further develop your use of the program.

The progress bar can help you identify quickly how many of the recommended steps you’ve completed, and the checklist will suggest which step you can take next.

We hope that this Help Center feature will be useful to you and help you grow with the AdSense program! If you have other great ideas for ways to help newbies get started with AdSense or thoughts on how to make the checklist even better, join the conversation in our forum.

Posted by Natalia Niznik - Inside AdSense team

If you're new to AdSense and would like help with getting started with your account, we're hosting a webinar this Thursday evening just for you. In this webinar, we'll walk you through the basics of your account, show you how to start displaying ads, and also answer your questions via chat. Here are the details you'll need before registering:

Date: Thursday, April 23, 2009
Time: 6:30pm - 7:30pm PDT
Register at https://googleonline.webex.com/googleonline/onstage/g.php?t=a&d=573101592

We're only able to accommodate a maximum of 500 people, so we encourage you to register early if you're interested in this session.

Finally, we've updated our Help Center with details about the schedule of upcoming webinars. We'll add sign-up links for each webinar as we finalize the dates and times, so feel free to check back often. In addition, remember to update your email notification preferences so we can keep you posted about any additional sessions.

Posted by Ashutosh Satpute - AdSense Publisher Support

As the summer draws to a close, it is with a heavy heart that I bring you our last Newbie Friday post. I hope you've enjoyed our words of wisdom over the past few months and have found the information useful. Our team will continue to update this blog with the most up-to-date AdSense news and information, so please don't let this be goodbye. If you missed part of the series or want to re-read specific posts, just visit our Newbie label at any time and look for our summer-themed logo. So, from one oldie to many newbies, I'll close out this season with a few final tips for our new publishers.

Go wide and get rich (media)
If you've just recently started with AdSense, there are two format-related tips I would instantly recommend. The first is to enable both text and image ads, which will increase competition among ads to appear in your ad units and may result in higher CPMs. Second, use some of our wider units, such as the 160x600 wide skyscraper, the 300x250 medium rectangle, or the 728x90 leaderboard. There are more rich media (image, flash, video and gadget) ads available in wider ad formats, and wider ad units are the preferred formats for advertisers looking to target your site. Again, increased competition or your ad space will help you maximise your earnings potential.

Use channels
Channels are powerful reporting tools, sometimes overlooked by new publishers. They allow you to view the AdSense performance of a site, a specific page, or even a specific ad unit, which can help you see where your ads are performing best. You can name these channels, give them descriptions, and then define them as ad placements so that they are visible to AdWords advertisers.

The secret
As top AdSense earners will tell you, when it comes to earning with AdSense, the most important thing is a policy-compliant site with good-quality, original content. Such sites attract users, relevant ads and, ultimately, revenue.

Finally, we constantly maintain online resources like our AdSense Help Forum, Newbie Central, and our Known Issues page to share useful information with you. We hope you'll use them to make the most of AdSense.

Posted by Lucy McKenna - AdSense UK Publisher Support

If you've added an AdSense for search box to your page, you're probably aware of the relevant search results it provides your users. That being said, a few publishers have asked us if it’s a violation of our program policies to perform searches in their own AdSense for search boxes. The short answer is no, this activity is not explicitly prohibited by our program policies.

However, we strongly advise against using your own AdSense for search box for a couple of reasons. First, it can increase the chance of accidental or invalid clicks on the ads that appear on the search results pages. Second, this will inflate the number of queries in your reports, giving you an inaccurate picture of the activity on your site.

If you’d like to use Google search, we recommend visiting Google.com or installing the Google Toolbar. And if you're using Google Chrome, don't forget that you can type search queries directly into your address bar.

Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

As we mentioned a few weeks ago, you can use your AdSense account to display ads on any policy-compliant sites you own. This has often sparked the question among new publishers of 'How many sites do I need to earn money with AdSense?'

We'd like to stress that it's not the number of sites you have, but the quality of those sites that will help you increase your earnings with AdSense. If you're just getting started with your first website and the AdSense program, we recommend taking the time to build up your site with plenty of original, quality content -- write about topics you're passionate about, or which you have expertise in. When designing your website, keep our Webmaster Guidelines and, most importantly, your users in mind.

Then, take advantage of our Webmaster Tools to help increase your site's visibility in the Google search index, and try out the tips our Search Quality Evaluators have provided. Once you've built up organic traffic to your site, use Website Optimizer to understand how users interact with your pages and make improvements to your layout. And of course, during all of this, experiment with AdSense optimization tips to learn which colors, formats, and placements monetize best on your site.

Finally, as we blogged about during this Newbie Fridays series, your earnings potential can go up as advertisers find that you're sending high-quality leads to their sites. This won't happen overnight, but with patience and hard work you can watch your efforts convert into a high-quality site and higher AdSense earnings. And you won't even need a hundred sites to do it :)

Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

We think it's important for all publishers, both new and veteran, to understand the role they play in our ad network ecosystem. While AdSense is designed for publishers to monetize their websites with Google ads, it's also designed to extend the reach for our AdWords advertisers, providing them with ad real estate whose value is close to that on Google Search results.

If your website performs well for advertisers, there may be increased competition among them to fill your ad spaces. This means we'd have a wider variety of possible ads to display, so the ads you see on your site may be more relevant to your site content and your users' interests. This may lead to more clicks from your users, more placement-targeted campaigns geared towards your site, and increased advertiser bids. Overall, you're likely to earn more revenue with your site if advertisers are generating conversions and receiving quality leads from your site.

On the other hand, if your website performs poorly for advertisers, they may be less inclined to display on your site. This means that the ads our system displays on your site may not be as relevant to your site content and your users' interests, leading to fewer clicks and decreased advertiser bids. As a result, you're likely to earn less revenue with your site if advertisers are performing poorly.

To maximize the value for advertisers displaying on your site, we recommend focusing on developing a high-quality site with original content that's valuable to your users. For more information, please consult our program policies and Webmaster Quality Guidelines for reference.

Posted by the Google Ad Traffic Quality Team

Whether you're new to this blog or have been with us since way back in August of aught five, we'd like to provide a few simple tips for effectively using the features provided on our site.

First of all, we've made it easy to subscribe to the blog so that you'll never miss a post. There are a few ways to do so:

• E-mail
  Have a Google Account? Then visit our subscription page, or just enter your email address into the yellow box on the right sidebar of this page. You'll be subscribed via Google Groups, and we'll send you a confirmation email. Once you confirm your subscription, you'll begin to see new blog posts in your email inbox.
  
  
• RSS Reader
  After clicking on the 'Site Feed' link in the upper right-hand corner of this page, you'll be taken to a Feedburner URL, which you can access from any RSS Reader or Live Bookmark of your choice. To view all of your feed subscription options, look for the 'Subscribe Now!' box on the right side.
  
  
• iGoogle
  Click the white '+ Google' icon on the top right, and you can receive the latest Inside AdSense updates on your iGoogle page or within Google Reader.
  
  

There's also plenty of content in our blog archives. Here are some ways to access some of those useful posts from the past:

• Labels
  Each post is tagged at the bottom with one or more labels that reflect the content of that post. All of these labels are also listed on our sidebar, which you can use to sort through past posts - for instance, click the 'Optimization' label to view all the posts related to optimizing AdSense on your site. You'll notice that this post is tagged with 'Newbie', since that's been our focus on recent Fridays.
  
  
• "You may have missed..."
  This name says it all - check the right sidebar for this section, where we'll be rotating links to useful posts from past months.
  
  
• Search box
  You can search for the topic of your choice using the search box at the top right. Using the tabs on the results page, you can choose whether to search within the AdSense blog or other resources such as our Help Center, the AdSense Forum, and the web.
  
  

We hope these tips will help you become a pro at navigating and absorbing our blog posts in the future!

Posted by Takayuki Funakoshi - AdSense Publisher Support

We'd like to remind you that once you've been approved for AdSense, you can place the code from your account on any page that complies with our program policies. Simply generate new code and paste it onto your site -- we don't need to update your account, so there's no need to contact us about your new site (although we appreciate the thought!). Even if your sites relate to completely different topics, our system will display appropriate ads for each site. This is because your ad targeting is based on the content of your pages, rather than set within your account. In addition, please keep in mind that publishers may only maintain one account per payee name, so there's no need for you to submit a new application.

If you run multiple websites, you may wish to view separate reports for each domain. Simply create a URL channel for each one. You won't need to modify your code in any way, and your URL channels will begin tracking data almost immediately. If you need to send these reports to other people who manage your site with you, you can set up emailable reports.

But what if you've sold the website you applied to AdSense, and now you run another one? We don't need to update your account information in any way. Just remove your ad code from the old site, paste new code onto your current site, and our system will automatically take care of the rest.

Finally, we'd like to note that we do constantly review sites displaying Google ads to make sure that they're complying with the AdSense program policies. If we find that a site isn't compliant with our policies, we'll contact the publisher whose ad code appears on the site to address the situation. If you're concerned about others placing your ad code on non-policy compliant pages, we recommend using our Allowed Sites feature.

Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

Have you ever checked your reports and noticed that you have clicks reported, but no revenue? We'd like to explain why this may happen, as we frequently receive emails and questions on our Help Forum about this issue. What you're seeing may be due to one of the following:

1. Allowed Sites setup
   
   The Allowed Sites feature allows you to specify a list of sites where ads from your account may be displayed. If you're using this feature, you'll need to make sure that you've listed all sites where you'd like to display your AdSense ad code.
   
   To check if this is the case, log into your account and visit the 'Allowed Sites' page under your AdSense Setup tab. If the radio button 'Allow any site to show ads for my account ' is populated, you're not being affected by this issue, and you should continue to #2 below. However, if 'Only allow certain sites to show ads for my account' is populated, review the list of sites in the box below -- are all the sites you own listed in this box? If the answer is 'no', you won't be credited for clicks on the missing sites. Please be sure to add all of the sites where you'd like to display your AdSense ad code.
   
   We've noticed some confusion among publishers who have entered the sites of advertisers they'd like to see on their pages into the Allowed Sites list. Please know that this is not the case, as it's not possible to request ads for a particular page - the sites you enter into this box can only be sites where your ads can be placed.
   
   
2. Invalid clicks
   
   It's possible that you have some clicks that our monitoring system has considered to be invalid. As we've mentioned before, we monitor all clicks and impressions on Google ads for any activity that may artificially drive up an advertiser's costs or a publisher's earnings. Any clicks that our system considers invalid will still appear on your 'Overview' page, under the Reports tab. However, because our advertisers aren't charged for these clicks and impressions, we won't show the earnings for this activity. If you're concerned about suspicious activity in your account, we recommend reviewing your site's logs and letting us know about the situation.
   
   Rest assured that AdSense accounts are properly credited for all clicks and impressions we consider to be valid. We'll post your finalized earnings for a given month on your 'Payment History' page during the first week of the following month. For more information about invalid clicks, please review our Help Center.
   

Posted by the Google Ad Traffic Quality Team

We often receive questions from new publishers about what these two terms mean, and we'd like to help you understand the difference.

Invalid clicks are clicks for which we decide not to charge our AdWords advertisers, since they may artificially drive up advertiser cost or publisher revenue. These include extraneous clicks without any value to the advertiser, such as the second click of a double-click. They also include many other types of clicks that we've determined aren't motivated by genuine user interest.

"Invalid clicks" are often confused with "clicking on your own ads". However, we'd like to stress that invalid clicks are generally any clicks that artificially inflate advertiser cost or publisher revenue, regardless of their source.

Click fraud is a subset of invalid clicks that are generated with malicious or fraudulent intent -- in other words, clicks that are intended to drive up advertiser cost or publisher revenue artificially. Sources for these clicks include, but are not limited to:

A publisher clicking on his own ads, or encouraging clicks on his ads

Users or family members clicking to support the site / publisher

Third-party programs with user incentives, such as paid-to-click services and click-exchanges

Automated clicking tools, robots, or other deceptive software

The same principles above apply to ad impressions and conversions as well. Some sources of invalid impressions include, but are not limited to:

Excessive page refreshes, generated either manually or automatically

Third-party programs with user incentives, such as paid-to-surf or auto-surf programs

Third-party programs for purchasing fixed amounts of traffic, e.g. "$10 for 1,000 page views"

As a reminder, any method that artificially generates clicks, impressions, or conversions is strictly prohibited by our program policies. You can also find more information about these topics in our Invalid Clicks FAQ and our Ad Traffic Quality Resource Center.

Updated links to resources

Posted by the Google Ad Traffic Quality Team

The maxim about the Internet is that content is king. While this holds true for AdSense publishers, there’s one important caveat: if it’s not text-based content, our crawler might not notice.

While we’re constantly working to improve our targeting technology, our crawlers need text to properly match ads to your pages. Although images, flash, and streaming video can help spice up a site, relying heavily on these sorts of elements will make it difficult for us to get a good read on what your site is about.

If your site uses a lot of these features, make sure you provide enough text-based content in one of our supported languages to effectively convey the topic of your site. If our crawler doesn’t find enough text, you may get poorly targeted ads or public service ads (PSAs). While we can't say the exact amount of text content that you'll need to receive targeted ads, we do recommend including complete sentences and paragraphs on your pages.

To improve your ad targeting, here are few other pointers:

• Use text in addition to images when possible. Please note that the crawler can't read text contained within images.
  
• If you use images, be sure to title them appropriately and provide descriptive ALT tags.
  
• Try imagining your site without pictures or dynamic content. This will give you a good idea of what our crawler reads. If you lack imagination, you can try turning the images off in your web browser.
  

Finally, it's important to keep in mind that the AdSense for content ads on your site are automatically determined. Though it's not possible to choose the ads that are placed on your site, including more text-based content will help make it possible for our system to target your site correctly.

Posted by Kent Sugarman - AdSense Publisher Support

With all of the different AdSense products we now offer, it can be tough to keep track of the maximum number of each type of unit that our program policies allow. To help you remember these important numbers, here's a list.

On any policy-compliant page, you can display:

ONE...
- video unit (currently only available in specific countries and languages, though we're working to expand video units to additional publishers soon)

TWO...
- AdSense for search boxes

THREE...
- standard AdSense for content ad units, and
- 3 link units

While you can place all of these on one page, please also keep the user experience in mind. We strongly recommend maintaining a balance between the number of ads and the unique, quality content on your site, which will keep your readers engaged and coming back for more. Also, the more text-based content you have on your site, the more relevant your ads will be.

If you'd like help with generating ad code for additional ad units, feel free to review our Generating Ad Code video or our Quick Start Guide.

Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

(To the tune of "Strangers in the Night")

"Publishers with websites, creating content
Wondering about their sites
If with their content, they could show some ads
Before the day was done

Something in AdSense, was so inviting
Something about those ads, was so exciting
Something in our Help Center
Told them they must be one

Publishers with websites, yearning for earnings
They were just publishers with websites
Up to the moment
When they placed their first ad code
Little did they know
Revenue was just a click away
A happy-user-generated click away and --

Ever since that day, they've been monetizing
Newbies at the start, they're now optimizing
It turned out so right
For publishers with websites.

Newbie, newbie dooo, da da da daaaa da..."

If my lyrical effort didn't clue you in, and our Newbie Central resource wasn't a big enough clue, let me come right out and say it: we care about new publishers. For the next few weeks, we'll be sharing that caring every Friday, with posts especially intended for all the publishers who have recently joined AdSense, fresh and green like a newly mown lawn in the summertime. Look for this logo to identify posts in this series:


Now let's see if we can apply that same spirit of new beginnings to your sites.

Updated with logo

Posted by Julie Beckmann - AdSense Publisher Support

Of late, we’ve received a few emails from new AdSense applicants about not being accepted into the program despite paying a specific amount of money or buying a CD package.

We’d like to take this opportunity to state that we're not affiliated with any third-parties that solicit payment to join the AdSense program or that sell CDs with money-back guarantee offers. AdSense is a free product offered to publishers by Google Inc., and there’s no cost or obligation involved. As a result, we recommend that prospective publishers exercise caution when presented with such offers.

To submit an application, simply visit www.google.com/adsense. Please also review our program policies and our application tips before applying.

Posted by Shanti Nanisetti - AdSense India Publisher Support

We're excited to introduce you to Newbie Central, our complete resource for new publishers, now live in our Help Center.

We know there's a lot to learn when you're just starting out with AdSense, so we boiled the program down to the basics for our beginners. In Newbie Central, you'll find a walk-through of the initial steps getting started, from familiarizing yourself with your account to placing ads on your site to receiving your very first payment. We've also included some brief guides to help you get acquainted with our various features, policies, and tools.

One highlight is the Earnings and Expectations pages, which provide insight into how much you can expect to earn and you can do to influence your earnings. Whether you're considering applying and curious about potential revenue, or you're an existing publisher and want to boost your current earnings, the Earnings and Expectations section can help.

For you AdSense veterans out there, feel free to point your friends who've been on the fence about joining to Newbie Central, or even use it as a way to brush up on the basics for yourself!

Posted by Vineesha Malkani - AdSense Publisher Support

We know it can be tough to keep track of all the official AdSense-related documentation we've put online; that's why we're happy to introduce you to the new Resources tab in your account.



We've compiled links to a number of resources under this tab, including the Help Center, Program Policies, and Help Forum. If you're looking to improve the performance of your ads, you can now easily navigate to our Optimization Tips page or to publisher tools like Analytics.

Need help with implementing your ad code or viewing your ads? Try our Demos & Guides or Troubleshooting Wizards, all available under the Resources tab.

Oh, and if you happen to forget the URL of the Inside AdSense blog, you can always find a link to us under this new tab as well. :)

Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

Getting started with AdSense is easy, but when reviewing the applications we get, we've noticed a few common pitfalls. To help make sure your application is approved the first time around, ask yourself the following questions below before submitting.

Do I have what I need to apply?

• Website: To display Google ads, you need administrative access to the site you submit for AdSense in order to place our JavaScript ad code on your site. Adding the Google code to your site's source code will enable you to show ads, search boxes, and referral units on your pages.
  
  If you don't have a website of your own, that doesn't mean you can't participate in AdSense. We offer a couple of options to help you easily create your own site.
  
  First, there's Blogger, a free tool for setting up and publishing your own blog online. With its easy-to-use and customizable templates, you can create an account and start blogging right away. You can also set up AdSense ads easily through your Blogger account.
  
  If you prefer more flexibility and control, then our web page tool, Page Creator, may be more suitable. Signing up for a Page Creator account is free as well -- all you need is a Gmail account. The best part is that you don't have to download any software or hire a designer. Once you've created your Page Creator site, you can begin displaying Google ads in minutes.
  
  
• Valid payee name: Payments will be made out to the name on your account, so make sure to include your full and valid name, or that of your business, rather than just initials. If banks won't accept the name you enter in the 'Payee Name' field, neither will we.
  
  
• Valid address: We want to make sure your hard-earned money reaches you, so please also provide a complete valid address where you can receive mail. If you live in a country or territory that doesn't have a standard format for addresses, please be sure that your application includes as much information as a mailman would need to find your residence.
  

Does my website meet all the necessary requirements?

• Valid URL: If you manage an entire website, give us the URL of your home page. If you manage a blog or other account within a larger website, you should provide the URL of the specific page that you manage and not the URL of the entire hosting website. Don't forget to double check your URL for typos!
  
  
• Fully launched website: Since we won't be able to review websites that are not fully launched or built, please ensure that your site is live and functioning at the time you submit your application.
  
  
• Unique content: We want visitors to sites in the AdSense network to have a good experience, so please publish content that's interesting and unique. Avoid using "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other cookie cutter approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content. If you're participating in an affiliate program, give people a reason to visit your site first.
  
  
• Supported language: We're constantly working to provide targeted, relevant ads in more languages. However, until then, we can only approve your application if the majority of your website is in one of our supported languages.
  
  
• Pay-To Sites: If your site participates in programs that compensate people to perform activities that drive traffic to you, we can't approve your application. Some examples of these "pay-to" programs are sites that encourage users "to click" or "to surf" or "to read email." In addition, you shouldn't encourage others to join these programs in the content, links, or third-party ads on your site.
  

We also encourage you to read our program policies in detail for further insight on how to create a successful application. Now that you have all the necessary information, now's a good time to apply.

Posted by Courtney Chin and Rohit Jenveja - AdSense Publisher Support

After counting the days till your AdSense check arrives in the mail, you might plan to sprint straight to the bank. But before you try to achieve a land speed record getting to your local financial institution, here are a few things to keep in mind.

Bank on it?

Because bank policies vary throughout the world, we can't say whether a specific bank will be able to accept your AdSense checks. Since all AdSense checks are issued by Citibank, a correspondent relationship between your bank and Citibank is required to process our US Dollar checks. We recommend that you check with your bank to find out if this relationship exists.

Patience is a virtue.

Banks take varying amounts of time to clear checks. The exact length of time before funds will be available to you is a question best answered by your bank.

A penny saved...

Checks from AdSense are for deposit only; they are not able to be cashed.

Now that you have all the information, we wish you happy spending (or saving) your revenue!

Posted by Vineesha Malkani - AdSense Publisher Support