Good luck on working with your content. Next week we'll review what publishers should do to get the most out of the time after the holiday season.

Posted by
Daryna Chushko - Publisher Growth Marketing Manager

The holiday shopping season starts in September with queries starting to increase and users beginning to search for deals and gifts. Start planning and optimizing your AdSense account and site in October and plan to finish all optimizations by November1,2.

This guide is here to help you learn about the importance of seasonality as well as provide you with tips on how to get more from your Google AdSense account and site during peak seasonal traffic. This guide is filled with easy, actionable insights you can start implementing today.

Here’s a sneak peek of what will be posted over the next couple of weeks to prepare you well for this busy time of the year. Let’s get holiday season ready!

• Pre-holiday season: How to prepare? 
• During the holiday season: How to maximize the opportunities 
• Post holidays: Looking at 2020 

Defining seasonal periods  What is seasonality?

Any predictable fluctuation or pattern that recurs over a calendar year is defined as seasonality. It can be categorized into 3 types of events and holidays:

1. Cultural (e.g. Ramadan, Thanksgiving, Christmas) 
2. Commercial (e.g. Black Friday, Singles’ Day, Mother’s Day)
3. Ad-hoc events (e.g. Olympics, Elections, TV series) 

By spotting events and holidays impacting your audience, you can identify your seasonality opportunities to increase revenue and attract new users.
What drives seasonality? 

Publisher revenue is driven by two interlinked factors: RPMs and traffic.

Advertisers are willing to pay more for inventory, leading to higher RPMs. Increased traffic leads to more impressions. These two factors drive seasonal spikes and dips in publisher earnings.

RPMs traffic

Why is it important for publishers?

Seasonality offers publishers opportunities to attract new audiences and maximize revenues. The upcoming holiday season (October - December) is the biggest annual seasonal opportunity. Let’s explore why!

1. Large increase in internet traffic (higher query opportunity)
   Over the past 5 years, the holiday season internet traffic has grown as users flock online to purchase gifts for themselves and others.
   
   
2. Higher competition between advertisers (higher query opportunity)
   The holiday shopping season is the busiest retail period of the year. Advertisers spend more during this time to ensure their products and brands are well-positioned at key events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. 
   For example, consumers around the world and especially in Asia reportedly spent more than $1 billion in the first 90 seconds of Singles’ Day in 2018. Advertisers are eager to be there for moments like this.

Starting the holiday season marathon

Let’s focus on the upcoming season. The October-December period is a global seasonal marathon offering the greatest annual opportunity to maximize your earnings. In fact, this seasonal opportunity is increasing all over. In 2018, the average global interest in Black Friday grew more than twice over the previous 5 years. 

Get your calendar open and mark the following dates:

Let’s see what you can do to make the most out of your site and AdSense account before, during and after the holiday season.

In the blogpost next week we’ll provide you with tips on how to prepare your site and AdSense account for the rush of the holiday season.

Posted by:
Daryna Chushko - Publisher Growth Marketing Manager

What’s changing

Easy setup and management

- No more messing with ad codes! Auto ads now work through any AdSense ad unit code, so using them on your existing sites is as easy as turning them on in your account.
- For new sites, just add them in the Sites page, copy-paste the AdSense code and turn on Auto ads.

- For pages where you don't want to use Auto ads, add those URLs to your “Page exclusions” list. You can exclude individual pages or entire sections of your site.
- You can see the full summary of your Auto ads settings for each of your sites as an overview.

Greater customization

- You can preview how Auto ads look on your site before they go live.

- You can delete specific ad placements inside the preview using the “delete” button. Auto ads will immediately generate a placement in a new location for you to review.
- You can easily specify the Ad formats that Auto ads places on your site, including Matched content.
- You can control the number of Auto ads you'd like to show on your pages by using the Ad load slider.

Updated reporting

- We're updating our reports to allow you to easily see Auto ads and manual ad unit performance side by side for each of your sites.

Don’t forget to check your Auto ads settings in the new Ads > Overview page to see these changes apply to your sites.

Over the coming weeks, we'll email to let you know that your account has the new Auto ads, and provide further information.


Experiments are coming!

We've received many requests to make it easier to test Auto ads and get accurate performance metrics. We're currently working on creating a new experiment type to make this possible. 

Together with the changes highlighted above, and a new experiment type, you'll be able to see how Auto ads will look on a site, and test out the performance on a portion of the traffic of a site before enabling them fully.

Posted by:
Google AdSense Product Team

Today, we’re excited to announce the addition of Marathi, a language spoken by over 80 millions people in Maharashtra, India and many other countries around the world, to the family of AdSense supported languages.

The interest for Marathi language content has been growing steadily over the last few years. With this launch, AdSense provides an easy way for publishers to monetize the content they create in Marathi, and advertisers can connect to a Marathi speaking audience with relevant ads.

To start monetizing your Marathi content website with Google AdSense:

1. Check the AdSense Program policies and make sure your site is compliant.
2. Sign up for an AdSense account
3. Add the AdSense code to start displaying relevant ads to your users

Welcome to AdSense! Sign Up now!

Posted by:
AdSense Internationalization Team

One of our top priorities is to sustain a healthy digital advertising ecosystem, one that works for everyone: users, advertisers and publishers. On a daily basis, teams of Google engineers, policy experts, and product managers combat and stop bad actors. Just last year, we removed 734,000 publishers and app developers from our ad network and ads from nearly 28 million pages that violated our publisher policies.

But we’re not just stopping bad actors. Just as critical to our mission is the work we do every day to help good publishers in our network succeed. One consistent piece of feedback we’ve heard from our publishers is that they want us to further simplify our policies, across products, so they are easier to understand and follow. That’s why we'll be simplifying the way our content policies are presented to publishers, and standardizing content policies across our publisher products.

A simplified publisher experience
In September, we’ll update the way our publisher content policies are presented with a clear outline of the types of content where advertising is not allowed or will be restricted.

Our Google Publisher Policies will outline the types of content that are not allowed to show ads through any of our publisher products. This includes policies against illegal content, dangerous or derogatory content, and sexually explicit content, among others.

Our Google Publisher Restrictions will detail the types of content, such as alcohol or tobacco, that don’t violate policy, but that may not be appealing for all advertisers. Publishers will not receive a policy violation for trying to monetize this content, but only some advertisers and advertising products—the ones that choose this kind of content—will bid on it. As a result, Google Ads will not appear on this content and this content will receive less advertising than non-restricted content will. 

The Google Publisher Policies and Google Publisher Restrictions will apply to all publishers, regardless of the products they use—AdSense, AdMob or Ad Manager.

These changes are the next step in our ongoing efforts to make it easier for publishers to navigate our policies so their businesses can continue to thrive with the help of our publisher products.


Posted by:
Scott Spencer, Director of Sustainable Ads

The web is mobile.

Nearly 70% of AdSense audiences experience the web on mobile devices. With new mobile web technologies such as responsive mobile sites, Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) and Progressive Web Apps (PWA) the mobile web works better and faster than ever.

We understand that using AdSense on the go is important to you. More than a third of our users access AdSense from mobile devices and this is an area where we continue to invest.

Our vision is an AdSense that does more to keep your account healthy, letting you focus on creating great content, and comes to you when issues or opportunities need your attention.

With this in mind, we have reviewed our mobile strategy. As a result, we will be focusing our investment on the AdSense mobile web interface and sunsetting the current iOS and Android apps. By investing in a common web application that supports all platforms, we will be able to deliver AdSense features optimized for mobile much faster than we can today.

Later this year we will announce improvements to the AdSense mobile web interface. The AdSense Android and iOS apps will be deprecated in the coming months, and will be discontinued and removed from the app stores by the end of 2019.

Like our publishers who have built their businesses around the mobile web, we look forward to leveraging great new web technologies to deliver an even better, more automated, and more useful mobile experience. Stay tuned for further announcements throughout the rest of the year.


Posted by: Andrew Gildfind
AdSense Product Manager

This summer, we’re excited to introduce the Women of Publishing Leadership Series, brought to you by the Google Partnerships team. This masterclass is an opportunity to enhance your business’ digital strategy through an exclusive, four-part webinar series.

A strong digital presence is necessary for driving growth in your business. But focusing on the success of women-led businesses is even more critical, as women only generate 37% of GDP, while making up half of the world’s working age population. Substantial strides have been made in growing the ranks of women in leadership and ownership and women are rising fast in the income and managerial ranks, at a rate that’s 1.5x the national average.

What you can expect
The Women of Publishing Leadership Series was created to help women leaders develop their skills in digital strategy to propel their business in the digital economy. The content is designed for small and medium-sized digital businesses ( less than 500 employees) that are women-led, display strong female leadership or have a predominantly-female audience.

Participants will have access to a tailored program focused on improving their digital presence, through a comprehensive monetization and data utilization curriculum. Women from all types of digital backgrounds: news, entertainment, video, app, ecommerce, etc. are encouraged to attend. Sign up now.

Webinar sessions

Planning for Growth (add to calendar)

• Date and time: Wednesday, June 19 at 1:30 PM ET 
• Speaker: Sarah Carpenter, Manager of Scalable Acquisitions, Google 
• Summary: Setting the stage for the webinar series, learn how to get into the growth mindset and why it matters for your business.
  
  
  Content and Audience Strategy (add to calendar)
• Date and time: Wednesday, July 17 at 1:30 PM ET
• Speaker: Amy Harding, Director of Analytics, Revenue Optimization, and Google News Consumer Insights
• Summary: Learn how to better understand and engage your audience with a robust content strategy.
  
  
  Using Data to Drive Growth (add to calendar)
• Date and time: Wednesday, July 31 at 1:30 PM ET
• Speaker: Madhav Goyal, Publisher Intelligence Analyst
• Summary: Many acknowledge the value of data-driven decision making - but few are able to use their data effectively. Get actionable insights on how to leverage data to drive growth for your business.
  
  
  Monetization Tips and Tricks (add to calendar)
• Date and time: Wednesday, August 14 at 1:30 PM ET
• Speaker: Roshni Dutt, Platforms Monetization Lead, Google
• Summary: Gain pro-tips on recognizing the value of your audience and effectively monetizing your content.

If you’re ready to take your small or medium-sized businesses to the next level, sign up by Monday, June 17th, and gain access to all of the sessions by registering here.

We want to do everything we can to help our publishers succeed.

Beyond providing the AdSense platform to monetize content, we provide various channels through which we communicate policies, best practices and product changes to our publishers.

What resources are available?

We know that one size doesn't fit all for publishers when it comes to preferred methods of transmitting messages and information.  There are several platforms where we provide policy information to publishers.

First, we have our Policy Help Center. Through the Help Center, publishers can view all AdSense program policies, with detailed information on specific areas such as content policies, ad implementation policies, webmaster guidelines and much more.

Next, we have an AdSense Forum, comprised of experienced expert publishers that are passionate about helping other publishers better understand AdSense policies.  Here, you can review previous threads or post questions and receive feedback from the community.

We also have our AdSense YouTube channel, a platform we are investing in going forward to address questions for those publishers who prefer videos over text. We plan to update this resource frequently throughout the next year.

For big policy changes, check out our Inside AdSense blog, where we generally post updates first. We have Googlers from across AdSense posting best practices as well as practical advice to avoid common pitfalls, increase revenue and remain policy compliant. We’ll also provide updates on industry drivers, which may be useful to publishers. 

And more recently we’ve also tried to amplify our messaging through the AdSense social channels on Facebook & Twitter.  Generally, these posts reiterate an update that we’ve posted on our AdSense blog, with a link to that posting.

Lastly, we often speak at conferences and host publisher events at our offices worldwide. At these events, we discuss our program policies and gather in-person feedback from you. This feedback is valuable and has resulted in modifications to products, policies, and policy enforcement to better serve your needs.

Why is it important for Google to provide all of these resources?

We know that your first priority is creating content and growing your business. We want to do our part to help you succeed, so we’ve provided multiple platforms to help you understand our policies in the way that suits you best. To put it simply: we want to provide the right resource information, at the right time, in as many places as possible to help you understand our policies.

We also want to make sure you have a number of paths to provide feedback. Our publisher events at Google offices are a great opportunity for this. Additionally, my entire role representing Publisher Policy Communications places a face to our policies, and a feedback loop from you, to the policy team.

Communication involves listening

Communication is a two way street. We’ve listened to your feedback, and created several ways, on several platforms for publishers to better understand our policies. We will always try to interact with you in ways that work best for you. When you succeed, we succeed. Please let us know how we can better communicate our policies to you.

John Brown
Head of Publisher Policy Communications

You can also download it with clickable links for desktop and mobile.