Introducing the AdSense 10 Challenge

In celebration of AdSense’s upcoming 10th anniversary, we’re hosting a free 10-week masterclass to help you become an AdSense expert and grow your revenue. This upcoming Learn with Google for Publishers series, the AdSense 10 Challenge, starts on June 25th and we’d love for you to join us!

What is the AdSense 10 Challenge? 
Over the course of 10 weeks, we’ll equip you with the tools and insights you need to make the most out of your online business with AdSense. We’ll cover a range of topics and show you ways to increase your revenue, uncover new information in your reports, and set up experiments to determine the best layouts for your site. You’ll meet members of the AdSense community like optimization specialists and experienced AdSense publishers. In addition, we’ll host office hours each week on Google+ to answer your questions on the topic of the week.

At the end of each week, let us know how you’re doing by filling out a short check-in survey. Check-in all 10 weeks and you could be featured on our Google+ page as a Challenge Finisher and receive a limited edition AdSense 10 t-shirt.

When is the Challenge and what topics will it cover? 
The AdSense 10 Challenge will take place online from June 25th - August 30th. We’ll cover a wide range of topics designed to encourage AdSense success. For more information, check out the schedule below and add it to your Google Calendar.

• Week 1, 6/25 - 7/1 - Welcome to the AdSense 10 Challenge
• Week 2, 7/2 - 7/8 - Understanding Your Performance Reports
• Week 3, 7/9 - 7/15 - Optimization Opportunities 
• Week 4, 7/16 - 7/22 - Make Better Decisions with Google Analytics - part 1
• Week 5, 7/23 - 7/29 - Make Better Decisions with Google Analytics - part 2
• Week 6, 7/30 - 8/5 - User Experience: Understanding Your Users
• Week 7, 8/6 - 8/12 - User Experience: Engaging Your Users
• Week 8, 8/13 - 8/19 - User Experience: Testing What Works Best
• Week 9, 8/20 - 8/26 - Mobile: The Time is Now
• Week 10, 8/27 - 8/30 - Grow and Engage with Google+

Where do I sign up?

Click here to register

As we get closer to June 25th, we’ll share more information about the Challenge on our Learn with Google for Publishers community on Google+. So be sure to join the community and check back soon for updates.

See you at the Challenge!

Posted by Laurie Shiau - Inside AdSense team
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Share your feedback on AdSense and other Google publisher products

Over the last few years, Google’s offering for online publishers has grown dramatically: in addition to AdSense, our products now range from AdMob, to DoubleClick for Publishers and the DoubleClick Ad Exchange.

As we continually work on improving our existing offerings, as well as developing new products and service for publishers, we’d like to hear your thoughts and suggestions. Our semi-annual satisfaction survey is a great way for you to share your feedback on AdSense and other publisher products you’re using. Later this month, we’ll be sending our survey to a sample of publishers opted in to receiving “occasional surveys”, so if you’d like to participate, make sure to update your email preferences and contact information.

Your suggestions are valuable, whether they come in via surveys, our product forum, or in-person events, and we regularly use your feedback to make improvements. For example, we recently introduced a new, brand-friendly ad size in AdSense and announced a closer collaboration with you when it comes to fighting invalid activity. Based on your feedback, you can now also benefit from video ad serving in DFP Small Business and AdMob Academy - our comprehensive guide to everything AdMob. It often takes time to develop new ideas and make improvements, but be assured that we read every single one of your comments and take your thoughts on board.

If you want to let us know your thoughts and ideas, don’t miss our survey in the week of April 28th. We look forward to hearing from you, and we appreciate your time.

Posted by Sahar Golestani, on behalf of the AdSense Publisher Satisfaction Team
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Doing Mobile Monetization The Right Way

Editor’s note: Chris Moore is a partner at Redpoint Ventures where he focuses on making investments in consumer Internet, online marketing and SaaS companies. Follow him on his blog and Twitter @Moorski.

This year alone, there is an $11.4 billion mobile advertising opportunity, which means there is tremendous upside for nimble and innovative startups with disruptive mobile-first models. As we saw from Facebook last year, the company was able to turn around and actually make something of its mobile business – a business that didn’t exist at the time of IPO. However, despite the potential of the market, and Facebook’s early success, we’re still a long way from realizing the promise of the mobile medium.

When looking at the opportunity, it’s clear there are a few core challenges that need to be addressed quickly in this nascent market. The startups that address these challenges first will be the companies to watch.

The Problems That Need Solutions

In many ways, we’re at the same juncture with mobile advertising as we were with the desktop web circa 1996-97. At that time we were limited by basic ad-serving capabilities, browser cookies to track visits and boring, static display ads. Search keyword advertising, the most compelling ad format and targeting method the web has seen, was only in its infancy (at Goto.com, which eventually became Overture) at the time.

Right now, the two most obvious hurdles to overcome are what smart companies are focusing on: developing a reliable and privacy-safe method for user targeting across apps, and developing smartphone native ad formats.

Cross-App User Targeting. On the traditional desktop web, browser cookies became a reasonably reliable and standardized method for recognizing and storing attributes of any given user in between visits to a site. Today roughly 80 percent of online ads leverage cookies or some other form of a user-targeting mechanism.

In the mobile app world, an analogous, reliable and standardized mechanism has not yet emerged across either iOS or Android, and until it does, relevance-based targeting will be less effective in the mobile environment and remain a giant missed opportunity for advertisers. Currently there isn’t a robust way to track users across applications after Apple deprecated UDID as a targeting mechanism. In order for cross-app user targeting to be fully realized, the tracking of users in a privacy-focused environment must be solved.

Smartphone Native Ad Formats. The first ad formats utilized on smartphones were borrowed from the web. As a result, users are inadvertently clicking on too-small-to-read banner ads, thus ensuring annoyed users. Instead of a fluid and seamless experience, users are pulled out of their task at hand and brought to un-optimized web landing pages in the mobile browser.

The only way mobile ad monetization will flourish is when smartphone native ad formats that enhance the immediate app experience are developed. The good news is that we’re starting to see a few promising native smartphone format candidates with notifications and Facebook’s Sponsored Stories. There is still plenty of room for innovation, as these formats aren’t 100 percent where they need to be. Users and marketers alike can’t wait for some savvy startup to develop innovative and reliable ad formats that fit within the app experience and engage the user without disrupting the task at hand.

The Winner’s Circle

Once the dilemmas of cross app user targeting and smartphone native ad formats are solved, there are some very promising areas within the mobile environment that are poised for the taking:

Online-to-Online Ad Tech Providers. The ad-tech player who can get the ambient context digital wallet and in-app context right for the Walmarts and Coca-Colas of the world will be a really big deal. There will be several winners in this area, each focused on a particular vertical of offline-to-online.

Cost-Per-Lead Advertising. Yes, cost-per-lead advertising. The web performance stepchild to cost-per-click could emerge as a first-call citizen in the smartphone medium. Why? Well, the medium happens to be attached to a phone, and guess what leads perform the best: phone calls. The smartphone promises to connect this intent to buy to a live person more seamlessly than any other medium to date. This will lead to higher conversion rates and thus higher monetization rates. Inadco, a Redpoint portfolio company that started in the web CPL space, is one startup helping these advertisers take advantage of the mobile phone.

Ambient Context and User Analytics Providers. The fundamental problem of user targeting and analytics within the mobile world must be solved. This solution will come from a clever startup, not the underlying platform players Apple and Google. Just as Omniture emerged to be an important platform company in web analytics, there will also be similar companies built within the smartphone medium. Native mobile app analytics companies like Flurry are promising, as are the emerging players in audience targeting like BlueKai (a Redpoint portfolio company).

While we are a far way from identifying the smartphone equivalent of paid search, it will absolutely exist (it has to) and it will leverage ambient targeting, the digital wallet and smartphone native formats that interrupt but don’t disrupt the user from the task at hand.

The market is big and the current players are just starting to crop up, which means the challenge is for the taking. The next two years will undoubtedly be exciting years to see it all unfold – not only to see who the winners will be, but also to see the innovations that make it happen.

Google, Twitter push to reveal number of national security related requests separately

While Microsoft and Facebook have both published information tonight about how many requests for customer info the government made over a six month period, Google and Twitter are apparently hoping to take a different route. As Google told AllThingsD and Twitter legal director Benjamin Lee tweeted, "it's important to be able to publish numbers of national security requests-including FISA disclosures-separately." Google went further, claiming that lumping the number of National Security Letters together with criminal requests would be a "step backwards." Clearly this post-PRISM revelations battle for more transparency on just what the government is doing behind the scenes isn't over, we'll let you know if any of the parties involved have more information to share.