Policy resources available to you

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

from Inside AdSense http://bit.ly/2IfEua6

[Infographic] Traffic tips

We're excited to share with you our infographic with important tips on how to boost and optimize your web site traffic.

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

from Inside AdSense http://bit.ly/2Cbb5r2

We’re excited about 2019, are you?

At Google AdSense we’re excited about 2019 and really hope you are too. Thank you for inspiring us every day. Have a great holiday season!

from Inside AdSense http://bit.ly/2EpQkM3

Best Practices for Policy Compliant Growth

As a publisher, there are many challenges you face. One area of interest for any publisher is how can you grow your user base, while maintaining high quality, policy-compliant content and traffic.

At Google, we strive to create policies that are designed to enable a healthy digital advertising ecosystem. We consider the needs of each party - users, advertisers and publishers, and want all players to thrive.

Just as important as creating policy is the enforcement of policy violations. Enforcement is important for the quality of the network, and designed to be fairly administered.  There are steps you can take to safeguard your growth efforts, while maintaining policy compliance:

Understand our policies, and develop your own policies and procedures

The first step is to read and understand our policies. These policies are posted in our Help Center, with specific FAQs called out for ease of reference. For new publishers, we created a beginner’s guide to highlight some of the most commonly violated policies.

Protect against invalid traffic

We want publishers to be proactive about tackling invalid traffic.

We’ve developed an Ad Traffic Quality Resource site designed to help publishers better educate themselves on what invalid traffic is, the risks that invalid traffic poses to their businesses, how to identify invalid traffic, and how to mitigate this type of traffic. The Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) also has a growing library of resources that can provide additional context and best practices on this topic.

Get familiar with your metrics

As part of your daily ritual, you should understand what typical traffic patterns for your website look like. Anomalies, especially on non-business hours’ or holidays, are signs of potential trouble. As part of metrics review, set aside time each month, or where appropriate for your business, to train and review traffic sources and patterns with your team. We provide guidance for linking analytics to AdSense to help facilitate this process.

Ask your partners to provide summary reporting

In addition to reviewing your own traffic on a daily basis, it’s important to regularly audit traffic from your partners. When working with partners, be diligent. Ask for traffic sources, and any optimization plans your partners may have, and educate your team to recognize suspicious behavior. 

Investing in good user experiences benefits the entire ecosystem. Work with partners that feel the same way.

Only trust business partners who have earned your trust

Trust, but verify. Only work with partners who adhere to best practices for sourcing traffic and growing their businesses, and require all partners to uphold safe standards when it comes to sourcing traffic and providing great user experiences.  Feel empowered to ask hard questions and demand answers from those you work with, and set up time to review and analyze inventory that you’ve purchased. If you don’t feel like you are getting the responses you need, find other partners that are more responsive.

Understand what’s too good to be true and watch for it. Build bridges with quality inventory sources and partners, and put up barriers between you and those who prove untrustworthy.  Many potential publishers, ad network and programmatic partners can have traffic quality that can vary quite significantly between various providers.

Focus on the User

Lastly, and most importantly, serving your end users needs should be at the heart of what you do, and a top priority.  Your entire business should be focused on your customer - the user.

Websites with great, unique content have lost loyal users due to deceptive navigation, or poor and/or numerous ad placements.  Great content is only part of your job.  Providing a straightforward, safe, easy to navigate, and uncluttered site experience is also important for users to return to your site.   

At conferences and events, I am often asked what is the one piece of advice I can give to help publishers maintain a good relationship with the Google policy team. My response is always “If you truly focus on the user, and do everything you can to help that user in his or her journey on your site, then you will likely have a long and productive relationship with Google.”

We hope these tips have been helpful. As always, please review our Help Center, and keep providing us with feedback.


John Brown
Head of Publisher Policy Communications

from Inside AdSense http://bit.ly/2Qopc6f

Help us improve our services and products

We’d like to personally invite you to share your thoughts with us so that we can keep improving your experience with us.

Depending on your email preferences, you may have received a survey by email, if so please take the time to respond to it as we value your input.

In the past, we’ve used your responses to improve how we help you, ways you interact with our product, and what type of features we offer.
The survey should take about 10-15 minutes and can be answered on mobile.

Whether you’ve completed this survey before or you’re providing feedback for the first time, we’d like to thank you for sharing your valuable thoughts. We’re looking forward to feedback!

Thank you!

from Inside AdSense http://bit.ly/2PmbBXJ

[VIDEO] User-generated content

Our new video takes a deeper dive into our User-generated content policy and describes how this policy helps to enable a healthy digital advertising ecosystem for users, advertisers, and publishers.

Click the video below to learn more:

We hope this video helps you to better understand our User-generated content policy. For more information, you can learn more about AdSense policies in our help center.

John Brown
Head of Publisher Policy Communications

from Inside AdSense http://bit.ly/2P4l71N

[VIDEO] Copyright infringement policy

We're adding more video content resources for our publishers to help them better understand various policies.

This week, our video takes a deeper dive into our Copyright infringement policy and describes how this policy helps to enable a healthy digital advertising ecosystem for users, advertisers, and publishers. Watch the video below to learn more:

After each video goes live, we'll be on hand to answer your questions related to the topic for a few hours on the YouTube channel. So be sure to subscribe to the channel to ensure you don’t miss an episode.

We hope this video helps you to better understand our Copyright infringement policy. For more information, you can learn more about AdSense policies in our help center.

Posted by:
John Brown
Head of Publisher Policy Communications

from Inside AdSense http://bit.ly/2FnfLyZ

[VIDEO] Dangerous or derogatory content

We're adding more video content resources for our publishers to help them better understand various policies.

This week, our video takes a deeper dive into our Dangerous or Derogatory Content policy and describes how this policy helps to enable a healthy digital advertising ecosystem for users, advertisers, and publishers. Click the video below to learn more:

After each video goes live, we'll be on hand to answer your questions related to the topic for a few hours on the YouTube channel. So be sure to subscribe to the channel to ensure you don’t miss an episode.

We hope this video helps you to better understand our Dangerous or Derogatory Content policy. For more information, you can learn more about AdSense policies in our help center.

Posted by:
John Brown
Head of Publisher Policy Communications

from Inside AdSense http://bit.ly/2qITzp3

[VIDEO] Accidental Clicks

We're adding more video content resources for our publishers to help them better understand various policies.

This week, our video takes a deeper dive into our Accidental Clicks policy and describes how this policy helps to enable a healthy digital advertising ecosystem for users, advertisers, and publishers. Click the video below to learn more:

After each video goes live, we'll be on hand to answer your questions related to the topic for a few hours on the YouTube channel. So be sure to subscribe to the channel to ensure you don’t miss an episode.

We hope this video helps you to better understand our Accidental Clicks policy. For more information, you can learn more about AdSense policies in our help center.

Posted by
John Brown
Head of Publisher Policy Communications

from Inside AdSense http://bit.ly/2zAM3jJ

[VIDEO] Misrepresentative content

For the next few weeks we'll be releasing several videos, providing a more in depth look into various policy topics.

This week, our video takes a deeper dive into our Misrepresentative content policy and describes how this policy helps to enable a healthy digital advertising ecosystem for users, advertisers, and publishers. Click the video below to learn more:

After each video goes live, we'll be on hand to answer your questions related to the topic for a few hours on the YouTube channel. So be sure to subscribe to the channel to ensure you don’t miss an episode.

We hope this video helps you to better understand our Misrepresentative Content policy. For more information, you can learn more about AdSense policies in our help center.


Posted by:
John Brown
Head of Publisher Policy Communications

from Inside AdSense http://bit.ly/2RuYAN1

Continuing to strengthen the quality of Google AdSense

Over the last 15 years, AdSense has grown to support web publishers by connecting their audiences to advertisers, with the aim of keeping the web open and funding content creators. Earlier this month, we posted about the exciting future we have ahead of us and with this post, we'd like to tell you a little more about our upcoming quality efforts.

We’re already committed to initiatives such as the Better Ads Standards and we continue to strive to create a clean and fair ad network. Continuing our work on quality in AdSense makes it more attractive to advertisers which in turn leads to better outcomes for our partners. With this in mind, we're making some changes to the way you monetize new sites with AdSense.

What's changing?
Before you can show ads on a new site, you now have to add the site to your AdSense account. Each new site will go through a verification process which checks that you own the domain or have the ability to modify its content. The process also reviews your site for compliance with the AdSense Program policies. After the checks are completed, your site will be marked as "Ready" and you can start showing ads.
We're also renaming the My Sites tab to Sites and moving it further up the menu to make it easier to find. Any existing sites you’re monetizing should automatically appear in your sites list, accessed by clicking the new Sites tab. If you want to add more sites you’ll need to add them to this list.

How will this impact partners?
For the vast majority of AdSense users, the only change will be the new Sites tab. However, for some of you, we may ask for help to find the correct ad code when you add a new site. If we require your help, we’ll reach out through email and notify you when you sign in to AdSense. So don’t forget to make sure we have the correct email address for you and that your email preferences are up to date.

Stay tuned for more exciting updates!

Posted by:

Google AdSense Product Team

from Inside AdSense http://bit.ly/2Db6CI0

[Infographic] Get ready for the holiday season

During the holiday season advertisers have their busiest time of the year as users search for gifts and celebration ideas. Increased demand in advertising space leads to growing RPMs and surges in traffic. Make the most out of this busy season by preparing your site and ads for increased activity.

Take a look at our infographic with important tips on how to prepare for the holiday season.

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

Posted by 

Daryna Chushko - Marketing Communications Specialist

from Inside AdSense http://bit.ly/2PjajB8

Looking back, looking forward...

Earlier this year, AdSense celebrated 15 years of partnering with digital content creators like you. A lot has changed since we started – new technology, new challenges, and new opportunities all driven by constantly changing user needs. A few things have endured though – the world has an insatiable appetite for great content and publishers like you remain the beating heart of the open web. Sharing in this mission with you, helping to create millions of sustainable content-first businesses on the web, keeps us going.

While we look back fondly on the last 15 years, your stories inspire us to keep looking forward. There’s lots more to do to support you and set AdSense and our ecosystem up for success for the next 15 years. With that in mind, we’d like to share a preview of how we plan to help you grow and play our part in making advertising work for everyone.

First up, smarter sizing, better ad placements and new formats powered by Google’s machine learning technology. We know you want to spend more time writing content and serving your users than managing ad tags and settings. We want that too. We’ve been investing heavily in understanding the best ways to increase user interest in ads, including when and what type of ads to show, while ensuring they complement your content and respect the experience of visitors to your site. Alongside these new capabilities, we’ll bring you the controls, reporting, and transparency you expect from AdSense to ensure we’re constantly meeting your needs along the way.

Secondly, we know that creating great content can take time, but making that content profitable shouldn’t. We’re hard at work on a number of new assistive features that give you more insight into your performance when you’re ready to take action, a clearer understanding of how you’re doing relative to your peers and the industry, and improved navigation to help you get it all done faster. We want to save you time so you can focus on the things that matter most to your business, like creating great content for your audiences.

Thirdly, AdSense and Google are committed to advertising that works for everyone and playing our part to ensure the ads ecosystem supports the diverse needs of publishers, advertisers and consumers. We’ll continue to meet and exceed important industry standards on ads quality, including the Better Ads Standards, to make sure that great publishers who make engaging content are rewarded, while advertisers can continue to spend with confidence.As we launch into the next 15 years and with it deliver these new features, we may need your help to keep your account up to date. If we do, you’ll hear from us by email over the coming months. Don’t forget to make sure we have the correct email address for you and that your preferences are up to date.

We’re just as excited about working with you now as we were when we launched 15 years ago. Thank you for being on the journey with us so far – here’s to another 15 years of partnership and shared success!


Posted by:
Matthew Conroy - Senior Product Manager

from Inside AdSense http://bit.ly/2DIOtCr

Lighthouse Auditing for Publishers

In February, we announced the launch of SEO auditing tools in Lighthouse Chrome Extension, which is now available in Google Chrome Developer tools.

Lighthouse is an open-source, automated tool for improving the quality of web pages.  Lighthouse is designed to help publishers improve the quality of their web sites, by providing tools and features for their developers to run audits for performance, compatibility, progressive web apps, SEO, and more.

The SEO audit category within Lighthouse was designed to validate and reflect the SEO basics that every site should get right, and provides detailed guidance to fix those issues. Current audits include checks for valid rel=canonical tag, successful HTTP response code, page title and description and more.

How do I use Lighthouse?

You can run Lighthouse in several ways:

Using the Lighthouse Chrome Extension:

1. Install the Lighthouse Chrome Extension
2. Click on the Lighthouse icon in the extension bar
3. Select the Options menu, click “SEO” and click OK, then generate report

Using Chrome Developer tools on Google Chrome:

1. Open Chrome Developer Tools
2. Go to Audits
3. Click Perform and audit
4. Click the “SEO” checkbox and click Run Audit.

The SEO audits category is not designed to replace any of your current strategies, or tools, nor does it make any SEO guarantees for Google websearch or other search engines.  However, it covers some of the SEO best practices that are relevant for Webmasters and publishers who want to ensure their website is visible in Search. These checks are part of best practices that we provide for our publisher partners.

Posted by:

John Brown

Head of Publisher Policy Communications

from Inside AdSense http://bit.ly/2BgiIzm

AdSense now understands Telugu

Today, we’re excited to announce the addition of Telugu, a language spoken by over 70 million in India and many other countries around the world, to the family of AdSense supported languages. With this launch, publishers can now monetize their Telugu content and advertisers can connect to a Telugu speaking audience with relevant ads.

To start monetizing your Telugu content website with Google AdSense:

Check the AdSense program policies and make sure your website is compliant.
Sign up for an AdSense account.
Add the AdSense code to start displaying relevant ads to your users.

Welcome to AdSense! Sign up now.


Posted by:
The AdSense Internationalization Team

from Inside AdSense http://bit.ly/2IBqRNd

Updated impressions metrics for AdSense

Reporting plays a key role in the AdSense experience. In fact, two-thirds of our partners consider it the most important feature within AdSense. Helping partners understand and improve their performance metrics is a top priority. Today, we’re announcing updates to how we report AdSense impressions.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and the Media Rating Council (MRC) in partnership with other industry bodies such as the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA), periodically review and update industry standards for impression measurement. They recommend guidelines to standardize how impressions are counted across formats and platforms.

What’s changing? 
Over the last year, to remain consistent with these standards, we have transitioned our ad serving platforms from served impressions to downloaded impressions. Served impressions are counted at the point that we find an ad for an ad request on the server. Downloaded impressions are counted for each ad request once at least one of the returned ads has begun to load on the user’s device. Starting today, publishers will see updated metrics in AdSense that reflect this change.
How will it impact partners?
Switching to counting impressions on download helps to improve viewability rates, consistency across measurement providers, and aligns the impression metric better with advertiser value. For example, if an ad failed to download or if the user closed the tab before it arrived, it will no longer be counted as an impression. As a result, some AdSense users might see decreases in their impression counts, and corresponding improvements in their impression RPM, CTR, and other impression-based metrics. Your earnings, however, should not be impacted.

We will continue to review and update our impression counting technology as new industry standards are defined and implemented.

For more information please visit our Help Center.

Posted by:
Andrew Gildfind, Product Manager

from Inside AdSense http://bit.ly/2HThIAd

Let’s talk about Policy! Partnership with Industry Associations, and Better Ads Standards

Thanks to your feedback around wanting more discussion of AdSense policies, we have created some new content on our AdSense YouTube channel in a series called “Let’s talk about Policy!”.

This month, we're talking about the Coalition for Better Ads, Better Ads Standards.

These standards were created by the Coalition for Better Ads to improve ad experiences for users across the web. Google is a member of the Coalition alongside other stakeholders within the industry. The Better Ads Standards were created with extensive consumer research to minimize annoying ad experiences across devices. The Standards are currently in place for users within North America and Europe, but we are advising all our publishers to abide by the standards to provide a quality user experience for your visitors and minimize the need to make changes in the future.

Check out our video discussing the Standards to learn more:

Be sure to subscribe to the channel to ensure you don’t miss an episode.

from Inside AdSense http://bit.ly/2Hn8JuO

Helping publishers recover lost revenue from ad blocking

Today, the majority of the internet is supported by digital advertising. But bad ad experiences—the ones that blare music unexpectedly, or force you to wait 10 seconds before you get to the page—are hurting publishers who make the content, apps and services we use everyday. When people encounter annoying ads, and then decide to block all ads, it cuts off revenue for the sites you actually find useful. Many of these people don't intend to defund the sites they love when they install an ad blocker, but when they do, they block all ads on every site they visit. 

Last year we announced Funding Choices to help publishers with good ad experiences recover lost revenue due to ad blocking. While Funding Choices is still in beta, millions of ad blocking users every month are now choosing to see ads on publisher websites, or “whitelisting” that site, after seeing a Funding Choices message. In fact, in the last month over 4.5 million visitors who were asked to allow ads said yes, creating over 90 million additional paying page views for those sites.

Over the coming weeks, we’re expanding Funding Choices to 31 additional countries, giving publishers the ability to ask visitors from those countries to choose between allowing ads on a site, or purchasing an ad removal pass through Google Contributor. Also, we’ve started a test that allows publishers to use their own proprietary subscription services within Funding Choices.

How Funding Choices works

Funding Choice gives publishers a way to have a conversation with their site visitors through custom messages they can use to express how ad blocking impacts their business and content. When a visitor arrives at a site using an ad blocker, Funding Choices allows the site to display one of three message types to that user:

A dismissible message that doesn’t restrict access to content: 



A dismissible message that counts and limits the number of page views that person is allowed per month, as determined by the site owner, before the content is blocked.



Or, a message that blocks access to content until the visitor chooses to allow ads on the site, or to pay to access the content with either the site’s proprietary subscription service or a pass that removes all ads on that site through Google Contributor.




On average, publishers using Funding Choices are seeing 16 percent of visitors allow ads on their sites with some seeing rates as high as 37 percent.

Ad blockers designed to remove all ads from all sites are making it difficult for publishers with good ad experiences to maintain sustainable businesses. Our goal for Funding Choices is to help publishers get paid for their work by reducing the impact of ad blocking on them, and we look forward to continuing to expand the product availability.

from Inside AdSense http://bit.ly/2J0TgNd