2015 Year in Review

2015 was a year with new and exciting AdSense updates. Let’s have a look at 2015 to recap all the product enhancements launched this year.

New features for your AdSense account:

• New sign-up flow: Signing up for AdSense is now faster and easier. Now, you have immediate access to your AdSense account once you sign up for AdSense.

• New AdSense website and mobile apps: We announced our new AdSense website with a new design and new publisher stories. We also updated the AdSense app with a fresh new look using material design and added some new features. 

• New AdSense performance reports: To give you quick and easy access to these reports, we introduced a new design for AdSense reporting with a new dashboard. With the redesigned Performance reports tab, you now have more control and flexibility, allowing you to better understand your AdSense earnings and performance.

• Improved transparency in payments: We've received feedback from you that you want to know more about the differences between estimated and finalized earnings. Now, you’re able to see the invalid activity deductions that cause these differences. 

• Matched content: To help you grow the number of pageviews on your site and increase user engagement, we launched Matched content. It’s a free content recommendation tool that promotes your content to your site visitors. Matched content generates contextually relevant and personalized article recommendations from the pages on your website. Have a look at the site management settings in your AdSense account to see if your sites are eligible to run Matched content.

• Certified Publishing Partner Program: We launched a new Certified Publishing Partner program to help you earn more from your sites while also saving you time.

New features for your ads: 

• New mobile text ads: This new design allows for higher performance with a more beautiful and user-friendly appearance. The text ads feature elements such as a shaded background and a centered button which bring together the parts of the ad into a cohesive whole. To see these new mobile text ads, choose to show both text and display ads on your site, if you haven’t already done so.

• Richer text ads: Richer text ads are a new ad format that automatically creates image ads from text ads. They compete for both your text and display, and display-only ad units and could increase your earnings.

• Improved "Mute this ad" feature: With ‘Mute this ad,’ users have a way to signal that they aren’t interested in certain ads. This feature gives users additional control over ad units. It also helps us find ad placements and creatives that users may not prefer so that we can continue working hard to serve better performing ads on your site.

We’re looking forward to 2016 with lots of new features and formats to improve your AdSense experience.

As always, we’d like to thank you for sharing your feedback. Please keep sharing your thoughts and suggestions and stay tuned for more updates in 2016.

Happy New Year, and see you online in 2016!

Google AdSense Team

Not yet an AdSense user? Sign up now!

Can't log in? Here's how to solve the five most common issues

Not being able to log in to your account can be frustrating, and it happens to most of us now and then. Every week the AdSense support team receives emails from publishers who are logged out and stumped.

With that in mind, let's look over the five most common "can't log in" scenarios and how you can clear them up and get back into action.

1. The email and password you entered don’t match

This is always the #1 login issue. Luckily, a fix is just few clicks away. If you've run out of all your memory tricks for remembering your password, visit Google's account recovery service. Enter your login address to reset your Google account password.

2. You deleted your Google Account

Your AdSense account is linked to other Google services like Gmail, Calendar, and Google+ under one Google Account. Sometimes a user decides to delete one service and deletes their entire Google Account, which cuts off access to their AdSense account as well. The good news: even if you deleted your Google Account and lost access to AdSense, your AdSense account is still active. To continue using AdSense, you'll need to recover your Google Account.

3. Your account was hijacked

Hijacking is more common in some regions than in other. If you think your account has been hijacked, you need to act fast.

First things first, visit this page and follow the instructions to alert a Hijacked Accounts specialist and prove your ownership. Be sure to provide detailed and accurate information for each of the questions. Next, contact the AdSense support team by following the steps in the Login troubleshooter. This will let us restore your access to your AdSense account.

To prevent hijacking from happening, follow these security best practices:

• Enable 2-step verification 
• If you sign into your account from a public computer, make sure to log out when you're done
• Don't share your password with others and don't write it down on paper or in documents
• Use strong passwords. The strongest contain upper and lower cases, special characters, and numbers, like this:  “mYvErY234Strong_pAssWord”
• Change your password frequently 

4. You signed into a different Google Account 

If you have more than one Google Account, your AdSense account will be linked to only one of them. If you're signed in but don't see your AdSense account, you may be signed into a different Google Account. Try logging in with a different email and password.

5. Your Google Apps account is not opted in for AdSense

If your email is linked to Google Apps, the Google Apps administrator might have turned off AdSense service for the whole Google Apps account. To fix this, ask your domain administrator to grant you access for AdSense. You can contact Google Apps support if you have more questions.

Now let's hope you never need any of these. For more information, check the AdSense Help Center.

Not yet an AdSense user? Sign up now!

Posted by Kateryna Malinovska

AdSense and AdMob Support Program Manager

Got Policy Questions, “Ask the AdSense Guy”

As part of our continued effort to be as transparent and accessible to publishers as possible, we’ve launched a collaboration with Search Engine Journal with a column titled “Ask the AdSense Guy”.

In this monthly column, we’ll answer questions on topics of interest from the readership of the Search Engine Journal, as well as provide insight into best practices for publishers of all sizes. Our hope is that these external collaborations strengthen overall understanding of our policy positions and allow publishers to scale their long term growth in ways that provide value for their users, as well as advertisers who place ads on publisher sites.

A Search Engine Journal managing partner, Brent Csutoras, interviewed me at Pubcon 2015 to get a glimpse of what investments Google is making to help the entire ecosystem: users, advertisers, and publishers.  Follow our column and share your questions, or submit them as a comment below.  We will answer questions posted on Search Engine Journal, as well as those we collect from our comments section and will post them in the “Ask the AdSense Guy” column.

Ask your policy question now!

Posted by John Brown

Head of Publisher Policy Communications