A day in the life of Spencer

When you write to AdSense - whether it's for help with payments, troubleshooting or general feedback - I might be the guy who writes back. Since so many of you have shared your stories with me, I thought it was only fair to tell you a little bit about my role here at AdSense.

I try to roll into the office fairly early to beat the Bay Area traffic. Then, fortified with extra strong coffee, I spend most of my day responding to publisher emails and working on projects to improve AdSense publisher support. Somewhere in the noon range I break for lunch at one of the Google cafes - my favorite menu item is the carne asada burrito with guacamole. Since the California weather has been nice, I've been eating outside with friends. In the afternoon, I sometimes take a break for a game of foosball. Our office is filled with world class foosball players, of which I am not one. So the games don't tend to last very long.




























Most of my time, though, is spent writing to publishers over email. It's a good feeling when I've helped publishers get paid, or can troubleshoot a problem so that ads start to appear on their pages. Our publisher base has a lot of energy and is incredibly diverse. I can be working with a publisher from Oregon one minute, and the next minute I might get an email from Lebanon. The best part about my job is being able to help people all over the world. Plus, I get to see a lot of cool websites every day. :)

Posted by Spencer - AdSense Publisher Support

'Dear Inside AdWords...' - a couple of follow-ups

In my personal opinion, the best part of 'Dear Inside AdWords...' is having the opportunity to engage readers and advertisers to share their AdWords tips and to let us know when we’re not providing enough information. In the past, we've provided some solutions to your questions, and today, I've gathered a couple of follow-up emails that we've received in response to our posts.

Regarding your answer to Brandon H.'s question on searching for URLs that did not contain specific terms: you actually can do this, using the Find and Edit Ad Text Tool. If you go to Tools > Find and Edit Ad Text, check "Destination URL", choose "does not contain" in the drop-down menu, input in the box the tracking code, and then choose "Just show me these ads", you'll get all the ads that do not contain that term. -- Assaf G.

Nice catch, Assaf. Thanks for sharing that tip!

One of your posts mentioned that the 'served percentage' is located under the ad statistics in each Ad Group. I can't seem to find it. Can you point me in the right direction? -- Nelson W.

With pleasure! There are two potential places where the served percentage will be displayed. Log in to your AdWords account, and go to the Ad Group of your choice. If your Ad Group contains only one ad, the served percentage will be shown to the right of the ad text as "Served - X %" under the number of clicks, CTR, and CPC information. If you have more than one ad in your Ad Group, click the "View all below" link to the right of the first ad (see first screenshot below), and you'll be taken to the bottom of the same page. Under each of the ads, you'll see the same "Served - X %" figure (see second screenshot below).

(Clicking on the "View all below" link, takes you to the bottom of the page where you'll see stats for all of your ads.)

Thanks again to Assaf and Nelson for writing in to share their insight and ask for clarification. We'd love to be all-knowing, but sometimes we need a little prodding from you in order to provide all the information you may need.

Posted by Vivian, Inside AdWords crew

25 cent CPMs for Site Targeting!

In June, we launched site targeting, a feature that allows you to select specific sites in our content network where you'd like your ads to show. Now, we're lowering the minimum CPM bid required to target these sites to $0.25. You don't have to make any changes to your currently running site-targeted campaigns, but if you'd like to adjust your bids or create a new campaign, you can now bid as low as $0.25.

Remember, with site-targeted campaigns, you'll still compete with keyword-targeted ads for placement on the content network. Therefore, make sure you experiment to find the CPM that works for you. If you're looking to show up consistently on a highly popular website, you'll still need to bid competitively; however, the lower minimum bid will allow you to more accurately price your ad placements on a wider variety of sites.

Posted by Sarah, Inside AdWords crew

Money talks

If you could talk to your AdSense earnings, you'd probably give them a pep talk ("Grow, baby, grow!"). If your AdSense earnings could talk to you, they'd want you to get to know them a little better. Though your earnings can't talk, we're happy to talk for them - just watch our updated Payment Demo. This video presentation will help you get personal with your earnings by learning more about how our payment process works and what payment methods are available to you.

The Demo walks you through the steps you'll need to take to receive payments, including submitting your tax information, entering your PIN, and selecting a form of payment. And it also guides you through the EFT sign-up process we highlighted last week.

Maybe after you've watched our Payments Demo, you feel like you've had a good long heart-to-heart with your AdSense earnings. You can even provide feedback about your bonding experience through our Payment Demo feedback form.

Posted by Suzie - AdSense Publisher Support

From the Inside AdSense International mail bag

Vladimir asks: Do you have any plans to offer other payment options to Russian publishers?

Inside AdSense says: We’re working hard to provide additional payment options to a wider set of publishers, but we don’t currently have a date for when new options may become available in Russia or any other location. At this time, publishers in Russia are only eligible to receive payments in US Dollar checks.

Publishers in some other locations may have additional payment options available to them: local currency checks or Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT) .

We appreciate the patience of all our publishers while we work to expand our payment options.

Mark asks: European publishers have been experiencing pretty big delays with PIN deliveries. I was wondering why you have to send it by post and not by email?

Inside AdSense says: We mail each publisher a Personal Identification Number (PIN) in order to help verify publisher addresses, protect the personal information of our publishers, and ensure that payments can be received. We anticipate publishers will receive PINs 2-4 weeks after they are mailed, but it may take longer depending on your location.

We’ll always mail your PIN to the payment address in your account, so make sure that information is correct. If it’s not correct, you can always update your information and request a replacement PIN. Although your payments will be held while you’re waiting for your PIN, please rest assured that you’ll still be able to access your account and continue to accrue earnings.

If you don’t receive your PIN, or if it has been lost, you're welcome to request up to two additional PINs.

Deepak asks: My website is built for India and targets the Indian population, but I’m based in Canada. Is there any way that I can ensure the ads are targeted to India?

Inside AdSense says: AdSense uses geo-targeting to ensure that your Google ads are always targeted to your audience wherever they are located. AdWords advertisers choose which countries they’d like to target, and AdSense serves appropriately targeted ads based on the IP address of your users. This means that your users in India will see a different pool of ads than you will see in Canada.

To preview what ads your users in India or many other geographic locations are seeing, we recommend reading our previous post on the AdSense preview tool.


Posted by Uladzimir - AdSense Publisher Support