AdSense: 2014 Year in Review

Google issued a recap of all the AdSense product enhancements launched this year. I am using AdSense for years and some new features were quite interesting:

Multi-screen additions: 

• Responsive ad units 

Responsive ad units can help you provide a great ad experience for users on every screen (i.e., computers, phones, tablets) if you have a responsively designed website. To make your code simpler and save you time and effort, our responsive ad code automatically adapts the ad unit size to your page layout.

• Multi-screen scorecard

Check the new multi-screen category in your publisher scorecard to see what percentage of your pages are multi-screen optimized, and review how this compares to other AdSense publishers.

• Tools for building multi-screen sites

New to multi-screen? The AdSense Multi-Screen guidelines can help you get started on or improve your mobile site. For more technical resources on developing a mobile website, visit the Web Fundamentals course and the Web Starter Kit.

Ad unit updates:

• Custom size ad units

Creating custom ad unit sizes for your website will give you the flexibility to design your ads and your site to fit your audience. We now have 434,216 new ad unit options which behave just like their standard sized counterparts.

• New ad sizes

Increase the flexibility of your ad units with the the new Billboard (970 x 250) and Portrait (300 x 1050) ad unit sizes. Learn how these sizes can help you reach more advertisers while also enhancing user experience and engagement on your site.

New features in your AdSense account:

• New features in the Ad review center

Discover how filtering reviewed ads, searching by ad sizes, and finding related ads can give you more control. Learn more about these new Ad review center features.

• A/B testing for categories in the AdSense interface

Interested in testing how blocking certain ad categories changes your site’s revenue? Now you can run A/B experiments without changing your ad code to better understand how to use ad category settings to your advantage.

Toolbar and plugin updates:

• View Google Analytics data in the Google Publisher Toolbar

You can now view visitor data from Google Analytics in the Google Publisher Toolbar. Learn how to install the Google Publisher Toolbar and use Google Analytics insights while you browse your pages.

• AdSense Plugin for WordPress

Using Google products within WordPress just got easier. Link your WordPress site to your AdSense account, easily place ads, and check your page visibility with the AdSense Plugin for WordPress.