We understand that many of you analyze how ad units or channels perform compared to each other to help you decide whether you should make changes to improve performance. Now, in the new interface, we provide you a new way to analyze individual items against one another.

The chart feature will allow you to see custom channels or ad units as their own line on the graph, so you can easily identify spikes or dips. To see how your channels perform compared to each other, visit the Performance Reports tab, and click Custom channels. Depending on the number of channels you’re using, you might be asked to filter the list and then click Update report. Once your selected channels are listed below the graph, you’ll see the Combine and Chart buttons.

Select a few channels and hit ‘Chart.’ Now you can see each specific channel in it’s own color on the graph. You can use the buttons next to the graph to change the metric for which you’re comparing the channels. Using this feature, you might notice that discrepancies between channel performance are more obvious on the graph than they are just viewing the numbers in the table.

Try it now! Navigate to the Performance reports tab, and select any report for which you want to chart items.

Help us figure out what you need and want in your reports by sending your feedback through the ‘Report issue’ link in the upper corner of your account or joining the conversations in our forum.

Posted by Guillaume Ryder – AdSense Engineer

Inside AdSense

We’ve heard that there are times when an ad appears on your site that you want to block from appearing again. How can you easily block a specific ad you’ve seen? If the ad is placement-targeted, you can now use the new AdSense interface to quickly search for and block that specific ad and future ad groups from a given advertiser.

To search for ads in the ad review center, first navigate to the Allow & block ads tab and click into one of the pages of the ad review center — for example ‘Allowed’ — for which you want to view ads. Look for the find ads box in the navigation sidebar. Here, you can search for ads based on text/url, ad type, and ad networks. For ads that are awaiting review, you can also search based on when the ads will be automatically allowed.

With recent updates we’ve made, you may also notice that when doing a keyword-based search, image ads in addition to text ads will be returned if the images contain text matching your search criteria.

Try it now! Navigate to the Allow & block ads tab and click into the Ad Review Center.

Posted by Pedro Diaz & Edouard Rosseel – AdSense Engineers

Inside AdSense

Have you ever wanted to understand your AdSense performance based on where your users are? Now you can do just that with the countries report.

To report by country, simply navigate to the Performance reports tab. In the navigation sidebar, click on the “Countries” report. This report will show your site’s earnings by visitor country.

Please note that the countries report won’t contain historical earnings data prior to when this feature is made available in your account. You can view earlier click and impression data by countries, but historical earnings data won’t be visible.

Try it now! Navigate to the Performance reports tab, and select the countries report.

Help us figure out what you need and want in your reports by sending your feedback through the ‘Report issue’ link in the upper corner of your account or joining the conversation in our forum.

Posted by Vincent Zanotti – AdSense Engineer

Inside AdSense

These features are found in the Performance Reports tab, under Custom channels. Depending on the number of channels you’re using, you might be asked to filter the list and then click Update report button. Once your selected channels are listed below the graph, you can view the combine and chart buttons.

Let’s review the combine feature first, which can be used to easily total items in your list and allow for deeper analysis. Click a few of your channels that you want to view earnings for together, then click the Combine button. The total of these channels is now shown on the graph and you can do further analysis using the view drop-down.

In contrast, the chart feature lets you visually compare the performance of up to five items. First reset your channels report by clicking the word Custom channels above the graph. From here, select a few channels in the table and then hit the Chart button. The lines in the graph represent the statistics you have chosen. Just like with the combine feature, you can now refine your report further using the view drop-down above the table.

Try it now! Navigate to the new interface and click on the Performance Reports tab, and then click Custom Channels and Update report.

Posted by Vincent Zanotti – AdSense Engineer

Inside AdSense

CrowdGather uses the new AdSense interface to efficiently track and improve performance across its large network of forums.

CrowdGather.com is a leading, publicly traded network of online forums, consisting of tens of thousands of online communities. Sanjay Sabnani, CEO of Crowdgather, recently sat down with us to share his site’s story as well as some tips on using the new AdSense interface to track and improve performance.

Inside AdSense: Tell us about the origin of your site.
Sanjay Sabnani: In 2002 I acquired my first forum, GenMay.com (short for General Mayhem), a place for off-topic humor, where gamers hang out. General Mayhem grew pretty rapidly and I started acquiring more forums, which ultimately led to the creation of CrowdGather one year later. CrowdGather now receives 5 million unique visitors a month and 90 million monthly page views across its tens of thousands of communities, including hosted forum sites Lefora and FreeForums.org.

IA: What role does AdSense play in your business?
SS: I used Google AdSense from the get-go on GenMay.com, and began using it across the entire CrowdGather network once it was established. AdSense was the first ad network I had found that I actually understood and could implement and it became a very easy way to begin to monetize. These days, AdSense is a key component for us, and we’ve worked on optimizing it across our network. We’ve found that AdSense displays the most relevant ads out of any contextual partner we’ve worked with. Since forums are very text-rich and the ads are so relevant, AdSense converts very well.

IA: I understand you’ve recently started using the new AdSense interface. What do you like about it?
SS: The new interface is like a monitoring system to ensure that all goes well across the CrowdGather network. For a network like CrowdGather comprising tens of thousands of online communities, the detailed performance reports are important tools for tracking individual site performance. We’re always looking to see if any one particular site is acting differently than the rest of the network. With the new interface, we’re able to track traffic down to that individual subdomain level which is valuable for us, since before it was all lumped together as a blanket effective CPM.

Based on the quicker feedback, we’ve been able to adjust the overall positioning and placement of the AdSense units across our network more rapidly. Before, we’d look at aggregate data for a few weeks to decide if a certain location was performing better on a certain community. Now we’re able to play around a lot more quickly, and get that feedback much quicker, in terms of testing.

IA: If you had to sum it up, what would you tell other publishers about the new interface?
SS: We can see all this data more rapidly, and get an overview of the week to see the revenue direction. The new interface has made AdSense a bigger part of our analytics routine.

If you’d like to see how the new AdSense interface can help reduce time spent managing and monitoring your account, sign in to your account and switch to the new interface (you can get there from the link in the upper corner that says “Try the new AdSense interface”). To learn more about the new reporting functionality, visit our Help Center.

Posted by Meredith Blackwell – Inside AdSense team

Inside AdSense