Adsense Cheque Received via Blue Dart

After a long wait, we received the Adsense cheque from Blue Dart. It arrived nicely packed with Google India, Hyderabad office seal on it! We really miss those Singapore, Buffalo and New York seal πŸ™‚
blue-dart-adsense-cheque
The tracking code is now available in all Indian publishers adsense account and can be found in their payment history link, if they are eligible for payment.

AdSense Account > Payment History > Payment Issued – Details

Here is the full mail which adsense team sent to us:

Hello,

We’d like to inform you that your most recent AdSense check has been shipped via Blue Dart. You can now find a Blue Dart tracking number in your AdSense account. For your convenience, we’ve also included this tracking number here: XXXXXXXXXXX.

You can use this number to track your payment at www.bluedart.com . Please contact your local Blue Dart office if you have any questions.

Thanks for your patience.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

Note that, Blue Dart had informed Adsense team that they are unable to reach some of the publishers as they have invalid address!

Here is the exact email from Adsense team, that some of my friends received:

Hi,

We are in the process of delivering your recent AdSense payment via Blue
Dart. However, Blue Dart has informed us that they are unable to deliver
to the address currently listed in your AdSense account. We therefore ask
that you update your address by following these steps:

1. Log in to your AdSense account
2. Click on the ‘My Account’ tab
3. Click the ‘Payee Information [edit]’ link
4. Edit the appropriate fields
5. Click ‘Save Changes’

Once you have made the changes, please contact Blue Dart to ensure proper
delivery of your payment.

So please double check your address and make sure everything is upto date.

As this is the first time adsense cheque delivery from Blue Dart, it had some issues(late delivery) and we hope that it will not happen in the future. I think Blue Dart had not expected such a huge number of adsense publishers in India πŸ™‚ . Thanks for Google for making this service free of cost. And the best thing about Blue Dart is, we can track our cheque by using the tracking code in our adsense account and searching for it in bluedart.

If you guys are waiting for your cheque then make sure your address is upto date. And if everyone else got the cheque except you, then the reason may be..Blue Dart is not able to service all areas throughout India. If you live in a location they don’t service, your check will be sent by Registered Post and should reach you within 2-3 weeks of the mailing date.
More chances that your cheque is on the way. Have a great week end. Cheers!

Blue Dart To Deliver Adsense Cheques Faster: India

If you live in India, you might have noticed that Secure Payment option in your adsense account settings is missing or no more available in your adsense settings. Instead of that, AdSense publishers in India will receive standard delivery checks mailed via the local courier service Blue Dart for no additional charge. Cheques mailed by Blue Dart should arrive within 10-30 days of the cheque date.

So the Secure Payment option has been removed from all the Indian adsense publishers account.

If your account reaches 100$ or more in any given month and if all the holds are removed, then you will be able to see the payment Tracking number on the payment history page of your account from 15th of that month. And you can also track the payment status at www.bluedart.com using your Tracking number.
bluedart-adsense-india
Blue Dart is not able to service all areas throughout India. If you live in a location they don’t service, your check will be sent by Registered Post and should reach you within 2-3 weeks of the mailing date.

Source: Google Help

Adsense Publishers — Update your Privacy Policy

Google has started showing message(TIPS) in the adsense account to update our privacy policy regarding Interest Based Advertising.
Adsense-policy-interest-Based-ads
Here is what the message tells(in case its not visible in the above image):

NEW: In preparation for interest-based advertising, please ensure that your site’s privacy policy is up to date by April 8, 2009.
Visitation information from publisher sites will be used to create user interest categories, delivering more relevant ads and improving monetization for publishers over time.

Here is the link to what you need to update in your privacy policy.
In short, we need to add the following to our privacy policy(Recommended to read in detail from the above link):

  • Google, as a third party vendor, uses cookies to serve ads on your site.
  • Google’s use of the DART cookie enables it to serve ads to your users based on their visit to your sites and other sites on the Internet.
  • Users may opt out of the use of the DART cookie by visiting the Google ad and content network privacy policy.

Have you updated your privacy policy ?

Change the font face of the text in adsense ad units

Adsense ads have worked great when we blend the ads according to the look and feel of our website.
Examples:-
1. Change the background colour of the ad unit to the background colour of your blog.
2. Use the font colour of the text in the ad similar to that on your blog.
3. Change the colour of the links in the ad to match the colour of the links on your blog.

These simple tweaks will optimize the ad zone.

Now to add to this blending and optimization, Adsense team has released yet another cool feature to our control. i.e., Changing the font face of the ad unit.

In HTML and XHTML, a font face or font family is the typeface that is applied to some text.
Ex:-
<font face="times, serif">Sample text.</font>

Adsense publishers are now allowed to choose between Arial, Times, and Verdana font faces. Please note that while font options will appear in every account, they’ll currently only be applied to ad units on pages primarily in Latin-based characters. Latin-based languages include:

* Croatian
* Czech
* Danish
* Dutch
* English (U.S. and U.K.)
* Finnish
* French
* German
* Hungarian
* Indonesian
* Italian
* Norwegian
* Polish
* Portuguese
* Romanian
* Slovak
* Spanish
* Swedish
* Turkish
So if your blog/website is written in some other language(other than listed above) then custom font face will not work and the default[‘Standard AdSense font family’] font face is shown on such sites[Ex:- Ads on pages mainly in Arabic, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and Russian, among others, will not be shown in custom fonts].

You can use this feature to your advantage in two ways:
1. If you’d like to quickly change the font settings for every ad unit generated from your account, visit the ‘Ad Display Preference‘ section of your Account Settings page to select a new account-wide font face. This will affect all units you’ve created in the past.
font-face-adsense

2. You can also change the font of individual ad unit while creating new ad units.

If you want to change the font face of already existing ad units, goto AdSense Setup tab –> Manage Ads now click on the “Edit Ad settings” of the corresponding ad, that you want to edit. You can find a section called “Font“, which is ment to change the font face of that ad unit.
font-face-adsense

If you apply “Arial” font globally to all your adsense ads, then also you can over write it(for individual ad units) by changing the settings in “Manage Ads” –> “Edit Ad settings” of individual ad units and you can show “Verdana” fonts for a particular ad unit. Other ads will still be showing Arial font, except the one you changed to “Verdana”.

From many days we have been seeing Adsense team testing different font face on our blogs. So Arial, Times, and Verdana font faces have worked well so far in the testing, so adsense team have decided to allow its publishers to select between these font faces.

So when will they give the control over font size ? Hope that would be an ultimate thing to optimize the ad unit.
Actually this feature was/is available to Adsense premium publishers from long time, its good to see adsense rolling many good features to all its publishers. These small features will surely help make more money to all publishers….and Google too!

Adsense for Domain Now Available to all Publishers

Adsense for Domain is now Available to almost all Adsense Publishers..if not, then they are busy rolling it to you.

What is AdSense for domains?
AdSense for domains allows publishers with undeveloped domains to help users by providing relevant information including ads, links and search results rather than see empty pages or “page not found” errors.

If you have undeveloped domains, then AdSense for domains can help you make some income. To get started, visit your adsense account and click on “AdSense Setup” and then on “AdSense for Domains”, and follow the instruction.

Previously AdSense for domains was only available for people with huge portfolios(large number of domains, with high traffic). With the opening of adsense for domain to all adsense publishers, even if you have 1 or 2 domains laying around you will now be able to monetize it with adsense.

adsense-for-domain
Never think that you can make a living out of monetizing your undeveloped domains, even if you are having hundreds of domains to monetize. Its good enough if it earns you some good income so that you pay the yearly domain registration charges.
But if you have a already popular domain with TLD (extension) .org or .net etc and if you park the same domain with .com extension, then chances are there that many of your visitors may landup at the .com domain by mistake and you may start seeing more earnings from the parked domain.
For example:
When Darren Rowse started blogging at problogger.net and established a great readership and a huge traffic to his blog, problogger.com had no content(it was an undeveloped domain), yet it ranked very high in Alexa and was receiving a lot of traffic. In such a case if the .com domain is monetized with adsense for domain, then it will yield more income! –> Just an example to clarify. Darren bought problogger.com domain and redirected it to problogger.net later.

Nevertheless, adsense for domains is by far the best way to monetize your undeveloped domains. We have tested with other ad network and they perform very poor and the ads delivered are also not contextual..now wondering how can adsense for domain deliver contextual ads when there is no content on the blog!
Google probably takes into consideration the name of the domain. If your domain is mp3zone.com then the ads served are mostly related to mp3. And if a user comes from search engine then the content matches to the search term.

For a detailed step by step procedure to setup your adsense for domain follow the link to support page.

To check whether AdSense for domains has been enabled for your account, log in and visit your AdSense Setup tab

Code To Show 125X125 Ad Banner On WordPress Sidebar

During the early days of this blog, we had some problem in showing adsense ads of 125×125 format on our sidebar. We wanted to have four 125×125 ad banners(as shown in below image), but we were unable to align it properly. After some research and getting help from online friends we could overcome this problem. Now we are sharing this, in order to save some of your time, who may also be facing the same problem.

Advertise here

Its easy to show image ads(direct advertisers ad banner) in the side bar. But if we want to show ads using some adnetwork(Ex:- Adsense, Adbrite, Bidvertiser, BuySellAds etc), its bit difficult to properly align the ads(as shown in above image).

First the simple one. If you want to show some ad banners(which does not use JavaScript or any other scripts). You can use the following code:


<h2>Sponsors</h2>
<!-- insert ad blocks instead of fake images -->
<a rel="nofollow" href="destination-url">
<img style="margin: 0 15px" height="125" width="125" 
src="image-url"
 border="0" title="insert title" alt="insert title" />
</a>

<a rel="nofollow" href="destination-url">
<img height="125" width="125" 
src="image-url" 
border="0" title="insert title" alt="insert title" />
</a>
<a rel="nofollow" href="destination-url">
<img style="margin: 0 15px" height="125" width="125" 
src="image-url"
 border="0" title="insert title" alt="insert title" />
</a>
<a rel="nofollow" href="destination-url">
<img height="125" width="125" 
src="image-url" 
border="0" title="insert title" alt="insert title" />
</a>

But the same can’t be applied when you want to show some JavaScript enabled ads(Ex:- Adsense, Adbrite, Bidvertiser, BuySellAds etc) in above mentioned style.
To do that, add below code to your style.css


.bigblock {
  width: auto;
  height: auto;
  padding: 15px;
       
}

.left-top {
  width: 125px;
  height: 125px;
  background: url(images/125x125.jpg) no-repeat;
  margin-bottom: 10px;
       
}

.left-bottom {
  width: 125px;
  height: 125px;
  background: url(images/125x125.jpg) no-repeat;
  }

.right-top {
  float: right;
  width: 125px;
  height: 125px;
  background: url(images/125x125.jpg) no-repeat;

}

.right-bottom {
  float: right;
  width: 125px;
  height: 125px;
    background: url(images/125x125.jpg) no-repeat;

}

.clearblock {
  width: 100%;
  clear: both;
}

Now insert below code wherever you want to show the ads(Ex:- sidebar)


<div class="bigblock">
<div class="right-top">Ad code</div>
<div class="left-top">Ad code</div>
<div class="clearblock"></div>
<div class="right-top">Ad code</div>
<div class="left-bottom">Ad code</div>
</div>

That’s it, you are done. You can play with above coding to customize it further to blend with your blog design.
Hope it helps, atleast for some of you.

Get Adsense and Analytics Integration in 24hrs

We know that many of you are waiting for the adsense and analytics integration in your account. If you are an English-language publisher, then there is more chances of getting it soon.
adsense-analytics-get-it-today
AdSenseAdvisor had posted a WebmasterWorld thread and said you can get it by going to the Inside AdSense Blog and reading the top. The top basically says:


Want to integrate your AdSense account with Google Analytics? Improved reporting was on publisher wish lists this year, so we’re spreading the reporting cheer this holiday season. Fill out our interest form, and we may be able to enable the feature earlier for you.

Take a look at this short video:-




Adsense/Analytics team is so fast and they will almost enable this feature to you within 24hrs(If they want to!). They may not enable this feature to you, if they see something objectionable. In such cases just contact Google and clarify.

Some people may feel insecure for entering their adsense pub ID in the forum. But feel free to enter your details, as this forum is created by official AdSense / Analytics team at Google.