It’s almost the end of the month, which means that it’s almost time for us to send our publishers their payments. We know you’re eagerly waiting for your check or EFT deposit to pay your bills, so we’d like to answer some questions you may have and clarify what to expect over the next few weeks.

Will I be sent a payment this month?

You can check to see whether you’re eligible for a payment at the end of July. Just visit your Payment History page, set the date range to ‘All time’, and find the amount in the ‘Monthly balance’ column corresponding to June. If this number is greater than $100 and you removed all holds from your account before July 15th, you’re eligible for a payment at the end of this month.

Can you give me an actual ‘end of the month’ date?

Unfortunately, we can’t. You may sometimes see that your payment is issued on the 23rd of the month, and at other times on the 29th. This is because all earnings are audited for accuracy every month, and this automatic audit process can take different amounts of time during each payment cycle. To keep things simple, you may wish to think of ‘end of the month’ as the last day of the month. After your payment is issued, please allow up to 6 weeks for delivery, depending on your location and the form of payment you’ve selected.

What about the 25th? I read somewhere that I’m supposed to get my checks by that day.

That’s a reissue date that applies to the month after a standard delivery check is issued. Let’s say you earned $200 in June and removed all payment holds before July 15th. We’d then issue you a check at the end of July, which we’d expect to reach you by August 25th.

I’ve selected EFT. Does that mean my payments get processed faster by Google?

No, the processing time is still the same for EFT and checks. However, once processed and issued, EFT payments typically reach publishers more quickly, since they’re directly deposited into bank accounts. If you’re issued an EFT payment at the end of July, we expect that you’ll see it in your bank account by August 5th. If you’re issued a standard delivery check at the end of July, we expect that you’ll receive it by August 25th.

After reading through this info, we hope you feel like an expert on payments. We’ve used the current month in all of the examples, but feel free to refer back to this post again in the future. If you’d like to learn more about AdSense payments, we recommend reviewing our Payments Demo, Payment Guide, and subscribing to the AdSense Calendar.

Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

Article taken from: Inside Adsense

This past March, we launched a referrals beta to test the feature and iron out some wrinkles. Now that we’ve finished our testing, we’re pleased to announce that referrals 2.0 will soon be available to all AdSense publishers in referrals-supported languages.

While some of you may already be familiar with referrals for Google products, this launch will greatly expand the inventory and functionality of referrals for AdSense publishers. Below we’ve highlighted a few of the key benefits of referrals 2.0:

• Expanded product inventory: While many of you have had success referring one of our Google products, some of you weren’t able to find a product that fit the context of your site. Referrals 2.0 offers products from thousands of AdWords advertisers, so you can find the right ads for your sites.
• Category and keyword targeting: With thousands of products available, it can be difficult to decide which ads will perform best on your site. That’s why we give you the option to refer products by category and keyword. You can narrow down the types of ads you want to display and let AdSense figure out which ones will perform best on your site. Whether you want ads for a specific category, advertiser, or product, referrals 2.0 will give you the control to decide.
• Ad unit optimization: It can be tricky picking the best ads for your site, so we’ve included ad unit optimization for referrals. When you create a new referral ad unit, simply select the Pick best performing ads option. We’ll then compare your selected ads to other relevant ads, and serve the ads we expect to perform best on your site.
• Better targeting for pages with multiple themes: With standard contextual targeting, ads may not match up directly with the text around them if there are a number of themes on the page. With referrals, you can select unique “keywords” for each ad unit to narrow the targeting directly to the theme you want. Better targeting means higher earnings for your site.
• Greater compensation for high-quality traffic: Since referrals are paid on a cost-per-action (CPA) basis, your traffic matters. If the traffic you send to advertisers is more likely to turn into a completed sale or lead, you will earn more with referrals.
• Add your seal of approval: Unlike AdSense for content ads, our program policies allow you to make specific references to referral ads on your site. If you endorse the product that you are referring, feel free to let your users know. By adding your personal review of the products you refer, you can help your users make more informed choices.

To get started with referrals, click the AdSense Setup tab in your account, then click Referrals. If you don’t see referrals 2.0 right away, please check back in a few days, as the feature will gradually become available in all accounts over the next few weeks. Please also keep in mind that for some languages, advertisers are just getting started so ad inventory may be limited at this time. We encourage you to check back frequently to see new offers.

Via Inside Adsense

For those of you who are regular Adsense users, you will be aware of the new Adsense formats which were released a few months back. From what I have heard and read, these changes were happily accepted by the public, and used immediately across millions of websites. I personally found that these new formats allowed Adsense adverts to be moulded into designs a lot easier, and actually look rather appealing! Here is a picture of the new layout.

Now, just a few months later, Google have once again brought out something new for publishers! First it was text colours, borders and backgrounds, then a slight change to the layout of the advert, and now it’s a makeover in terms of the shape of the Adsense! You can now choose the shape of your Adsense to have square, slightly rounded, or very rounded corners! Take a look here to see an example of this, and here to see the options in the ‘Adsense Setup’ tag in your adsense account.

With Adsense becoming more and more flexible, it is making it easier and easier for publishers to earn a decent monthly income with these means!

I have been monitoring my Google Adsense closely since the last cheque arrived, and decided to pick one of my domains to prove that being patient has a lot to do with affiliate marketing. As you can see by the graph below, the dollar amounts are plotted in the Y-axis, and these are relative to the days of the month, plotted on the X-axis. It is very clear that the Adsense on this domain has been steadily increasing over the last several weeks. Be patient, monitor your Adsense, and you will see it grow!

It takes time!