Adding a social playlist to your site

As you're building your site, you may be looking for a simple way to provide fresh content that captures the attention of first time visitors and loyal users alike. They say that music brings people together, so what better way to engage your visitors than by inviting them to help build a unique, collaborative soundtrack for your website? Now, social application creator iLike has built a special version of their social playlist gadget for sites using Google Friend Connect.

Visitors can add their favorite songs
iLike's playlist gadget lets you and your visitors shape the site's "musical footprint" as a group. With this application, anyone visiting your website can listen to songs on the playlist, and if they sign in using Friend Connect, they can add their own favorites to the list. Of course, you can also add songs to the playlist, and as the site administrator, you have the ability to remove songs or change the order.

If you already have Friend Connect running on your website, you can add some musical flair in a matter of minutes with just a few clicks. Sign in at www.google.com/friendconnect, click "Social Gadgets," and you'll find the iLike "Playlist gadget" in the gallery.

Select the "Playlist gadget," and Friend Connect will automatically generate a snippet of code for you to copy-and-paste into your website's HTML. While you're there, you may also consider adding the "Wall gadget"—music can be a great conversation starter!

This iLike gadget is fully integrated with your existing Friend Connect account, so you can edit your website's playlist, moderate wall posts, and manage membership all from a single interface.

Like all of the social applications that work with Friend Connect, iLike's application is built using OpenSocial, and it's a great example of how a social application can foster a sense of community around a website. Any site using Friend Connect can host gadgets created by the OpenSocial developer community.

If you're a site owner who wants to begin adding social features to your website, visit Google Friend Connect. No programming is required!

If you're a developer interested in building a social application to run on the tens thousands of websites that are now using Google Friend Connect, learn more at www.opensocial.org.

Posted by Mussie Shore, Product Manager - Google Friend Connect

Talking AdSense optimization in Google Ad Manager

It can be tough to sell advertising in today's economy. It can be even tougher to figure out how to maximize revenue for each ad impression. Google Ad Manager, our hosted ad serving and management solution for publishers with small direct sales teams, was built to address these issues. Ad Manager helps publishers maximize the value of their ad impressions while reducing ad serving costs.

We enlisted the help of Nandu Ramani, Engineering Lead on Ad Manager, to talk about one of Ad Manager's features that helps publishers maximize the value of their ad impressions: AdSense price optimization.

What is the AdSense price optimization feature in Ad Manager?

Many publishers don't sell all of their ad inventory. In these situations, publishers might not serve any ads or might serve less valuable house ads, therefore losing potential earnings. The AdSense price optimization feature in Ad Manager provides an automated solution so publishers will always have an ad to serve in an undersold situation.

We also wanted to make sure that when a publisher runs multiple ad networks they are always showing the most valuable ads. For certain individual impressions, AdSense can provide the highest paying ad. When that's the case, an AdSense ad shows. When that's not the case, an ad from the highest paying alternative network will be shown.

How does the price optimization feature work?

In order for AdSense to compete against other ad networks, a publisher must manually enter a CPM for each configured network. We use the CPM entered to determine in real time, on a per impression basis, whether or not an AdSense ad will pay a publisher more. If the AdSense eCPM is greater than the CPM value entered for competing networks, then an AdSense ad will be shown. Additionally, AdSense will never compete with a publisher's directly-sold inventory. To enable the price optimization feature, all a publisher has to do is check a box when setting up inventory.

As a publisher, how much will I earn using AdSense price optimization?

It's hard to predict; the best way to find out is to opt your ad slots into AdSense price optimization and see how AdSense performs for you. With AdSense price optimization, Google will always serve the highest paying AdSense ad available, and will never lower the price of the winning ad, or reduce your earnings from it.

When should I use the AdSense price optimization feature?

We suggest you opt all of your ad slots into AdSense price optimization. AdSense ads will only appear if they're able to pay you more than the alternatives, so there's no risk of losing revenue.

We also recommend that you opt your premium placements into placement targeting so AdWords advertisers may specifically choose to bid for space on your website.

Sounds good. How do I get started?

If you already have an Ad Manager account, go into the inventory tab in your account. For each ad slot where you want to enable AdSense price optimization, click on the name of the ad slot, check the 'Maximize revenue of unsold and remnant inventory with AdSense' checkbox, and click 'Save.'

If you don't already have an account, get started today at http://www.google.com/admanager. Then, when you're setting up your inventory, make sure to opt all of your ad slots into AdSense price optimization.

For more information about AdSense in Ad Manager, check out the following video.

Posted by Stephen Kliff - Google Ad Manager Team

Seamless verification of Google Sites and Blogger with Webmaster Tools

Verifying that you own a site is the first step towards accessing all of the great features Webmaster Tools has to offer, such as crawl errors and query statistics. The Google Sites and Blogger teams have worked hard to make site verification as simple as possible. In the following videos, I'll walk you through how to verify sites created in Google Sites and Blogger.

Google Sites:


Blogger:


These videos are available in our Help Center if you have additional questions about verifying a Google Site or Blogger blog with Webmaster Tools. And as always, you can find me and many other Googlers and webmasters in our Webmaster Help Forum.

Posted by Reid Yokoyama, Search Quality