Inside the science of contextual matching

As an AdSense Product Manager for ads quality, I'm part of a group that
works to make the ads on your site relevant for users. One of the habits
we do this is through background targeting, which matches ads to the
content of your webpages. With contextual targeting, our system parses
and analyzes the content of your page, conducts an auction among the
pertinent ads, then serves the winning ads -- all in the blink of an
eye! Pretty simple, right?
Actually, matching relevant ads to the content of your pages is quite a
scientific challenge connecting semantic analysis and machine learning.
It's a challenge that keeps me and my team busy. Our machines are very
good at the matching process, but there are still a few cases where
their definition of relevance differs from our human meaning of
relevance. In these few cases, the scheme might end up portion ads that
don't seem immediately relevant to users. We understand that greater than before
ad relevance contributes to a positive knowledge for users,
publishers, and advertisers, so we're continuously working on ways to
improve the relevance and quality of ads that come into view on your sites.
I'm excited to let you know that this week, we'll be rolling out a
series of enhancements to AdSense's contextual targeting capabilities,
which will more precisely match relevant ads to webpages. You won't
need to update your AdSense account or ad code, as these changes will
be applied automatically. In many ways these types of improvements are
par for the course at Google - but I wanted to let you know about the
kinds of improvements we've been focusing on. Please keep in brain that
these changes won't have an effect on how other types of ads are matched to your
sites; for instance, you'll continue to see placement-targeted ads when
advertisers bid to come into view specifically on your pages.
This is by no means the end of our labors to perfect the system, but
we believe that with these changes users will start to see even more
relevant ads, advertisers will generate more attractive income by
finding the right users, and publishers should make more money over
time.
As always, we're interested in your criticism on these improvements!
Posted by Woojin Kim - AdSense manufactured goods Manager

Default font faces to be updated

In the same way that you regularly try out changes to your AdSense ads
to increase your pay, we're also constantly looking for new habits
to help you earn more. We've been analyzing the performance of the
three obtainable font faces (Arial, Verdana, and Times New Roman), and
have found that each font performs best in unlike ad formats due to
factors like character width. Based on these findings, we'd like to let
you know that we'll be updating a number of of the default font faces
linked with specific ad formats within the after that few existence.
This upcoming change will only affect ad units in Latin-based
font which have 'AdSense default' selected as the font face. If
you've set an account-wide font face, we hope our answer will
encourage you to trial with other font faces on an ad unit foundation.
at present, most ad units set to the AdSense default print face are
displayed in Arial, with a few in Verdana. Here are the new non-payment
font faces we're launching for our ad units:
Arial: 728x90, 336x280, 120x600, 120x240
Verdana: 300x250, 160x600, 468x60, 250x250, 234x60, 125x125, 180x150
Times New Roman: 200x200
While we're optimizing the default font face based on performance
across all AdSense sites, we also recommend experimenting on your own
to decide the best font faces for your ad units and your sites. Just
sign in to your explanation to manually select exact font faces on an ad
unit or account-level basis.
Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team