AdSense Gets a Facelift

AdSense has redesigned their back end for publishers in what looks to me at first impression like a simplification of design. Now across the top of a publishers screen are just three tabs – ‘reports’, ‘AdSense Setup’ and ‘My Account’.

It seems at a first glance that it’s the ‘AdSense Setup’ that has had the update. When you click on it you get a choice of four products to add to your site as can be seen in the following screenshot.

The products are not new – just the layout.

When you click on one of the options you’re taken to newly designed pages for making ads also.

For example if you click ‘AdSense for Content’ you’re taken to a page like this:

Then if you select ‘Ad Unit’ the next screen is:

Lastly you’re taken to a code page to get the code you need to paste into your template:

All in all the redesign is about functionality rather than a new product as such.

The design will be helpful for new publishers as it’s very much a step by step design. However for advanced users I’m unsure whether it ads functionality. Now instead of having everything on the one page there is this four step process to get to ad code. Perhaps they should have some sort of ‘experienced user’ mode for those who know what they are doing. I can see that it will be frustrating for some users to have to go through four steps to generate code.

AdSense for Search seems to have had an update also but the referrals and feeds pages don’t seem that different.

update: The AdSense blog (official) has a little more news on the topic