Adsense Referrals Quick Start Guide

It takes four basic steps to set up referrals on your site. Review the steps below for a guided walkthrough of selecting and implementing referrals on your webpages.

Step 1: Choose your referral locale

Before picking specific ads, you'll need to specify your country and language preferences. In order to maximize conversion opportunities, choose the combination that best reflects the profile of your users. Some referrals may not be available in all countries, even if they are available in your preferred language. Please note that if you select ads for a location other than the one your users are in that you may not get paid for the conversion.

Step 2: Fill your Ad Shopping Cart

The first step in building your Ad Shopping Cart is selecting the ad format you would like to use. From the drop-down, select the size that you would like your for your ad unit.

Next, select the options to add to your shopping cart. On the primary selection screen, there are a number of ways for you to start building your Ad Shopping Cart:

• Search for a specific product name or keyword
• Add categories from the list of available options
• Browse by category by clicking on one of the View products links next to the category you're interested in
• Browse through the entire list of available advertisers by clicking the first View products link next to the All products category

If you search by keyword or browse by category, you'll be offered a list of products that match your request along with the option to add that keyword or category to your cart. If there's a specific product that you would like to refer from this list, select that product. If you're not sure which product to choose, or simply want the best-performing ads from this list to show up on your site, select the Add Keyword/Category to Cart option.

Choosing Keywords/Categories (recommended for most publishers)

When you add keywords or categories to your Ad Shopping Cart, Google will rotate ads from all products matching these targeting selections and optimize the ad unit to display the ads that perform best for your site. In the future, when new products matching these targeting options are added to our system, we'll add them to the rotation automatically to make sure you are receiving the highest-paying products for your ad unit. There's no need to select new products or update your code.

Choosing Products

If you prefer to select the exact products to refer on your site, you can do that as well. You can select up to 15 products for each ad unit you create and Google will optimize among those products to display the ads that perform best on your site.

Once you've found a product to refer, you'll see all the available ads for that product; most advertisers have a variety of different text ads, text links, and image ads from which you can choose. Text ads are available in all ad unit sizes, but images and text links cannot be customized. Select as many ads as you like, as long as they're all the same size. Google will rotate the ads and display the best performing ones for your site.

Alternatively, if you're not sure which ads to select for a given product, you can select the Add product to cart option. If you select this option, the best-performing ads for this product will always be displayed in your ad unit.

Step 3: Customize your ad unit

Next, you can select the standard text ad format (if you haven't already selected one) and color, as well as add a custom channel.

You can choose from any text ad format that's currently available in AdSense for content. To review the available sizes, visit the Ad Formats page.

For your color options, you can choose from any of the AdSense palettes or custom palettes that you've defined in your AdSense for content setup. If you'd like to create a new custom palette, you can do this visiting the Color Palettes page, under the AdSense Setup tab in your account.
You can assign a custom channel either by selecting one of the channels you've already defined from the drop-down menu or by clicking Add new channel and creating a new one.

Step 4 : Copy and paste the code in your pages After continuing from the Referral Options page, you'll see the code for the ad unit you generated. Copy this code in its entirety and paste it into the HTML source of your webpage wherever you would like your new referral ad unit to appear.
Remember, you can place up to three referral units on a single webpage, in addition to three standard AdSense for content units.