To date, you’ve been limited to a total of 200 custom and URL channels, and many of you have asked for more. That’s why today, we’re very excited to announce that we’ve raised this limit to 500 custom channels per product, and 500 URL channels for AdSense for content.

The change makes it easier for AdSense professionals to take their testing processes to the next level. Channels can be used to track direct advertisers as well. As you can tell, making money from AdSense involves more than just slapping ads on pages. This new enhancement should help.

A short while ago, Google discontinued the old interface and forced everyone to adopt the new interface. As it happened, our account went on a hold when we were switched over. The problem? Google needed our tax information yet again. If you are making any kind of money from AdSense, you need to provide Google with your tax information. In fact, Google has announced that it will soon start sending tax documents to publishers making money off of Google.

To ensure that your AdSense account reflects your current tax standing, you may even re-submit your tax information. We’ll soon be using the information in your AdSense account to generate your tax forms for 2011, so you’ll want to make sure that the information we have is correct.

Remember, you’ll only receive a tax form 1099-MISC from us if you’re a U.S. publisher and you meet either of the following requirements:

• You submitted a Form W-9, are not a corporation, and were paid at least US $600 in 2011
• You indicated that you are subject to backup withholding and had taxes withheld

In order to remove the tax hold from your account, you should just resubmit your data. The hold will be lifted shortly thereafter. Keep in mind that Google may keep your earnings if you do not provide it with your tax information.

Many AdSense users are not that happy about the change. Many find the new interface to be ugly and hard to use. But that’s what we are going to be stuck with for now. Google is not exactly the greatest when it comes to designing user interfaces anyway.

Do you like the new AdSense interface?

It is not a surprise to see Google introduce Google+ pages. Businesses have been asking for that feature for a long time. Google has also announced that businesses can connect their business pages to their AdWords campaign.  What does that mean? All the +1s you receive online from your page, website, ads, and search results will be tallied together as one. With Social Extensions, your visitors will be able to see all your recommendations in one place.

Currently (and for campaigns that don’t have Social Extensions enabled) your AdWords ads only show +1’s from people who have +1’d that ad’s landing page. This limits the likelihood that someone who sees your ad will have a friend or contact who’s recommended it.

By enabling Social Extensions on your ad campaigns you’re able to leverage all the +1’s your brand has received, whether it be on a search result, on your Google+ Page, your website or on your ads, making it more likely that someone who sees your ad will have a friend or contact who has recommended it.

This feature has the potential to improve the performance of your ads. Of course, you want to pay attention to your conversion rates just to be on the safe side. Google is adding a new reporting segment to show you the impact of social annotations. To activate social extensions, just choose the appropriate option from Ad Extensions tab.

Google has been updating and giving makeover to many of its services in the past few months. That includes its AdWords and AdSense programs. Google now plans to change the way ads are displayed in the SERPs. Ads that used to be shown in the side may now be shown below the top listings.

… ads that have previously shown to the side of the results may in some cases appear below them. We dynamically optimize each search page, including its ads, to provide the best experience for our users. In many cases, we have found that displaying ads below search results fits better into the user’s flow as they scan the page from top to bottom. On average, this placement performed better than side ads in terms of click-through rate in our tests.

The good news is you can always compare how your ads are performing depending on where they are being shown. You do want to keep an eye on the position of your ads to make sure you get the best bang for your buck.

You will get all the relevant information with this report:

With today’s new report, you’ll be able to see a breakdown of impressions, clicks, and earnings by Google-certified ad network. To view this report, log in to your account and visit the Performance reports tab. Click ‘Ad networks’ in the side navigation to see which networks served ads on your pages and how they performed. When comparing the performance of different ad networks, bear in mind that some metrics like RPM can be affected by networks targeting certain value impressions. Please note that there is no historical data prior to September 27, 2011.

Enabling third party ad network ads to get displayed on your website could increase your revenue. With this new reporting feature, you will have an easier time doing your tests.

Most beginners decide to go with the Auto feature here. Going with the Manual option gives you the chance to target only the topics that apply to your website. If you check the second checkbox under this option, your ads will be restricted to those who Stumble stories on the exact topics you have chosen. With this new feature, you will have an easier time targeting specific topics.

With ad styles, you can customize the font, color, and corner styles. What’s nice about this feature is the fact that you can apply these styles to ads or search engines across your website (saving you some time in the process). As Google explains it, the process of creating ad styles is easy:

To create a new ad style, visit the ‘My ads’ tab. Click ‘Ad styles’ in the navigation bar and then the ‘+New’ button. You can then assign existing ad styles to your ad units during the ad unit creation process.

You will have to use the new AdSense interface to use this feature.

Google has changed the number of links in these units to 4 horizontally and 3 vertically. The color scheme, orientation, fonts, and number of ads are all changing. Not sure how to use these link units? This video tutorial should help.

Over the past months, we’ve been working to improve the new AdSense interface and develop features that provide you with additional insights, control, and efficiency. Beyond the visual redesign, some of the new features only available in the new interface include multi-dimension reporting, reporting by country and platform, and search functionality in the Ad review center.

We’ve also heard your feedback on features from the older interface that you wanted to see in the newer version. In response, we’ve recently rolled out top-requested features like the ability to create scheduled reports and view channels on the Home tab.

While we’ve been investing in new features within the new interface, we’ve also been discussing our plans to move away from the older version. With that in mind, we’ll be retiring the old interface in mid-November. We’re continuing to focus on building new functionality into the new interface, and are excited about the additional improvements we plan to deliver.

You can already test the new interface by clicking on the appropriate link in your AdSense interface. These videos may make the transition process easier for you.