Tag Archives: mobile

Put your users first with the four S’: Speed, Scroll, Style, Simple

We’re all consumers of web content. Yet as content creators it can be easy to forget what we need as users. But don’t worry, you’ve got this, and we’ve got you covered with just four S’.

 If you’re new to AdSense, be sure to sign up today and start turning your #PassionIntoProfit. 


1. Speed 

We all know how frustrating it is when a page takes forever to load. We twiddle our thumbs and look from side to side. And after just three seconds, we bounce.

But somehow publishers aren’t responding to this primal need that we all know as users.

According to Google's research from the Mobile Speed Matters report, the average load time for mobile sites across the web is 19 seconds. This is a LONG time. Usain Bolt can run 200m in 19.9s - think of what your users can do with a tap and a swipe.

But how does this impact me? Well, the report also states that…

  • 53% of mobile site visits are abandoned if pages take longer than 3 seconds to load.
  • Publishers whose mobile sites load in 5 seconds earn up to 2x more mobile ad revenue than those whose sites load in 19 seconds. 


By now we think you’re sold on speed. So what’s next?

2. Scroll

The magic scroll. It’s an infinite, endless, perfectly loaded stream of content. There’s no need to click, to wait for a page to load, to navigate to that tiny ‘next’ with your giant thumb. It’s all right here, content, just waiting for you to consume it.

There are, of course, a few caveats before developing an infinite scroll. Like almost everything online, this isn’t a one size fits all solution. 

Infinite scroll is great for ...
  • UGC publishers with constantly evolving content - think Tumblr, Facebook, Pinterest.
  • Sites with lengthy articles or tutorials. No one wants to click ‘more’ or ‘page 2’ anymore. It’s just too dang hard. 
  • Publishers using a slideshow with pagination. Consider a lazy loaded infinite scroll instead. Users love it. 
  • Publishers considering mobile first (aren’t we all?!).
Watch out for … 
  • Crawler errors & SEO impact and check out this article for creating a search friendly infinite scroll. 

3. Style 

Style should never be an afterthought. You and your users want to interact with something that looks good and feels good. 

There are two primary components to style: content style & ad style. 

First: Content Style 

Great websites are able to maintain a consistent style  across pages and platforms. Consistency gives users a sense of familiarity when interacting with your content. 
  • Choose a color scheme and stick to it 
  • Choose a layout and stick to it 
  • Choose a theme and stick to it 
We can’t stress this enough - stick to it. 

As the industry continues to migrate towards a mobile first perspective, consistency across device types and platforms becomes increasingly important. Responsive web design enables your site to adapt to various device sizes without changing the overall look and feel or compromising user experience. 

If you're up for the challenge, check out more on responsive design. 

Second: Ad Style 

In the internet of yesteryear it was nearly impossible to monetize without stripping a site of what made it beautiful. The good news? It’s 2016 and now you have the ability to make a profit and maintain your site’s style. 


When implementing ads think about what makes sense for you and your users.
Here's a sample of a native ad design.
Most importantly use ads to complement the content of your site. Since content is king, it’s important to ensure that you give your users what they're looking for in a format that’s easy to find and navigate, this includes the ads on your site.

Place ads at natural breaks or where the user’s attention may have waned. Not only will this improve user experience but it also may encourage a higher CTR and increased audience engagement.

4. Simple

Keep it simple, folks. 

This rule underlines most everything that is targeted towards consumers, but it is even more important for a mobile first audience. 

When it comes to consuming digital content, we’re a generation of hungry hippos. We want headlines, snippets, concise and clear information. We want minimalist design with streamlined content and easy navigation.

Tips on keeping it simple
  • Make it touch friendly. What’s easier than that?
  • Bullet points make your content easily consumable 
  • Be brief in sign-ups. If your site requires users to sign-up or sign-in, keep input requirements to a minimum or consider adding a Google sign-in option to speed up the process 

So there you have it; the four S’ of user experience: speed, scroll, style, simple. If you’re new to AdSense, be sure to sign up today and start turning your #PassionIntoProfit.


Posted by: Sarah Hornsey, from the AdSense team


Source: Inside AdSense


An update on Google’s feature-phone crawling & indexing

Limited mobile devices, "feature-phones", require a special form of markup or a transcoder for web content. Most websites don't provide feature-phone-compatible content in WAP/WML any more. Given these developments, we've made changes in how we crawl feature-phone content (note: these changes don't affect smartphone content):

1. We've retired the feature-phone Googlebot

We won't be using the feature-phone user-agents for crawling for search going forward.

2. Use "handheld" link annotations for dynamic serving of feature-phone content.

Some sites provide content for feature-phones through dynamic serving, based on the user's user-agent. To understand this configuration, make sure your desktop and smartphone pages have a self-referential alternate URL link for handheld (feature-phone) devices:

<link rel="alternate" media="handheld" href="[current page URL]" />

This is a change from our previous guidance of only using the "vary: user-agent" HTTP header. We've updated our documentation on making feature-phone pages accordingly. We hope adding this link element is possible on your side, and thank you for your help in this regard. We'll continue to show feature-phone URLs in search when we can recognize them, and when they're appropriate for users.

3. We're retiring feature-phone tools in Search Console

Without the feature-phone Googlebot, special sitemaps extensions for feature-phone, the Fetch as Google feature-phone options, and feature-phone crawl errors are no longer needed. We continue to support sitemaps and other sitemaps extensions (such as for videos or Google News), as well as the other Fetch as Google options in Search Console.


We've worked to make these changes as minimal as possible. Most websites don't serve feature-phone content, and wouldn't be affected. If your site has been providing feature-phone content, we thank you for your help in bringing the Internet to feature-phone users worldwide!

For any questions, feel free to drop by our Webmaster Help Forums!

Posted by John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst, Google Switzerland

Trash view and more in the Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides mobile apps

Check out the following new features in the latest versions of the Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides mobile apps:

  • Trash view in the Docs, Sheets, and Slides iOS apps - You can now view and restore previously deleted files in the Docs, Sheets, and Slides iOS apps. Just select “Trash” from the menu on the left side of the screen.
  • GIF insertion in the Docs Android app - Using the Google Keyboard in the Docs Android app, you can now search for and insert GIFs into documents.


Download the latest versions of the Docs, Sheets, and Slides mobile apps from the Google Play Store and the App Store today.

Launch Details
Release track: 
Launching to both Rapid release and Scheduled release

Editions:
Available to all G Suite editions

Rollout pace:
Gradual rollout (potentially longer than 3 days for feature visibility)

Impact:
All end users

Action:
Change management suggested/FYI

More Information
Help Center: Delete a document, spreadsheet, or presentation


Launch release calendar
Launch detail categories
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Updating Your Holiday Hours on Google? Easy as Pumpkin Pie.

Heather Mohorn, owner of Momo’s Tree House, adds special hours on Google to let last-minute shoppers know when her business is open. “The holiday hours feature makes it easy to communicate [changes in hours] to customers,” she says. “It reduces the number of phone calls we receive to ask whether we’re open, which is nice when we’re busy wrapping those last-minute gifts on Christmas Eve.”

With Google My Business, you can update your business info on Google for free to ensure that your phone number, address, and hours of operation are correct so customers can find you this season (and beyond).

To help you make the most of the season, we put together a holiday workshop filled with tips for using the web to connect with shoppers. Preview the section on updating your holiday hours above, or watch the entire workshop at gybo.com/livestream.

For a list of step-by-step instructions on how to update your hours on Google My Business, visit our help center

We hope this is one thing you can easily check off your holiday to-do list.

Cheers,
Emily Harris, on behalf of the Let’s Put Our Cities on the Map team

Rich Cards expands to more verticals

At Google I/O in May, we launched Rich Cards for Movies and Recipes, creating a new way for site owners to present previews of their content on the Search results page. Today, we’re expanding to two new verticals for US-based sites: Local restaurants and Online courses.

Evolution of search results for queries like [best New Orleans restaurants] and [leadership courses]: with rich cards, results are presented in new UIs, like carousels that are easy to browse by scrolling left and right, or a vertical three-pack that displays more individual courses

By building Rich Cards, you have a new opportunity to attract more engaged users to your page. Users can swipe through restaurant recommendations from sites like TripAdvisor, Thrillist, Time Out, Eater, and 10Best. In addition to food, users can browse through courses from sites like Coursera, LinkedIn Learning, EdX, Harvard, Udacity, FutureLearn, Edureka, Open University, Udemy, Canvas Network, and NPTEL.

If you have a site that contains local restaurant information or offers online courses, check out our developer docs to start building Rich Cards in the Local restaurant and Online courses verticals.

While AMP HTML is not required for Local restaurant pages and Online Courses rich cards, AMP provides Google Search users with a consistently fast experience, so we recommend that you create AMP pages to further engage users. Users consuming AMP’d content will be able to swipe near instantly from restaurant to restaurant or from recipe to recipe within your site.

Users who tap on your Rich Card will be taken near instantly to your AMP page, and be able to swipe between pages within your site.

Check out our developer site for implementation details.

To make it easier for you to create Rich Cards, we made some changes in our tools:

  • The Structured Data Testing Tool displays markup errors and a preview card for Local restaurant content as it might appear on Search.
  • The Rich Cards report in Search Console shows which cards across verticals contain errors, and which ones could be enhanced with more markup.
  • The AMP Test helps validate AMP pages as well as mark up on the page.

What’s next?

We are actively experimenting with new verticals globally to provide more opportunities for you to display richer previews of your content.

If you have questions, find us in the dedicated Structured data section of our forum, on Twitter or on Google+.


Post by Stacie Chan, Global Product Partnerships

Showing why mobile #SpeedMatters

Publishers create the stories, memes, shows and games that entertain and inform us everyday - and most of that content is funded by ads. Our goal at DoubleClick is to help these publishers thrive by delivering great user experiences on every screen, so they can keep us users happy and grow their revenue. That’s why we believe it’s important to share insights when we can, and partner closely with publishers to help them apply learnings from our research to support their businesses.

Calculating the cost of mobile speed

People expect great experiences wherever they’re consuming content, especially on mobile. But slow loading mobile sites are more than a user experience issue; they can cost publishers revenue. Our recent research, The Need for Mobile Speed, shows that mobile websites that load in 5 seconds can earn up to 2X more revenue than sites that load in 19 seconds, the industry average1. To help publishers understand how much more revenue they could earn, we’ve published an interactive revenue calculator on DoubleClick.com showing how mobile page speed relates to ad revenue.


While there are many factors that can impact publisher revenue, the results provided by the calculator are based on analysis of thousands of mobile web domains combined with real revenue and site performance data from DoubleClick for Publishers, DoubleClick Ad Exchange and Google Analytics. By entering just a few data points from their current site, publishers can find out how much money they could earn with a faster site.

Partnering to solve mobile speed

Using lessons and insights from our mobile research, our teams work closely with publishers like Everyday Health and Sinclair Digital to help them improve their mobile experiences and deliver real business results.

After consulting and working together with our team, Everyday Health, Inc. took steps to accelerate their What to Expect mobile web pages.

“We were able to improve the time it takes to load the first part of the page by 33%, and we were able to improve the full page load by 78%, so that’s going to be miles better for a mom who’s impatient, or nervous, or anxious. She’s going to trust us more.”
-Diane Otter, Editor in Chief, Everyday Health

Sinclair Digital contacted various mobile experts to see what metrics they should use and how best to measure them. The DoubleClick team was able to give the Sinclair team a second opinion and specific advice on ways to reduce load times and increase engagement. After implementing changes, Sinclair’s was able to improve their average page speed by 500%.

Read more about how Everyday Health and Sinclair Digital improved their mobile web experiences and then see how much more you could earn with a faster mobile website.

Posted by Alex Shellhammer
Product Marketing Manager

1 DoubleClick, “The Need for Mobile Speed”, September 2016

Publisher sustainability in a mobile and video world

Google believes in the value of the open web, an ecosystem where users get access to information, and publishers are able to create and earn money from their content. And at DoubleClick, our product roadmap is focused on a simple premise: to help publishers thrive and create sustainable businesses with advertising. That commitment isn’t just for today, tomorrow or next quarter - we invest in solutions for the long-term, that will help publishers succeed for many years to come.

On the eve of the 10th anniversary of the smartphone, when we talk about the open web we are really talking about mobile: more than half of all ad queries on DoubleClick’s publisher platform are on mobile1. At the same time, the fastest-growing form of content across all digital channels is video2. Today, we’re launching three new betas, all designed to help publishers thrive in a mobile and video world.

Putting users first and delivering better ads

People expect great experiences wherever they’re consuming content. That’s why we built a flexible, component-based native advertising solution to help publishers deliver better ads that fit a user’s context. We’re excited to announce that we are bringing video to Native Ads on DoubleClick in a new beta offering.

Since May 2016, native ad impressions served through DoubleClick have more than doubled3 with publishers including The New York Times, Aller Media, Vogue, Zillow Group, Slate, Epicurious and eBay adopting our solution. With the addition of video to our native ads solution, publishers can now capture premium video advertising budgets on their non-video content.

According to Chris Quinn, Head of Commercial Operations at Kijiji, a subsidiary of eBay and an early tester of this solution:

“The [DoubleClick] native video templates — content and app-install — enable Kijiji to give our advertisers an alternative to banner and static native. We were excited about the ability to run assets seamlessly without embedded video players, which will hopefully give us a jumpstart in the video space. Testing has just begun across our iOS app, and we look forward to seeing positive results and potentially incorporating into our greater offering in 2017.”

Maximizing revenue while delivering the best user experience

Our research shows that people will not wait for slow content on mobile: over half of visits are abandoned when mobile web pages take longer than 3 seconds to load4. In this environment, publishers only have a split second to deliver the most relevant and highest paying ads to maximize their overall revenue without increasing latency and losing users.

At DoubleClick, we’ve consistently delivered server-side solutions that create the most revenue possible across all of a publisher’s inventory without sacrificing speed. For example, Dynamic Allocation has helped publishers earn up to a 24% lift in their programmatic revenue5 and publishers like Gannett have seen 15% greater lift in eCPMs for revenue from programmatic channels with new products like DoubleClick for Publishers First Look.

When speed matters, the fastest solutions yield the best results. That’s why we’re excited about our latest offering, Exchange Bidding. Exchange Bidding helps publishers maximize demand for every impression by letting them put multiple exchanges into competition in real time without adding any new client-side code. Since we announced it earlier this year, the number of participating publishers has grown 4x, the number of exchange partners has doubled, and we’ve moved the product from alpha into closed beta in the US.

Continuing this momentum, we’re happy to announce that we are expanding the beta of Exchange Bidding to include mobile apps, with Smaato as one of our first mobile app exchange partners.

“By integrating directly with DoubleClick for Publishers, Smaato can compete in real time for ad impressions based on price and priority, in parallel with other exchanges. We’re delighted to be an early participant in Exchange Bidding and look forward to expanding this solution to all of our partners.”
-Christian Sieweke, Senior Product Manager at Smaato.

Engaging users with personalized video experiences on every screen

Mobile and connected streaming devices are the new destination for digital video. Last year, ad impressions served to Connected TVs via DoubleClick Bid Manager grew over 225%6. Across all these screens, people expect personalized experiences no matter what they’re watching.

Earlier this year, we launched Dynamic Ad Insertion (DAI) for live TV on DoubleClick as a way to bring addressable advertising capabilities to broadcasters. Whether for live sporting events in France or the Presidential debates in the United States, partners like TF1 and Fox News have used DAI to deliver seamless, personalized ad experiences to all screens. In fact, for some of our biggest partners, DAI represents about a third of all their digital ad impressions, and the majority of their Connected TV impressions are being served via DAI.

Today, we’re excited to announce a beta offering to extend Dynamic Ad Insertion to video on demand (VOD). Publishers like A+E Networks are now inserting relevant, highly targeted ads into both long- and short-form VOD content across all devices, and delivering personalized ads while eliminating common pain points like buffering. This feature will be capable of serving both direct-sold and programmatic campaigns - in both cases delivering smarter, data-driven ads that perform better.

At Google, we know we’re only successful when our partners are successful. Today, building for sustainability means thoughtfully innovating to deliver mobile and video solutions that help publishers earn the most from their content while respecting user desires for better experiences.

Posted by Jonathan Bellack
Director of Product Management, Publisher Platforms

1 DoubleClick internal data, Oct - Nov 2016
2 eMarketer, “Growth of Average Time Spent per Day with Major Media by US Adults, 2013-2018 (% change)”, October 1, 2016
3 DoubleClick internal data, May - Oct 2016
4 DoubleClick, “The Need for Mobile Speed”, September 2016
5 Boston Consulting Group, “The Publisher’s Path to Profitability”, July 2015
6 DoubleClickThe State of Play”, July 2016

Notifications and more in the Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides apps for Android

Check out the following new features in the latest versions of the Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides Android apps:

  • Notifications in Docs, Sheets, and Slides - Users who currently see notifications in their Google Drive Android app (for instance, when someone mentions them in a comment or shares a document with them) will now see notifications in their Docs, Sheets, and Slides Android apps as well. These notifications are specific to the app they’re working in and only appear if the user has an updated version of Google Drive installed on their mobile device.
  • Resize rows and columns in Sheets - Users will find it easier to resize rows and columns in the Sheets Android app, which now features options to specify the pixel sizes of rows and columns and to fit columns to their data exactly.
  • Create and edit data validation in Sheets - Just like they can on the web, users can now create and edit data validation criteria in the Sheets Android app.
  • Change the color of sheet tabs in Sheets - Users can now differentiate between sheets in a spreadsheet by changing the color of their tabs in the Sheets Android app.

Visit the Google Play Store to download the latest versions of the Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides apps for Android.

Launch Details
Release track:
Launching to both Rapid release and Scheduled release

Editions:
Available to all G Suite editions

Rollout pace:
Gradual rollout (potentially longer than 3 days for feature visibility)

Impact:
All end users

Action:
Change management suggested/FYI

More Information
Help Center: Edit rows and columns in a spreadsheet
Help Center: Create an in-cell dropdown list
Help Center: Copy, re-order, and delete sheets


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Launch detail categories
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Mobile-first Indexing

Today, most people are searching on Google using a mobile device. However, our ranking systems still typically look at the desktop version of a page’s content to evaluate its relevance to the user. This can cause issues when the mobile page has less content than the desktop page because our algorithms are not evaluating the actual page that is seen by a mobile searcher.

To make our results more useful, we’ve begun experiments to make our index mobile-first. Although our search index will continue to be a single index of websites and apps, our algorithms will eventually primarily use the mobile version of a site’s content to rank pages from that site, to understand structured data, and to show snippets from those pages in our results. Of course, while our index will be built from mobile documents, we're going to continue to build a great search experience for all users, whether they come from mobile or desktop devices.

We understand this is an important shift in our indexing and it’s one we take seriously. We’ll continue to carefully experiment over the coming months on a small scale and we’ll ramp up this change when we’re confident that we have a great user experience. Though we’re only beginning this process, here are a few recommendations to help webmasters prepare as we move towards a more mobile-focused index.

  • If you have a responsive site or a dynamic serving site where the primary content and markup is equivalent across mobile and desktop, you shouldn’t have to change anything.
  • If you have a site configuration where the primary content and markup is different across mobile and desktop, you should consider making some changes to your site.
    • Make sure to serve structured markup for both the desktop and mobile version.

      Sites can verify the equivalence of their structured markup across desktop and mobile by typing the URLs of both versions into the Structured Data Testing Tool and comparing the output.

      When adding structured data to a mobile site, avoid adding large amounts of markup that isn’t relevant to the specific information content of each document.
    • Use the robots.txt testing tool to verify that your mobile version is accessible to Googlebot.
    • Sites do not have to make changes to their canonical links; we’ll continue to use these links as guides to serve the appropriate results to a user searching on desktop or mobile.
  • If you are a site owner who has only verified their desktop site in Search Console, please add and verify your mobile version.
  • If you only have a desktop site, we'll continue to index your desktop site just fine, even if we're using a mobile user agent to view your site.

    If you are building a mobile version of your site, keep in mind that a functional desktop-oriented site can be better than a broken or incomplete mobile version of the site. It's better for you to build up your mobile site and launch it when ready.  

If you have any questions, feel free to contact us via the Webmaster forums or our public events. We anticipate this change will take some time and we’ll update you as we make progress on migrating our systems.


Posted by Doantam Phan, Product Manager

Global Spotlight: Converting pageviews into revenue

Welcome back to our Global Spotlight on India, a nation with a population of over 1 billion people and 22 official languages (not including English) which for current AdSense publishers, this presents an opportunity to grow your audience globally.

The Global Spotlight is a series of blog posts that can help educate, inspire, and provide you with insights into how you can grow your business and share your content in emerging markets.


Our last spotlight shared insights on why you should cater to mobile first users.  Now that you have a site optimized for mobile users and with  high quality, relevant content, here’s how you can convert your traffic into revenue and turn your #PassionIntoProfit.



First, deliver more viewable impressions to get your ads seen. Measuring viewability is extremely important, because if an ad isn't seen, it can't have an impact, change perception, or build brand trust. Here’s a few ways to boost ad viewability on mobile devices:


  1. Replace 320x50 ad units with 320x100 
  2. Move ads at least 150 pixels away from content to cut accidental clicks
  3. Use page-level ads designed for mobile devices. More on page levels below

Learn more tips on boosting mobile ad viewability in this blog post.

Second, choose the right mobile ad sizes: medium rectangle (300x250), large rectangle (336x280), large mobile banner (320x100), and rectangular responsive ad units. They tend to get the best results.

Third, use page-level ads. You’ve heard this from us before haven’t you? Page-level ads are a family of ad formats that offer a new and innovative way to help you earn money from your mobile content. They’re designed to automatically show the right mobile ad format at the right time - potentially increasing your earnings without interfering with your users’ mobile experience.
 
There you have it, our 3-step strategy to help you expand, or start, your site in India. 
  1. Do your research
    1. Use Google’s research tools
    2. Understand the users in India
    3. Apply your micro-moments strategy
  2. Go mobile or don’t go at all. And make it fast. 
    1. Understand how mobile devices are used
    2. Increase your page speed
    3. Leverage Google’s mobile resources
  3. Convert page views into revenue 
    1. Optimizing for viewability
    2. Use the right ad sizes
    3. Try Page-level ads
Do you want to hear more from us about successfully monetizing your content in India? We regularly host live Hangout on Air sessions to talk through best practices and ways to grow your business. Be sure to register for our next live session on November 17th.

If you’re new to AdSense, turn your #PassionIntoProfit today and sign up for Google AdSense.

 
Be sure to follow AdSense on Twitter to learn more tips on optimizing your account and stay tuned for more posts from our Global Spotlight series in the future!

Posted by Jay Castro, from the AdSense Team

Source: Inside AdSense