Tag Archives: mobile

How to optimize your Adsense ad placements for mobile users

This is the final guest post from AdSense publisher Brandon Gaille. Brandon has built his small business marketing blog, BrandonGaille.com, to over 2 million monthly visitors in less than three years. He’s featured as our guest blogger to share insights and tips from his personal blogging experience to help AdSense publishers grow earnings. If you’re new to AdSense, be sure to sign up for AdSense and start turning your #PassionIntoProfit. 


Every year more people are using their phones and devices to browse web pages. In 2013, mobile made up only 17% of web traffic. In 2016, this number has risen to over 38%. Within the next couple of years, mobile traffic will easily surpass 50%.


Mobile's Share of Global Web Traffic


This is why you need to take time to optimize your AdSense ads for mobile traffic. Although you can easily grab a responsive AdSense ad unit, there are more ways to optimize your ad units for mobile. It may be the easiest way, but I’ve found that the easy way usually does not always produce the best results. I’ve tested the responsive ad units on my blogs against manual optimization, and the results were staggering.


The manual optimization of my ads produced a 54% increase in my AdSense revenue.


Here’s what I learned from the tests I ran:


#1 A large mobile banner at the top of the page earned the most money on my site

The highest producing location was below the title of a post and above the first paragraph. It’s important to know that  AdSense amended their policy on ads above the fold on mobile devices, and you can no longer use the 300x250 ad above the fold on mobile.


#2 Hide the sidebar ads in tablets and mobile

The sidebar is going to be pushed down to the bottom of the post when it is viewed in mobile. This is essentially banishing any ads in the sidebar to no man’s land. Most premium WordPress themes will allow you to turn off ad spots in the sidebar. This will allow you to drop in an additional AdSense ad into the post to get maximum monetization from mobile.


#3 The best ad grouping was top, middle, and bottom

Out of all the mobile ad groupings, this one easily produced the most revenue for me. The grouping was made up of three 250x250 ads. The first ad was below the title and above the first paragraph. The second ad was placed after the 6th paragraph of the post. The final ad was placed at the end of the post.


In addition to mobile optimization, I applied four AdSense optimization strategies, which resulted in an overall revenue increase of close to 300%.  Whether you are making $500/month or $5000/month, a 300% increase can make a huge impact on your yearly earnings.


Go here to read all of my “5 AdSense Optimization Strategies that Will Increase Your Earnings.”


Posted By
Brandon Gaille
Brandon Gaille

Brandon Gaille is an AdSense publisher. You can learn more about Brandon at BrandonGaille.com and listen to his popular blogging podcast, The Blog Millionaire.

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

Source: Inside AdSense


Manage iOS devices without MDM profiles

G Suite administrators who want their employees to use their own mobile devices at work face a challenge: all Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) solutions available today require an agent or profile to mandate corporate mobile policies, but employees are uncomfortable setting up these agents and profiles on their personal devices. Oftentimes, they choose not to add their corporate accounts to their personal devices at all.

To meet the needs of both admins and employees, today we’re introducing an agentless way to manage iOS devices: Basic Mobile Management.



Basic Mobile Management allows admins to mandate basic security on iOS devices without requiring users to install an MDM profile. It also relieves admins of the need to set up an Apple Push Certificate and the hassles of renewing that certificate regularly.

With Basic Mobile Management, admins can:
  • Enforce a screen lock.
  • Wipe a corporate account (but not the entire device).
  • View, search, and manage their device inventory.

Basic Mobile Management makes it easier for employees to use their personal devices at work as well, by allowing them to set up their corporate accounts just like they would their personal accounts.

Organizations that require additional restrictions, mobile audit, or application management on iOS devices should continue using the Advanced Mobile Management option.

For more details on Basic Mobile Management and how to get started, check out the Help Center.

Please note that agentless management is only available for iOS devices at this time. Users will still need to install the Device Policy app on their Android devices, even if their admin has chosen Basic Mobile Management.

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:
Admins only

Action:
Admin action suggested/FYI

More Information
Help Center: Set up mobile device management


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How to earn more money with AdSense by decreasing your bounce rate

This is the fourth of five guest posts from AdSense publisher Brandon Gaille. Brandon has built his small business marketing blog, BrandonGaille.com, to over 2 million monthly visitors in less than three years. He’s featured as our guest blogger to share insights and tips from his personal blogging experience to help AdSense publishers grow earnings. If you’re new to AdSense, be sure to sign up for AdSense and start turning your #PassionIntoProfit. 


Google Analytics defines bounce rate as the percentage of single-page sessions, which essentially means the people that left your site after seeing only a single page. When your bounce rate is high, it also means that your AdSense ads may not be seen by a large percentage of your audience.

Over the years, I've researched this topic many times over in an effort to constantly decrease the bounce rate of my sites and my clients’ sites. Through countless hours of A/B testing and deep analytics research, I was able to identify 25 tactics that consistently reduced the bounce rate.

The great thing about most of these tactics is that they usually only take a matter of minutes to incorporate, and you can start seeing results the next day.


#1 Do not use more than 7 sentences per paragraph

You never want to block too much text together. One really long paragraph can easily overwhelm your visitors and lead them to hitting the back button.

Most bloggers write their posts on a desktop or laptop computer. From a computer, the occasional 12 to 15 sentence paragraph does not look too intimidating. However, over 50% of my blog visitors are using their phones to read the posts on my site. On a phone, these long paragraphs will fill up the entire screen and add to your bounce rate.


I like to break up my paragraphs into different sizes. This can make the text of a post visually stimulating, which can turn scanners into readers.


Using an occasional single sentence paragraph will speed up the flow of article and add some nice white space.


#2 Keep your column width between 700 and 800 pixels


There have been many big name bloggers that have been considering ditching the sidebar. Although the sidebar does not get as many clicks as it once did, this is largely due to the increase in mobile traffic.


A post without a sidebar will have a column width well beyond 800 pixels. This is going to make your content look very long on a desktop computer. The ideal width for engagement is 700 pixels, which will allow between 80 and 90 characters per line.


Smashing Magazine did a study on the typographic design patterns in websites. When they looked at a segment of websites with the highest engagement, they found the majority of these sites had between 75 and 90 characters per line.
average-characters-per-line
Source of image: Smashing Magazine

#3 Organize your content with headers and sub-headers


Based on reviewing heat maps of million and millions of page views, I’ve found that visitors of blog posts are made up of a mix of readers and scanners. To be precise, the results showed that 40% are readers and 60% are scanners. The readers start by reading the introduction paragraph, and the scanners scroll through the entire post. The scanners consistently stop scrolling to read each header and sub-header.


For the readers, most bloggers are pulling them into the post with a great introduction. However, the vast majority fail to create compelling headers. The easiest type of post to break into headers is the list post. For example, “13 Habits that Lead to Success.”


Each habit should be turned into a bold header and be able to stand alone as its own title. The goal here is to create thirteen compelling titles. Each title is designed to grab the reader’s attention and drive them into reading that section.


If you’ve enjoyed these three tips to decrease your bounce rate, go here to read all of the “25 Proven Ways to Decrease Your Bounce Rate.”


Posted By
Brandon Gaille

Brandon Gaille


Brandon Gaille is an AdSense publisher. You can learn more about Brandon at BrandonGaille.com and listen to his popular blogging podcast, The Blog Millionaire.

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



Source: Inside AdSense


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!

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


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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+.


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