Mobile Mondays: Setting goals for mobile monetization

This is the first post in our 'Mobile Mondays' series. Throughout the next couple of months we'll highlight best practices to help you get the most from your mobile content. From time to time, we'll also share stories directly from publishers who have recently gone mobile.

We recently announced our 11 billionth app download from Android Play. Given the consumer movement towards the small screen, it's important to consider how much of this consumed media was created specifically for mobile. Once you've successfully taken your business mobile, you can capitalize on this with some key optimization steps. Below, we'll outline ways you can get the most out of your mobile content. Before any optimization can take place, you'll need a clear view of your business goals on mobile.

The importance of goals
There are no rules around mobile strategies, but mobile businesses need clearly defined goals  in order to be successful. If you're an online-only publisher, your goals might revolve around engagement and visits. If you have location-specific content, you may want to incorporate local elements into your mobile offering. Your business goals should align with the needs of your users.

Prioritization is a key element in goal-setting. You might think that all publishers have acquisition goals around new users prioritized most highly -- after all, who wouldn't want to reach new audiences? Consider a mobile forum and message board website. They'll want new users discovering and using their online discussion site, but this should occur organically if their existing user base creates discussions with sufficient breadth and depth. In this instance, it could be beneficial for the forum owners to focus on website optimization (driving engagement), rather than new user acquisition.

With these possible goals in mind, here are some tips to help you optimize your content for a mobile audience:

Goal #1: Drive traffic and new customer acquisition

• Cross-promotion: This is an easy and cost-effective way to leverage your existing user base to drive users to your mobile site.
• Advertising: Mobile website optimization now factors into mobile search ads quality. To find out more about advertising on mobile devices, visit our Mobile Ads site.
• Localize: China, Korea, Japan, and the U.S. represent some of the biggest markets for mobile media consumption. Track your usage in regions and consider building out a localized app for regions where it's most popular. 
• Create new, unique mobile content for new mobile audiences. Men's Health understood that their target audience used smartphones in the gym to listen to music. As a result, they created a mobile app with workout exercises -- handy for when their users have the phone with them in the gym.

Goal #2: Drive Engagement

• Website optimization: If one of your goals is to retain users who want access to content on-the-go, use Google Analytics to help you choose the most effective content for your site. A recent survey (Omniture, 2010) found that Mobile- friendly web experiences have produced an average 75% higher rate of engagement (revenue, page views, etc.) per visit for mobile users, than desktop websites viewed through a mobile device.
• Brand engagement: Make use of the extended functionality of a mobile device (GPS, Camera, SMS).

Goal #3: Maximizing Revenue

• When designing a mobile-optimized site, it's key to focus on the overall user experience and what you want to achieve as a publisher. This is especially true if your core business model is built around advertising revenue or if it's a strong contributor of profit. Consider the type of ad units and formats that you plan to incorporate, which will help you make the most of monetization opportunities without compromising content. To find out more, download our publisher guide or our Android app to explore the range of our mobile ad formats.

We've placed "publisher goals" into three categories using broad brush strokes above. In reality, it's unlikely your ambitions will be as narrow in scope. We hope you'll be able to pick an optimization step (or a combination of steps) tailored to your particular site.

Posted by Robbie Wetherell, Mobile Publisher Advocate

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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 4/16/2012 09:40:00 AM

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Mobile Mondays: Going Mobile - Why FindTheBest went mobile

For our second post in the Mobile Mondays series, we've invited Grace Nasri of FindtheBest to share her company's experience in going mobile.  Read last week's post to learn about setting mobile goals.

Mobile is rising at a rate much faster than any other technology to date. Last year at Google's Think Mobile Event, Kleiner Perkins' Mary Meeker said the pace and force of mobile growth was unlike anything seen previously and Google's Dennis Woodside predicted, "mobile will create the largest technology market ever. This market will dwarf the PC and all the PC industry has done."

Seeing this global trend toward mobile, realizing that large segments of potential consumers only have access to mobile devices, and knowing that about 60% of time spent on smartphones is spent engaging in new activities—meaning potentially new customers— we at FindTheBest decided to launch a mobile-optimized version of our site.

FindTheBest is a data-driven comparison engine, and we launched our mobile site in January after realizing there was a large segment of potential customers we weren't able to effectively reach. Before launching the mobile site, mobile visitors were 12% more likely to bounce and viewed 27% less pages than desktop visitors.

FindTheBest has gone mobile, and has been rewarded with a 3.5x increase in mobile revenue.

However, designing a mobile site doesn't come without challenges and we had to consider three main issues:

1. While traditional desktops offer a lot of real estate, mobile devices are more limited in terms of space.
2. Desktops and laptops have faster Internet connections than mobile devices.
3. Mobile devices are primarily touch-based, which requires an entirely different user interface.

How FindTheBest went mobile

We hired a mobile expert to design our mobile site. Several decisions needed to be factored in to guarantee the best user experience, as users who visit mobile sites that don't offer a great UX often leave a site and go to a competitor site. Since we offer a diverse amount of information presented in a range of ways on the traditional site, we had to limit what it would include in the mobile version. We took into consideration questions like, "What are the most relevant filters that need to be included?" and narrowed the data fields on each comparison's search results page to only the top three most important ones. Similarly, we made design considerations to ensure users could access the information they needed within three taps and that the pages loaded quickly over 3G networks.

After developing and designing the mobile site, we were able to take some of our findings and apply it to the main site.

The Results: Increased customers and ad revenue for FindTheBest and its partners

Currently, 25% of our customers are accessing the site through mobile devices. While traffic to FindTheBest is rising by about 15-20% month-over-month, the percentage of mobile users accessing FindTheBest is rising by 25%.

Between January 2011 and January 2012, the total number of visits to FindTheBest has grown by 3X, while the number of visits from mobile alone has grown 7X. The week after after launching the mobile version, visits from mobile devices increased 28% (as compared to 19% for non-mobile visits). Our user engagement has also significantly increased as page views per mobile visit increased by more than 15%--which reaffirmed the benefit of optimizing for mobile.

The mobile site has also translated into more ad revenue for us. After launching the mobile site, our ad revenue from mobile devices increased 3.5X. The benefits of having a mobile-optimized site have also carried over to our publisher partners, which currently include TechCrunch, VentureBeat and Android Authority.

What's Next?

We constantly analyze user behavior and continue to optimize the mobile site accordingly. We're currently researching ways to include responsive design technologies into the site, so that the mobile and desktop code bases can be merged into one. Maintaining multiple code bases is time consuming, but we believe this is the future and will be worth the investment.

Posted by Grace Nasri, Managing Editor at FindTheBest

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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 4/23/2012 09:40:00 AM

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Tips for creating high quality sites

We receive a lot of questions from publishers wanting to know best practices to grow your businesses with AdSense. While there's no one right answer, our advice continues to be to focus on creating high quality content and delivering the best possible user experience on your websites. Here are some key suggestions on how to design and organize your website content with an overall emphasis on the quality of the site.

Don't create multiple pages or sites with duplicate content.

We encourage you to create high quality sites rather than a large quantity of sites. Focusing on one site and making it richer in information and authentic in content not only benefits users, but also helps you win more of them. When users are browsing online, they want to find what they're looking for quickly and easily without combing through endless multiple pages, subdomains, or sites with substantially generic or duplicate content. If you have pages or sites that are similar in content or template design, consider consolidating the pages or sites into one.

 

Provide content that gives users a reason to visit, and return, to your site. 

When you create content on your site, it's important to ask yourself if the page provides substantial value or service when compared to sites covering similar subjects. It's worth the effort to create original content that sets your site apart from the rest. This will provide useful search results and keep your visitors coming back.
 

Provide the information or service promised. 

Some publishers create sites that appear to offer a product or service, but instead trick users into navigating through several pages and viewing ads. This results in a negative user experience, and causes your site to be perceived as untrustworthy. Use keywords appropriately and in context with your content and make sure users are able to easily navigate through the site to find what products, goods, or services are promised.

There's no shortcut to success. Building high quality site takes effort and time. However, we've seen that publishers who focus on their users instead of using quick and deceptive techniques are the real winners and experience long-term revenue growth and success in our network. For more information, check out Google Webmaster Guidelines and the policy section of the AdSense Help Center.

Posted by Lingjuan Zhang, AdSense Policy team

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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 4/25/2012 08:30:00 AM

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Mobile site or mobile app, what’s right for your business right now?

Last month, we talked about why the time has come to mobilize your site and nurture what is most likely your fastest growing audience -- your mobile users. We also launched our GoMo initiative to help you get started. If you've started thinking about going mobile, chances are you've asked yourself whether you should mobile site, a mobile app, or even both.  The answer depends entirely on the needs of your business.

One thing to note — for web publishers, the best mobile strategy is rarely a "one or the other" choice between mobile sites and mobile apps.  Mobile sites are cheaper and less complex.  Many web publishers have elected to build mobile sites as their first foray into mobile, and the question becomes:  do I need to invest further in mobile and build a mobile app?  Below are a few questions to consider as you decide whether a mobile app is right for your business.

Who are your users?
Find out how users are currently accessing your content using the Platforms report on the Performance reports tab in your AdSense account. Understanding the devices your users are accessing your site from will help you tailor your content to provide them with the best mobile experience.  For example, if most of your visitors are coming from feature phones, then a smartphone app wouldn't do them any good.

How do you want users to access your content?
Connectivity matters. A mobile site requires users to have data access, while apps can allow the user to cache your content to consume at a later moment. Tourist information and maps are great examples of content that is extremely useful when downloaded and cached on a mobile device for later consumption.

How do you want users to interact with your content?
Mobile devices allow you to design a unique user experience with your content.  Mobile apps allow you to tap into native phone features that don't exist on a desktop browser such as GPS, accelerometers, embedded cameras, etc.  While more of these device features are becoming available via HTML5 libraries on newer devices, mobile apps still offer the most robust suite of options for accessing mobile specific features.

How quickly do you want to make changes to your content?
Updates to mobile sites are instantaneous. Depending on the change you want to make, some app stores may require you to resubmit your app, which will then require the users to take action in updating the app package on their mobile devices.

What development and budget constraints exist?
Understanding your in-house capabilities and resources is crucial in making development choices. Without in-house capabilities to develop mobile assets, you'll have to consider development and upkeep costs. In addition, you'll only need to develop one mobile site, while apps require cross platform assets and skills to maintain. As with any other worthwhile investment, this should not be a set-it-and-forget-it project. Be sure to iterate often to keep the user experience fresh.

Finally, consider who will be responsible for further development and whether you'll need to hire another head to maintain this new asset. Answering all of these questions above will help you to make the right decision for your business and your users.

Posted by Tuyen Nguyen - Mobile Publisher Advocate

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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 4/30/2012 09:50:00 AM

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