AdSense 101: Building your brand

AdSense 101: Building your brand

Dark.net    Mei 03, 2017    Comment   

8 minutes to read
Now that you’ve got your account setup, and you’re writing winning content, it’s time to build a quality brand and create a sustainable revenue stream with AdSense.

What separates a website from a brand? Credibility, consistency, and community.

Think of the websites you visit most - chances are they’re updated regularly with content that’s familiar and trustworthy. You can also navigate these sites intuitively, without putting any thought into how you’re consuming the content you love or where the links you’re looking for are positioned.

In this blog, we’ll cover how to effectively measure how well your site is performing, how to use experiments to uncover new insights, and how to lay out your site in a way that engages your readers.

Measure your performance with reports 

Only by digging deep into how visitors engage with your site can you identify the roadblocks that may keep them from returning. 

To make sure you’re up-to-date with everything you need to know, check the ‘common reports’ tab in your AdSense account dashboard. Focus on the following key areas to analyze your overall account performance.

• The reporting dashboard gives you a quick summary of three main reporting metrics: estimated earnings, page views, and revenue per thousand impressions (RPM). It’s a great way to quickly check the overall health of your account. 
• The entire account by day report helps you analyze daily performance, and gives you a better understanding of why your earnings change over time. If you’ve made recent changes to ad units or placements, then it’s a great way to measure how the adjustments affected click-through rates. 

To find this report, visit the Performance reports tab, then Common reports on the left-hand panel, select Ad units and then add Platforms from the top as a secondary dimension. 

• Use Ad units + Performance to measure your campaign success by device. CTR and Active View Viewable (AVV) are the key metrics to monitor here, with AVV showing you how many of your total measurable impressions were truly viewable. If an ad’s active view percentage is below 50%, then consider placing it in a more prominent area to improve engagement. To learn more about viewability, check out DoubleClick's 5 Factors of Display Viewability.
• The Platforms report identifies how ads are performing on different devices. For example, you may find that your ad units are performing better on mobile devices than on desktop (or vice versa). If that’s the case, then measure your web traffic and make sure that your ads are optimized for the devices you receive most traffic from. 
• If you manage multiple domains within a single account, then use the Sites report to compare performance. The report is especially helpful if you have different mobile and desktop versions of the same site, allowing you to find new ways to optimize UI for consistent experience across devices. 

Every website is different, so if there are specific metrics you want to target, then learn how to create your own reports to measure what matters to you. 

Use experiments to discover new opportunities

AdSense Experiments split your site traffic into two different ad settings, so you can compare performance and make more informed decisions. 

There are three different ways to run experiments on your content:

1. Design it yourself by choosing the ad setting and variation you’d like to test.
2. Choose an experiment from an opportunity on your Optimization page. 
3. Use automatic experiments, which allows AdSense to run experiments on a small portion of your web traffic that are tailored to your website. 

Experiments can help you to measure the impact of both ad content and ad style on your earnings. Discover whether ‘text only’ or ‘text and display ads’ capture the attention of your audience, and whether or not changing the colors of your ads helps them to blend in.  

We recommend allowing automatic experiments on your site, as a time-efficient and easy way to inform your decision-making. 

Improve the usability of your site

Great content can get lost when it’s hosted on a website with poor usability. Pages that are slow, needlessly complex, or difficult to navigate are more likely to disrupt your visitors focus and drive them away.

For a better UX, we recommend focusing on the 4 S’s: Speed, scroll, style, and simple. 

Speed: A recent study by Google found a strong correlation between page speed and key performance indicators like revenue, bounce rate, session duration, and viewability. Web users are impatient when it comes to loading times, and are likely to get frustrated and abandon slow pages. 

To measure the speed of your website, use PageSpeed Insights or the Web Developer Kit. And if you’re looking for some quick fixes to improve loading times, consider asynchronous loading, lazy loading, or AMP.

Finally, use the mobile web speed toolkit for in-depth and tactical recommendations to get your website up to speed. 

Scroll: Infinite scroll continues to add new content at the bottom of your page, taking away the need to load new pages. 

It’s ideal for publishers that post lengthy articles, tutorials, or slideshows, and works particularly well for websites focused on mobile consumption. 

Style: Your website needs to look attractive and consistent across all pages to build immediate trust with new visitors. Focus on two areas: content style and ad style. 

For content style, choose a theme, layout, and color scheme, then stick to it. Consistency is key to developing a brand that your readers will grow comfortable and familiar with. 

Responsive web design improves UX by maintaining the same look and feel to your site regardless of the device it’s being viewed on. 

With ad style, the first thing to consider is how they will affect the flow of content on your site. Placing ads at natural breaks in your narrative, or in areas where the user’s attention may have waned, can improve UX and may encourage a higher CTR (click-through rate). 

When placing ads, take some time to consider your options. Responsive ads automatically adapt to your user’s screen size, while native ads and matched content may help you unlock new ad revenue. 

Simple: The best digital content is scannable, snappy, and intuitive. By focusing on simplicity, you’re removing the roadblocks that potentially stop users from enjoying your content. 

Here’s some tips to make sure your site is as easy as possible to engage with:

• Make it touch-friendly for mobile users
• Format your content the right way
• Use minimalist design where possible.

If you think AdSense is a fit for your website, then sign up and get started.

Posted by Jay Castro, @jayciro

5 steps to improve Page Speed and boost page performance

5 steps to improve Page Speed and boost page performance

Dark.net    Februari 06, 2017    Comment   

The eighth installment of the #SuccessStack takes a second look at page speed, specifically tips you can implement that may improve your metrics.

Last week the #SuccessStack illustrated lots of reasons why mobile Page Speed is critically important to the ongoing success of your publishing business. Now you can explore what you can do that could improve this metric and boost your overall page performance as a result.

Step 1: See how much more you could earn

Before you put time and effort into improving your mobile speed, you want to see what it’s worth to you. This useful tool will help you make a personal calculation of how much more you could earn with a faster mobile experience. However, this tool does not calculate user experience or user loyalty, both of which are impacted by either a fast, or slow, mobile experience. 

Step 2: Look at how you measure up

Using tools to measure different aspects of your site will help you identify areas for improvement more easily than if you were to just estimate. Here are a few of our favorites:

• Page Speed Insights analyzes your site performance, scoring its speed and user experience and identifies issues to fix. The best practice is a score of 85 or above.1
• Webpagetest provides a Speed Index that indicates the average time at which visible parts of the page are displayed. Aim for a Speed Index of 3,000 or less and load time of 3 seconds or less — ideally 1-3 seconds.2
• Chrome DevTools is a versatile real-time tool for evaluating your website’s performance right in the browser. You can simulate network and CPU speeds, examine network loading details and see how your site’s code is impacting your page.
• Mobile-Friendly Test is designed specifically for mobile sites. This tool analyzes exactly how mobile-friendly the site is, and focuses on elements beyond speed as well. 

Step 3: Have a clear out - reduce the size of your pages.

Reduce the size of your pages.

• Target 50 or fewer requests and 1,000 or fewer bytes to optimize load time. 
• Compress and select efficient images, and prioritize download of visible content.

Assess the ads and trackers running on your page.

• Use a tool to measure the bandwidth and latency impact of pixels and other elements on your pages (e.g., Ghostery). Evaluate if trackers are needed and used, and if they provide enough benefit.
• Review latency of your ad partners, especially those delivering video ads, and remove low performing monetization partners.

Step 4: Prioritize the order your page loads in

It sounds obvious, but prioritizing loading of the elements that are visible above the fold will enhance your user experience, even of your net page loading speed doesn’t change.

• Prioritize loading elements that are visible above the fold first: Minimize the amount of pieces that show above the fold of visible content. Load styling, javascript logic and images that are only accessed after direct interaction later. 
• Enable HTTPS and HTTP/2: Support modern HTTPS to provide site integrity, encryption, authentication, and better user experience. More than 1-in-3 of top 100 sites run on modern HTTPS, and a quarter of them use HTTPS by default
• Limit server requests where possible: Each mobile page makes an average of 214 server requests,3 some of which happen simultaneously and some that can only happen one after the other. Review each request on your site to understand the benefit it provides.  

Step 5: Measure, test, repeat

As the shift to mobile continues to grow, so will users expectations of lighting speed experiences across the web. This means that improving your mobile speed isn’t a one off job, you need to have a process in place to regularly evaluate and improve it. Follow the steps outlined above at regular intervals and record the results of the adjustments you make to refer back to when deciding on new optimization techniques in the future.

• Continually assess your ad-related calls to remove low performing monetization partners.
• Pick third-party ad-tech partners with lower latency.
• Remove or reduce any bulky content.
• Consolidate data and analytics tags.
• Investigate open-source tools such as Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) and Progressive Web Apps (PWA). 

Implementing the strategies outlined in this article could have a serious positive impact on your business. Check out these inspirational stories from Sinclair News and What to Expect to see how significant shifts in mobile speed were achieved with a few technical tweaks.

Next steps

From your interest in Page Speed, you’re clearly committed to doing all you can to improve the performance of your site and grow your publishing business. With this in mind, you may benefit from a chat with one of our experts. They can offer a personalized consultation to help you make the right technology choices to support your business growth. Book a time.

Post content Posted by Jay Castro, from the AdSense Team

1. Google Developers

2. Google and kissmetrics

3. DoubleClick, “The Need for Mobile Speed”, , September 2016

The ultimate mobile page speed infographic

The ultimate mobile page speed infographic

Dark.net    Januari 31, 2017    Comment   

In the next edition of the #SuccessStack series, we look at page speed, a metric that became even more important in 2016 and directly impacts the first interaction your site has with its users.
What is page speed?
Page speed measures how quickly the viewable elements of a web page load. In other words, it measures how long it takes before a user can view and interact with a page on the site. It’s a particularly critical metric for the mobile user experience --- recent research from DoubleClick indicates that 53% of mobile site visits are abandoned if pages take longer than 3 seconds to load.


Consider page speed a user-centric measurement since users typically focus on one page at a time and expect fast experiences on every page they interact with. If your page speed isn’t good, you may lose the opportunity to keep users engaged and on your site for longer.
How does page speed impact ad revenue?
The more quickly a user can access your content, the more likely they are to engage with the content on the page and explore more pages on your site. Our study shows that ads on faster mobile pages are likely to be more viewable. The study also projects that mobile sites that load within 5 seconds vs 19 seconds earn up to 2X greater revenue.
While revenue can be impacted by many factors, improving page speed will lead to a better user experience and possibly increased ad revenue.
The ultimate page speed infographic
Our recent page speed studies found many notable learnings that may help paint the picture of the importance of page speed and the impact it can have on your site’s earnings.

Next steps
If you’re wondering which Google tools will be most useful to help grow your business, then you’ll benefit from a chat with one of our experts. They can offer a personalised consultation to help you make the right choice for your site. Book your consultation today.

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

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

Dark.net    Desember 12, 2016    Comment   

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.

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 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. 

Global Spotlight: Catering to mobile first users in India

Global Spotlight: Catering to mobile first users in India

Dark.net    November 02, 2016    Comment   

This week we are shining our AdSense Global Spotlight on India, a nation with a population of over 1 billion people and 22 official languages (not including English). For current AdSense publishers, this presents an opportunity to grow your audience globally.

The Global Spotlight is 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 how to capture the opportunity in India by sharing tips on how to research your potential audience in India. Research is an important first step because when you know what users are talking about, you can participate in the conversation.

Today we want to talk about why you should cater to mobile first users.

It’s no longer breaking news, our world has shifted to mobile. This shift has been quick, and users expectations for great mobile experiences has increased even more quickly. A website that simply loads on a mobile device is no longer enough. To keep users engaged, mobile sites must be fast and relevant. You’ve learned in our previous post that India is projected to have 570M users online by 20201, and more than half of those users will be accessing the internet via a smartphone. Since hundreds of millions of users in India will only access the internet via a mobile device, it’s important to think like a user, and think mobile first.

First, understand how users interact and use their mobile devices. The study “How People Use Their Devices” dives into three different categories of use cases:

1. What does device usage look like in an average day
2. What we do on our devices
3. How we search across devices

Second, increase your mobile page speed. For users in India, it’s important to reduce the size of your pages. To reduce the size of your pages, target 50 or fewer requests and 1,000 or fewer bytes to optimize load time. You can also compress and select efficient images, and prioritize download of visible content. Lastly, consider AMPlifying your site for lightning speed. These are all key in winning mobile micro-moments. 

Check out the Mobile Web Speed Toolkit released by DoubleClick to help you optimize the speed of your mobile site.

Third, leverage the many resources available to go mobile.

• Test my site
• Principles of mobile site design
• Building websites for multi-screen consumers
• AdSense multi-screen guidelines
• Find a multi-screen vendor
• Optimize your content for mobile users

What are you waiting for? Get out there and grow your site in India. While you’re at it, be sure to turn your #PassionIntoProfit today by signing up for Google AdSense.

Tomorrow we’ll be sharing more tips so stay tuned or check out the other posts from our Global Spotlight series! Don’t forget to mark your calendar and register for our next live Hangout on Air session on November 17th. We’ll be talking through best practices and ways to grow your business.  

Posted By: Jay Castro, from the AdSense team

Footnotes

1. eMarketer, Worldwide Internet and Mobile Users: eMarketer’s Updated Estimates and Forecast for 2015–2020, October 11, 2016

Increase the speed of your mobile site with this toolkit

Increase the speed of your mobile site with this toolkit

Dark.net    Oktober 13, 2016    Comment   

Cross-Posted from the DoubleClick for Publishers blog

Last month we released a new study, "The need for mobile speed", highlighting the impact of mobile latency on publisher revenue. Simply having your site load on a mobile device is no longer enough: Mobile sites have to be fast and relevant. The study analyzed 10,000+ mobile web domains, and from the results we gained several insights about the impact of mobile latency on user experience.

Critically, the study also revealed strong correlations between page speed and the following key performance indicators:

1. Revenue
2. Bounce rate
3. Session duration
4. Viewability

It’s clear mobile speed matters to the success of publisher sites, but making mobile load times a priority doesn’t always make achieving speed easy. To help you build a faster mobile web experience, we’ve created a mobile web speed toolkit. It outlines a 4-step process to diagnose and fix mobile speed issues:

1. Measure your site’s performance.
2. Assess the different components impacting speed.
3. Prioritize the order your site loads.
4. Test, remeasure and repeat to improve your site speed.

The mobile web speed toolkit offers tactical recommendations to begin achieving mobile speed. 

The relationship between page speed and publisher revenue is clearer than ever before. Small improvements to your mobile site may yield big gains for your mobile revenue, so get your copy of the mobile web speed toolkit and start making changes today. 

#SpeedMatters

Posted by: Jay Castro
AdSense team

The Need for Mobile Speed

The Need for Mobile Speed

Dark.net    September 08, 2016    Comment   

Cross-posted from the DoubleClick for Publishers Blog
Today, we’re excited to share insights from a new study on how mobile speed can impact user engagement and publisher revenue. As people’s expectations for mobile experiences have grown, simply loading on a mobile device is no longer enough. Mobile sites must be fast and relevant.
Unfortunately, based on our analysis of 10,000+ mobile web domains, we found that most mobile sites don’t meet this bar: the average load time for mobile sites is 19 seconds over 3G connections.¹ That’s about as long as it takes to sing the entire alphabet song!²
Slow loading sites frustrate users and negatively impact publishers. While there are several factors that impact revenue, our model projects that publishers whose mobile sites load in 5 seconds earn up to 2x more mobile ad revenue than those whose sites load in 19 seconds.³ The study also observed 25% higher ad viewability⁴ and 70% longer average sessions⁵ for sites that load in 5 seconds vs 19 seconds.
That’s why we’ve been so focused on mobile-first solutions to help publishers succeed — from our participation in the nearly year old AMP project, to our launch of a scalable native advertising solution, to our investment in products that help publishers increase revenue while minimizing latency.
Never before has mobile speed been more important.

3...2...1… gone

Slow page load times are a big blocker:

• 53% of visits are likely to be abandoned if pages take longer than 3 seconds to load⁶
• One out of two people expect a page to load in less than 2 seconds⁷
• 46% of people say that waiting for pages to load is what they dislike the most when browsing the web on mobile devices⁸

We all know this first hand — if you’re looking for something on your phone, how long will you wait if the page takes more than a few seconds to load?
The three major factors that slow down mobile sites are file size, the number of server requests, and the order in which the different elements of the page are loaded. We found:

• The average size of the content on mobile sites is 1.49 MB, which takes 7 seconds to load over 3G connections⁹
• Mobile pages make an average of 214 server requests, and nearly half of all server requests are ad-related¹⁰

Getting up to speed

There are many tools out there to help diagnose the problem and fix it. We recommend a 3-step process to speed up mobile sites:

• Assess the current performance of the site using tools like PageSpeed Insights, Mobile-Friendly Test, and Web Page Test.
• Execute changes that eliminate bulky content, reduce the number of server requests, and consolidate data and analytics tags. Switch up the element order and select the minimum number of pieces to show above the fold first — styling, javascript logic, and images accessed after the tap, scroll or swipe can be loaded later.
• Monitor performance after making changes and run A/B tests to regularly audit the setup of your site, flagging and removing anything that adds latency.

You should also investigate open source solutions like Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) and Progressive Web Apps.
To learn more about our study and the steps you can take to improve the experience on your mobile site, check out our guide, “The Need for Mobile Speed” [g.co/MobileSpeed]

^{1 Webpagetest.org, Sampled 11.8K global mWeb homepage domains loaded using a fast 3G connection timing first view only (no cached resources), February 2016
2 NPR, “Keep Flu At Bay With A Song”, April 2009
3 Google Data, Aggregated, anonymized Google Analytics and DoubleClick AdExchange data from a sample of mWeb sites opted into sharing benchmark data, n=4.5K, Global, June 2015 - May 2016
4 DoubleClick for Publishers, Google Active View ad viewability for 10.7K mWeb homepage domains with >70% measurable ad viewability, Global, February 2016
5 Google Data, Aggregated, anonymized Google Analytics data from a sample of mWeb sites opted into sharing benchmark data, n=3.5K, Global, March 2016
6 Google Data, Aggregated, anonymized Google Analytics data from a sample of mWeb sites opted into sharing benchmark data, n=3.7K, Global, March 2016
7 Akamai Technologies - 2014 Consumer Web Performance Expectations Survey
8 Google Webmaster Central Blog, "#MobileMadness: a campaign to help you go mobile-friendly", April, 2015
9 Webpagetest.org, Sampled 11.8K global mWeb homepage domains loaded using a fast 3G connection timing first view only (no cached resources), February 2016
10 Webpagetest.org, Sampled 11.8K global mWeb homepage domains loaded using a fast 3G connection timing first view only (no cached resources), February 2016}

AMP your content: A preview of AMP'd results in Search

AMP your content: A preview of AMP'd results in Search

Dark.net    Agustus 02, 2016    Comment   

Cross-posted from the Webmaster Central blog

It's 2016 and it's hard to believe that browsing the web on a mobile phone can still feel so slow with users abandoning sites that just don't load quickly. To us -- and many in the industry -- it was clear that something needed to change. That was why we started working with the Accelerated Mobile Pages Project, an open source initiative to improve the mobile web experience for everyone.

Less than six months ago, we started sending people to AMP pages in the “Top stories” section of the Google Search Results page on mobile phones. Since then, we’ve seen incredible global adoption of AMP that has gone beyond the news industry to include e-commerce, entertainment, travel, recipe sites and so on. To date we have more than 150 million AMP docs in our index, with over 4 million new ones being added every week. As a result, today we’re sharing an early preview of our expanded AMP support across the entire search results page --not just the “Top stories” section.

To clarify, this is not a ranking change for sites. As a result of the growth of AMP beyond publishers, we wanted to make it easier for people to access this faster experience. The preview shows an experience where web results that that have AMP versions are labeled with . When you tap on these results, you will be directed to the corresponding AMP page within the AMP viewer. 

AMP in Search Preview

Try it out for yourself on your mobile device by navigating to g.co/ampdemo. Once you’re in the demo, search for something like “french toast recipe” or music lyrics by your favorite artist to experience how AMP can provide a speedier reading experience on the mobile web. The “Who” page on AMPProject.org has a flavor of some of the sites already creating AMP content.

We’re starting with a preview to get feedback from users, developers and sites so that we can create a better Search experience when we make this feature more broadly available later this year. In addition, we want to give everyone who might be interested in “AMPing up” their content enough time to learn how to implement AMP and to see how their content appears in the demo. And beyond developing AMP pages, we invite everyone to get involved and contribute to the AMP Project.

We can’t wait to hear from you as we work together to speed up the web. And as always, if you have any questions, please visit our webmaster forums.

Posted by Nick Zukoski, Software Engineer