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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







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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The new Google+ Share button is available to all publishers, globally. Try adding it to your site now - just visit Google Developers to get the code.

Follow the conversation on Google+.

Posted by Rick Borovoy, Product Manager, Google+
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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 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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Mashable has learned by doing, and that all started by creating a Google+ page. “We tried a lot of things early on, and were able to catch on quickly to what was working and what wasn’t, and have been able to shift our strategy pretty well from there,” Meghan says. Some of what she’s learned is below:
We think people can learn a lot from how Mashable has built a strong audience on Google+ through its use of in-depth posts, interactive Hangouts, and creative promotions, including the Google+ badge and +1 button. As Meghan notes, “Our community was very excited about this network, and we told them, let’s connect and let’s figure out...how we can both, you as a user and us as a brand, get the most out of it.”

Follow Mashable on Google+ and download the full case study here.

Posted by Rico Farmer, Product Marketing Manager
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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
Goal #2: Drive engagement
Goal #3: Maximize revenue
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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Watch this webinar to learn:

1. Why go mobile?
Your users have gone mobile in a big way, hear why you must follow suit.
2. Tips for building mobile sites   
Mobile is different.  Learn 10 practical tips for building engaging, uniquely mobile experiences.
3. Best practices in action
Hear from web publisher FindTheBest about the success they’ve seen from going mobile.
4. How to get started
Google is here to help. Learn about tools we’ve created to get you started on the path to delighting
your users and maximizing your mobile revenue.

Interested in learning more? Watch the recorded webinar and download the slides.

Posted by Tuyen Nguyen - Mobile Publisher Advocate
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With a background in database and computer science, Internet marketing, and search engine optimization, Kooshiar Azimian is a self-described wearer of many hats. In early 2011, he channeled his diverse expertise to create Concertboom, a comprehensive concert database. Concertboom is monetized through ticket sales and Google AdSense, serving more than four million ad impressions monthly. “AdSense creates the least amount of ad waste — the advertiser gets the most value out of their ads, and the publisher gets the most money,” says Kooshiar, recalling his decision to use AdSense. As traffic increased to one million unique visitors per month, Kooshiar was looking for new ways to increase revenue from AdSense. 

A simple change brings booming revenue
Initially, Kooshiar showed just one 300x250 ad on some of his pages. A few months later, he received a personalized email from the Google AdSense team, who periodically share optimization tips to help publishers maximize revenue. The email suggested adding an ad unit or two, for a maximum of three units per page.

This surprised Kooshiar, who had previously thought one ad unit per page was the maximum allowed. “I was also a little skeptical about losing page quality, and I didn’t want to have to change my interface to serve another ad. But I said, ‘Let’s give it a shot.’ I added one unit and the result was shocking. My revenue more than quadrupled in the first week,” he recalls. 

Quality matters most
Given the benefits of this simple implementation, Kooshiar recommends other publishers give it a try, but not at the expense of site quality and user experience. “A quality site serves the right content, especially if your audience comes from search engines. Don’t trick your audience into content you don’t have. Provide content that is accurate, updated and served in a timely fashion with nice, clean graphics. Be sure to maintain page quality and a quick load time. Know your audience and consider which ad formats work best with your content. Also, make sure you’re not compromising your site aesthetic, so your website doesn’t just look like ad junk,” he advises.

Kooshiar also points out that since he maintained his focus on quality, he did not experience any change in his search ranking after adding a new ad unit.

A solid venture
After witnessing his revenue quadruple, Kooshiar is seeing Concertboom in a new light. “Before, this site was just extra cash for me, and now it’s a growing business. I can start hiring people to help me create more content,” he says. “This AdSense optimization has changed the whole dynamic of Concertboom.”

Posted by Caroline Halpin, AdSense Optimization Specialist



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