With more options available it’s important to carefully consider the impact of blocking, or allowing, a category. Blocking a general category could lower your potential earnings as the affected advertisers’ bids are excluded from the auction. On the other hand, with more subcategories available you may have the opportunity to be more granular and pick the subcategory that most closely matches the type of ad you want to prevent -- minimizing the negative impact on your earnings.
We know how important it is to have control over the ads that appear on your site, and this update is adding to a set of controls available in AdSense already. We’d love to hear what you think about these update so please leave your feedback in the comments field below.
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.
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Posted by Jay Castro, from the AdSense Team
1. Google Developers
2. Google and kissmetrics
3. DoubleClick, “The Need for Mobile Speed”, , September 2016
For the seventh installment of the #SuccessStack, we’ll explore the topic of viewability for video ads and take a look at how mastering this could boost your earnings from video ads on your site.
Device: Video ads are more easily viewed on mobile (73%) or tablet (81%) devices than desktop (64%).1
Location: 76% of non viewable video ads were never on screen at all, for instance because they are on tabs situated behind the one the user is looking at.2 Additionally, videos positioned in the center of the page and towards the top are the most visible locations on the page.3
Player Size: Bigger players deliver better viewability. The most popular player size of 300x250 offers only 20% viewability whereas the 848x477 is the second most popular size but offers a huge improvement of 89% viewability.4
What can you do to improve viewability in your video content?
Choose a bigger player: Larger player sizes have been shown to have a positive correlation with viewability and other key metrics that advertisers care about, so advertisers are increasingly targeting them. In Q1 2016 on DBM, growth in spend on large players outpaced all other player sizes combined by 17%.5
Spread your content: The average viewability of video ads across the web is 66%, whereas YouTube offers 93%.6 Hosting your video content on YouTube as well as on your site could allow you to benefit from this uplift.
Be more mobile: Mobile friendly sites that encourage traffic from mobile devices and tablets can increase viewability for video ads. For example YouTube viewability rises to 95% on mobile devices.7
Give video content top billing: As we’ve seen above, placing content at the top of the page in the center and using a larger player size both increase viewability. So give your video content the highest possible profile on the page to increase viewability.
Next steps
Alongside your work on video viewability, you’ll want to make sure you have the right tools in place for managing the video ads you serve. To make sure you’ve got the right tools in place, have a chat with one of our experts. They can offer a personalized consultation to help you make the right choice for your business. Book a slot.
