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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 l...

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 viewability 4 and 70% longer average sessions 5 for sites that load in 5 secon...

Throughout the summer, fans are looking for great content, regardless of whether they’re viewing it from a desktop, tablet or mobile device. Did you know that 1/3 of followers used more than one screen to follow the 2012 Olympic games? [1] With this in mind, think about whether your content is mobile-optimized and easily accessible for your users in the moments that matter. If they receive a link on their smartphone but are unable to view the content because it’s not mobile-optimized, it’s easy for them to feel frustrated with the poor user experience. On the other hand, If the users are delighted with the content and their first visit to your site is a positive one, they’re more likely to share your content and come back again. If you already have a mobile optimized site, don’t forget that you can grow your earnings potential by understanding which mobile ad sizes are most effective for you. Finally don't forget these 4 important tips to maximize your earnings with AdSense: Swap o...

Social media is more than just vacation photos and stories about babies, it’s about sharing experiences and creating interactions with people. Content on social media can instantly reach millions of users and create thousands of online stories. Do you remember the social media storm that Ellen DeGeneres created with a single photo? Her selfie from the 2014 Oscars started a global conversation and has since been added to Google’s 2014 web culture guide. Her content holds the win for the most retweeted tweet with more than 3M retweets, 6.8M site embeds, and even temporarily led to Twitter going down. Big events like the Oscars create opportunities for publishers to interact with users through both original content and viral content. This summer, users will be searching, sharing, and consuming content like never before. Be sure to examine your content strategy, and find ways to spark conversations on social channels or, contribute to an existing digital conversation. How can AdSense Pub...

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 ...

It’s official, #hashtags have taken over the internet. Much like memes, gifs, and audio-less fast motion cooking instructional videos, #hashtags fill up social media news feeds. However, unlike the other popular content types, what’s unique to #hashtags is that they organize conversations across the web. Even Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake had something to say about #hashtags. #Hashtags started around 2007 on Twitter, and have rapidly grown into a common medium for users to express their feelings or interests primarily on social networks. As the summer of sport kicks off, it’s a good idea for you to consider incorporating #hashtags into your content strategy as a key ingredient to #drawthecrowds. #Hashtags are quite simple to use and can attract new users to your content when you understand how they work. Essentially, when the pound/hash sign is used in front of a group of words it automatically turns that group of words into a searchable link. This transforms those keywords into...

Users access your content from many different screens like phones, phablets, tablets, desktops, game consoles, TVs, and even wearables. The size and type of screens that people use are continually changing, so it’s important that your site, content, and ads adapt to any screen size. Savvy publishers have responded by building a single “responsive” site instead of creating different sites for different screens. These sites use responsive design principles and a single set of HTML/CSS to control user experiences on multiple screens, streamlining publisher operations. Adapting content to different screens though, isn’t enough. To ensure that users have seamless experiences with ads as well, many publishers are using AdSense ad units that are fully responsive . These units automatically adapt to the size of the screen on which your site is being viewed. And if you find that our responsive ad code doesn't do everything you need, you may modify your ad code to better meet the requirement...

What’s ad viewability and how is it measured? In this post we'll look at those questions and offer four ways to make your ads more viewable and profitable on mobile screens. What’s viewability? Most of us know that ads used to be measured by impressions: if a page loaded, and the ad was anywhere on that page, that counted. There was an obvious problem with this: if the ad was below the fold of the page, and the user didn't scroll down to see it, there wasn’t a chance for that ad to be seen. And ads that can’t be seen, don’t deliver results and can’t drive the impact that Advertisers are looking for. Advertisers today want more transparency and effectiveness, and that's where ad viewability comes in. Now, by Media Rating Council and IAB standards, a display ad is counted as viewable when at least 50% of the ad is within the viewable space on the user’s screen for one second or more. That means an ad unit on the first screen ("above the fold") will be counted as ...

However important mobile is to your business today, it will become even more critical tomorrow. That's true whether you’re blogging about your favorite sports team, building the site for your community theater, or selling products to potential customers. Your visitors simply must have a great experience when they visit your site on their mobile devices. Research has found that 61% of users will leave a mobile site if they don’t see what they are looking for right away.  Sites that are not mobile-friendly expect users to pinch, slide, and zoom in order to consume content. It’s a frustrating experience when users expect to find the information they’re looking for right away, but are presented with obstacles to obtain that information. This is what causes users to abandon sites.  To create a mobile-friendly site, follow these three rules: Make it fast. Research shows that 74% of people will abandon a mobile site that takes more than 5 seconds to load. Make it easy. Research ...

Using the Internet on mobile phones is now the standard. 60% of Internet users access the Internet through their phones, 94% of American smartphone users search for local information on their phones, and 77% of mobile searches occur at places where desktop computers are available (according to the eMarketer Global Mobile Landscape 2015 report). For publishers, this new reality means that your sites have to be mobile-friendly. It's the only way to offer your existing users a good mobile experience and to hold onto new users who are visiting your site for the first time. That said, a mobile-optimized site alone isn't enough to compete in the new multi-screen world. Optimizing performance for faster page loads and easier navigation will keep users coming back and drive your business forward in a competitive marketplace. Slow-loading sites, broken video players and redirects were among the top frustrations reported by 570 respondents in a recent Google poll when asked about the...

We’ve all been there. You’re trying to send an article from your phone to a friend, or you’re playing a mobile game while waiting in line for a movie, when you accidentally touch an ad on your screen. You weren’t interested in the ad -- heck, you didn’t even have time to see what it was for -- but now you’re hitting the back button to get back to what you were doing. Not only do accidental clicks like these annoy users, but left unaddressed, they can drive down the value of ads. Over the last four years, we’ve introduced a series of protections across mobile web and mobile apps to prevent accidental clicks like these on ads. Today we are continuing this commitment to protecting users and advertisers by extending accidental click protections to native ad formats. Native ads were developed to help publishers and developers implement ads that complement the look and feel of their content. Since our teams started instituting various click protections, we’ve learned quite a bit along the...

Today, we’re excited to introduce AdSense’s next generation ads. Page-level ads is a family of ad formats that offer a new and innovative way to help you earn money from your mobile content. With Page-level ads, you place the same ad code once on each page that you want to show ads. They’re designed to show automatically at the right time and in the right format -  potentially increasing your earnings without interfering with your users’ mobile experience. The benefits of Page-level ads include: Optimized ads that show when they’re likely to perform well and provide a good user experience. One-time set-up that only requires you to place the Page-level ad code once on each page you’d like the ads shown.  Ability to adjust the settings in your account and to enable new ad formats without having to change the code on your site. Additional ads on your site that don’t count towards your AdSense per page ad limit. Watch the video below for a quick view of Page-level ads: Curren...

This is the third in our series of posts about micro- and macro-moments. In parts one and two we talked about how to think about these moments of intent and find out what they are for your audience. Today let's talk about what to do about it. 1) A good place to start is with a moments map . This is where you identify the set of moments you absolutely want to win or can't afford to lose. Examine all phases of the consumer journey for your business, and look for the moments when people want to find inspiration, learn about something you’re reporting, make a social statement, or anything in between. Breaking news stories are an example of moments you can’t afford to lose Suppose you have a news site and a user visits your review of a restaurant as they walk through town. They may just want to know if you gave it two or four stars… or they may want to know your reviewer's in-depth thoughts and recommendations for each course. How you deliver this information will make a big ...

In the last post we talked about the rise of micro-moments . But what about macro-moments? According to this great response to micro-moments and our own interpretations, the three most important types of macro-moments are: Affinity Moments , when fans act in unison in support of their favorite team or musician.  Buddy Moments , when friends connect and bond everything they see, hear or read -- whether that's a live concert or a funny cat video on YouTube. Deep Knowledge Moments , when someone wants to learn deeply about a topic (maybe political issues or financial news) so they can share that knowledge later. In essence, micro-moments happen on the go and with intent, while macro-moments are more tribal or community-based. They're deep-dive media experiences that impact individuals in ways micro-moments can’t. Publishers should remember that preferences and loyalty are shaped by both micro and macro moments. The brands that do the best job of addressing our needs in each mome...

For a long time, we've all heard that we're perched on the edge of a new golden age of digital, like divers on a cliff. By now it seems clear that we have well and truly jumped off that edge and are swimming, frolicking (and sometimes drowning) in that futuristic sea of digital, connectivity, cams, drones, the Internet of Things… and especially mobile. Today, we'd like to kick off a three-part blog series that will look at how publishers can do more frolicking and less failing in this digital sea. In particular, we'll look at what we call digital moments that matter, and the best ways for publishers to think about those moments. Part one today is Micro-Moments for Publishers, to be followed by From Micro to Macro and then part 3, Acting On Your Moments. Where to start? In an age where people create and consume their very own newsrooms on a daily basis, expectations for content are growing higher and higher. Just a few examples: People over 35 tend to print out recipes, ...

Speed matters, particularly on mobile devices. People are likely to abandon websites after just three seconds if the content doesn’t load quickly. This is bad for the user trying to access content, and also for the publisher whose business depends on users engaging with content. That’s why, last October, we joined others across the industry to announce the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project, an open source initiative to make the mobile web as fast as possible. Earlier today, Google announced that web pages created using AMP will appear when relevant in the Top Stories section of the search results page, giving users a lightning-fast experience --- early tests have found that AMP pages load an average of four times faster and use 10 times less data than equivalent non-AMP pages. A key goal of the AMP Project is to ensure that publishers’ existing business models are supported. To that end, AMP in Search will have what could be termed as version one of some new features aimed at he...

Have you noticed the new look of text ads on your mobile site? We’ve given them a makeover. This new format allows for higher performance with a more beautiful and user-friendly appearance. The text ads feature elements such as a shaded background and a centered button which bring together the parts of the ad into a cohesive whole. The look and feel is inspired by material design, like the richer text ads that we launched earlier this year. To see these new mobile text ads, choose to show both text and display ads on your site, if you haven’t already done so. We’d love to hear your thoughts on this new mobile ad design. Share your comments below and let us know! Posted by Clyde Li AdSense Software Engineer

We live in an exciting time, where the number and variety of connected devices are growing at a rapid pace. People are coming online for the first time, and they’re accessing the Web through a mobile device. Having a solid multi-screen strategy will help you prepare for the next wave of mobile web users. By following the simple steps below, we can help set you up for success on mobile web and answer questions like: How will my users react?, how do I keep my brand identity?, and what will happen to my earnings? 1. Test your site  Start by understanding how your site currently runs on mobile devices. Use Google PageSpeed Insights to see how your site is performing on mobile and identify your site’s most crucial needs and what to take care of first. 2. Pick your strategy Next, it’s time to make a choice on which multi-screen strategy to move forward with. The most common solutions are: Separate mobile/tablet site Responsive web design Dynamic serving The choice is yours and all strat...