Tag Archives: AdSense

Optimize your mobile page speed to keep users coming back

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 their experience browsing the Web on mobile devices.

Given the instant nature of mobile, the competition to capture the attention of users has intensified. On average, 74% of people will abandon a mobile site if it takes longer than five seconds to load, yet the average mobile page on the web still takes 6 to 10 seconds to load, according to Kinsta. Every one-second delay in page load decreases customer satisfaction by 16% and page views by 11%, according to Aberdeen Group Research.

If you want to improve your mobile site's performance, consider the following recommendations:

Render blocking resources - There’s too much external JS/CSS that needs to be loaded before the user can see anything. Load only what's absolutely needed to serve the user's query. Async everything where possible.
Browser caching - Keep resources that your page depends on on your device for as long as possible.
Optimize images - Don't send large images meant for desktop to your phone. Also use image compression tech in your CMS, which can mean up to 90% data savings.
Minify JavaScript - Trim the fat. You should consider keeping your more complex page logic secret or simplify the logic if you only need simple functions like to power a drop-down, an image gallery and/or some share buttons.

The ideal load time for a mobile site is one second. To avoid frustrating users with slow pages, optimize your critical rendering path to unblock rendering, and enable progressive rendering to do its work in the background.

A fast site leads to easier discovery, better user retention and more and longer site visits. We hope that these recommendations will move you closer to your page speed goal and give all of your users a smooth and enjoyable experience.

Be sure to follow us on Twitter and Google+ to engage in our conversation around the #MobileWeb and help our users #SeetheFullPicture on mobile phones.

Posted by: Jason Le

Google AdSense Team, South East Asia Lead

Source: Inside AdSense

Ads on Accelerated Mobile Pages: Where Faster is Better

Cross-posted from the AMP Project blog

When the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) team set out to help make mobile experiences great for everybody, the objective wasn’t just to improve a user’s engagement with content. We knew the experience people had with ads was equally important to help publishers fund the great content we all love to read.

The AMP team laid out four core principles that would guide the innovation on the AMP ads roadmap and get us to a world where ads are as fast and engaging as the content we value.

Faster is better
‘Beautiful’ matters
Security is a must
We’re better together

We recently took a moment to review the progress made and see how ads on AMP are doing. We compared ad performance on AMP and non-AMP mobile pages across 150 publishers (large corporations and small businesses in different geographic regions) on our programmatic platforms. The preliminary results are encouraging.

Compared to non-AMP pages, ads on AMP have led to:

80%+ of the publishers realizing higher viewability rates
90%+ of the publishers driving greater engagement with higher CTRs
The majority of the publishers seeing higher eCPMs (Impact and proportion of lift varies by region and how optimized the non-AMP sites are)

We have also received positive feedback from a number of publishers with varying mobile web advertising business models:

'So far, AMP has performed well against a number of metrics for advertising effectiveness and revenue. One encouraging stat is that we have seen an increase in viewability of ads within the AMP environment. As the industry moves more towards this as a measurement tool it is important we focus on optimizing for this metric. We are encouraged by the open approach to both publishers and our tech partners and look forward to what’s to come'

— Noah Szubski, Chief Product Officer, DailyMail and EliteDaily

‘It is still very early days, but AMP has performed well to date from both direct and indirect monetization sources. We've been able to extend all of our custom ad products to AMP and have enabled it within our premium ad marketplace, Concert. We see AMP as a perfect intersection of two core tenets of Vox Media - fast mobile web experiences and ads that perform. We are encouraged by all of the metrics and are looking forward to continuing to grow this important channel”

— Joe Alicata, Vice President of Revenue Products & Operations, Vox Media

“We’ve seen a 90% decrease in page latency, 96% decrease in unfilled
impressions, 65% increase in ad engagement and 32% increase in eCPM. Perceived load time improved from approximately 17 seconds to 2-3 seconds.”

— Conor Beck, Director of political news network TownHall Media

While this makes for a promising start, we’ve barely scratched the surface of what’s possible with ads in AMP. There’s much work ahead for us and the rest of the industry — including our third party ad tech partners — to make advertising experiences on the mobile web as great as content experiences with AMP. We’re both committed to and excited by that.

If you’re curious about what lies ahead for the broader AMP project, check out the AMP roadmap.

Posted by:

Craig DiNatali, Director, Global Partnerships Google

Nitin Kashyap, Product Manager, Google

Source: Inside AdSense

[eBook] Learn how to increase audience engagement

Did you know that roughly 61% of users abandon a site if they don't find what they’re looking for right away?¹ As hard as you work to get visitors to your site, you have to work even harder to keep them there.

Unfortunately, there isn’t a clever hack to keeping your users engaged. However, if you understand the intent of your users and provide unique content that’s relevant to their interests, you’ll be on your way to increasing engagement on your site.

Download our guide to audience engagement to learn more about best practices and tips to drive better results for both your users and business. Get your free copy today.

We’d love to hear your feedback on how this guide, connect with us on Google+ and Twitter using #AdSenseGuide.

Posted by Jay Castro

from the AdSense team

@jayciro

^{1) Think with Google, What users want from mobile sites}

Source: Inside AdSense

Preventing accidental clicks for a better mobile ads experience

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 way. Here are two insights among many that guide our ongoing work.

Fast clicks are not real clicks
A professional baseball player has about 680ms¹ to react and swing at a baseball thrown at 90mph. That’s fast, even for a professional who’s paying close attention to hitting the ball. We think it’s virtually impossible for someone to read, understand, and take action on an ad in that amount of time.

Figure 1: A click is ignored when a user accidentally fast clicks on an interstitial ad

Not surprisingly, we found super-fast clicks on ads to provide little to no value to advertisers. That’s why we ignore fast clicks that we detect to be accidental immediately upon ad load. Rather than our ads causing surprise low quality clicks, users can continue on uninterrupted.

Edge clicks lack value

If you’ve used a mobile device, you know fat-fingers are a reality of touchscreens: the average fingerpad is roughly 50px large when pressing down.² When we’re swiping, pinching, and poking our screens, it’s easy to accidentally touch the edge of an ad that appears unexpectedly or is placed too close to tappable controls on your screen.

Figure 2: A click is ignored when a user misses adjacent content and accidentally hits the ad

When we compared the performance of clicks from the edge of ads to those coming from the interior region, we found dramatically higher conversion rates and user intentionality on clicks toward the middle of ad units. A few years ago, we started to expand these protections across mobile placements resulting in ad clicks that are more intentional.

The overall benefits of click protections

Fast clicks and edge clicks are just two of the user interaction issues we prevent in order to deliver value to advertisers. By expanding protections like these to native ad formats on mobile, we observe conversion rates increase over 10% on average with minimal impact to long term publisher revenue. This combined with our previous efforts has greatly improved the experience with mobile ads for users and advertisers.

The protections we’ve put in place across mobile web and mobile apps prevent tens of millions of accidental clicks per day, saving users tens of thousands of hours. When we look at the effect for advertisers in mobile apps, we observe double the value per click. We work hard to ensure that the clicks advertisers are charged for are more meaningful, and we hope sharing insight on these protections helps raise awareness and guide the wider advertising ecosystem. Plus, we really love playing games on our phones too, and want to make sure that we’re only taken to an advertiser’s page when we mean to go there.

Posted by Alex Jacobson, Product Manager, Ad Traffic Quality

Footnotes:

^{1) 90ft/132 ft per second = 681ms, 132 ft per second = 90mph}

^{2) http://touchlab.mit.edu/publications/2003_009.pdf}