Google Data

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:

1. Swap out the 320×50 ad units for 320×100 for a potential RPM increase.
2. Place a 320×100 ad unit just above the fold or peek the 300×250 — that is, place a small portion of the ad unit just above the fold (ATF).
3. Use the 300×250 ad unit below the fold (BTF) mixed in with your content.
4. Prevent accidental clicks on enhanced features in text ads by moving ad units 150 pixels away from your content.

Is your site mobile ready for the summer? 

Download the #AdSenseGuide to Mobile Web Success to learn more. Are you new to AdSense? If so, sign up now and turn your passion into profit.

Posted by Barbara Sarti, AdSense Account Associate

[1] Google internal data

Strategically place your ads to improve viewability.

According to a Think With Google study, “56.1% of all impressions are not seen.” So when determining the placement of your Matched content units, think about which spot(s) would improve viewability and engagement. To increase these metrics we recommend placing this unit directly below your article and either above or below your ad unit. This way readers can easily click on the next piece of content that is interesting to them. Placing it directly below the article often drives higher click-through rates (CTR) than other placements.

Since Matched content units help your users learn more about similar content, you should think about placing it at points in your website where your user will engage more with the content.

Track performance.
To determine if your placement is effective for your site, be sure to track the performance of your Matched content units. Understanding performance is key to maximizing your ad revenue and satisfying your readers. On your Performance reports tab, you’ll see an updated way to view two metric families — the Overview metric family and the Matched content metric family:
Overview metric family

Selecting this metric family will allow you to understand how much you’re earning from your Matched content units and how these units compare to other ad units on your site. You can also review metrics such as impressions, clicks, and estimated earnings.

Matched content metric family

To get a more detailed performance of your ads and recommendations, use this metric family to view metrics like total impressions, ad impressions, ad clicks, ad revenue per thousand impressions (RPM), and recommendation clicks. Since this metric family is more specific, you should be able to use this data to optimize the ad unit itself.

To see all metric offerings and how they work, take a look at the AdSense Help Center.

By optimizing your Matched content units, you will allow your readers to learn more about topics they are interested in and potentially increase your site’s engagement rate and revenue. If you do not currently have Matched content but are looking to add the feature, determine if you’re eligible by viewing our Help Center article.

Posted by Bserat Ghebremicael
From the AdSense team

Viewability is a trendy word in the advertising world. This popular metric has become key for advertisers to measure the success of an ad campaign. But what is Viewability?

Viewability is the measurement of a viewable ad impression, meaning that it has appeared within a user’s browser and had the opportunity to be seen. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) defines a viewable impression as an ad that meets the following criteria:

50% of the ad’s pixels are visible in the browser window for a continuous one second.

Think with Google says “If an ad isn’t seen, it can’t have an impact, change perception, or build brand trust. That’s why measuring viewability matters.” For AdSense publishers, this means that increased viewability may encourage greater investments from advertisers.

Global events are opportunities for advertisers to connect with larger audiences and create brand awareness. For advertisers with these goals in mind, viewability matters. Here are a few resources to help get your ads seen this summer.

• Viewability for Spotlight for Sellers
• Four ways to boost your ad viewability on mobile
• 5 Factors of Display Viewability.

See Google’s Active View in action and move towards delivering more viewable impressions this summer.

New to AdSense? Sign up now and start drawing the crowd.

Posted by Barbara Sarti, from the AdSense team

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 Publishers participate in big events? If you’re new to AdSense, you can sign up now and turn your passion into profit.

1. Include editorial coverage around topical events.
2. Make sure your content is easy to consume and share.
3. Create a social media strategy around a big event.

Here are four tips to help jumpstart your social media strategy:

1. Know your audience. Trigger an emotional response from your viewers by humanizing your brand.
2. Be social to win on social by creating relationships with your users.
3. Don’t be afraid to follow the leaders and the trends. If there’s social proof behind it, do it.
4. Use tools to help you create great content.

More on the fourth tip, here are a few tools to help you #drawthecrowds through social channels:

• Buffer is a well-known tool used by social media marketers. It helps streamline your social media management.
• Pablo is a tool created by Buffer that is “the simplest way to create beautiful images that fit every social network perfectly”.
• Canva is another image creating tool that can help you create visual content on a budget.
• Feedly can help you organize and read relevant content in your industry to help fuel your content creation.
• Google Trends is a widely used tool to help you identify key trends happening around the world.
• IFTTT is a popular tool used to streamline many tasks. For example, here’s a pre-built recipe that will automate the process of tweeting each new wordpress blog post.

According to the New York Times, 68% of users share [online content] to give people a better sense of who they are and what they care about. To amplify your content this summer, be sure to create content that resonates with your audience.

New to AdSense? Sign up now and turn your passion into profit. Let us know your thoughts on Twitter @AdSense.

Posted by Barbara Sarti and Jay Castro from the AdSense team

Building a strong brand experience comes down to four things:

A brand’s voice means more than just the tone you use in your content and communications. It also applies to style, colors, and graphics. Is your brand bubbly, bright, and fun? Or is it straight to the point with clean lines and a matter-of-fact tone? Often times, the type of product or services you’re selling as well as your company philosophy can help you determine an appropriate tone. There’s no secret for determining what an audience will respond best to, as all styles can be effective in their own way. So choose what works for you and your creative vision.

Once you’ve laid the groundwork for what defines your brand, it’s important to stick to these principles. This applies to your website, emails, social media posts, and any other place users come into contact with your brand. Taking the time to stick to an easy to read font, finding a color scheme that draws the eye and guides your readers, or having consistent verbiage can do wonders to further cement your brand’s presence and make it memorable.

3. Know your audience

While it’s important to decide what your brand is, it’s also important to know your audience, their interests, and how they prefer to communicate. For example, if you’re targeting busy, high-level decision makers, they may prefer something short and sweet—perhaps bullet points are the way to go. If you’re targeting creative individuals, it may be worth investing in a personalized logo and site. Highly visual assets such as videos would also be a great way to go. The more you know and cater to your intended audience, the more successful your brand will be.

To understand your users’ interests, use Google Analytics to view your bounce rates, time on pages, and pageviews—three indicators of user engagement. Understand where you stand in comparison to other sites and, if needed, improve on these rates by creating a stronger connection between your site and your audience, i.e. creating content relevant to your audience’s interests.

4. Prove your Worth

Having a particular value that you provide to your customers (not to be mistaken for price) can help separate your brand from competitors. For instance, what do you provide to your customers that is different or special? This can include everything from innovative products to great customer service and can also be an emotional value (think Kleenex being associated with comfort and support). Just make sure to deliver on any and all promises made on your site.

To learn more about how to develop your user experience, check out the AdSense Guide to Audience Engagement.

Posted by Jay Castro
From the AdSense team
@jayciro

When you know what the world’s talking about, you can participate in the conversation. But the online world moves quickly, so if you want to keep the crowds coming back to your site, your content needs to move with it.

Google’s News Lab is Google’s effort to empower innovation at the intersection of technology and media. Its mission is to collaborate with journalists and entrepreneurs to build the future of media. An important part of that is ensuring that Google tools are available and easy-to-use for journalists around the world.

Google News Lab offers lessons on how to use Google tools relevant to publishers’ needs. Say something newsworthy at a sports event is grabbing headlines, Google tools can ensure that you’re informed. It’s then over to you to draw on this story and incorporate it into your content.

A great way to keep your finger on the pulse is Google Alerts, a tool that allows you to follow developing stories from your inbox. Simply select the topics you want to follow and have emails sent directly to your inbox any time that Google finds new results for this topic.

Google tools are designed to help you create great content. The more topical your content, the more likely you are to keep drawing the crowds.

Get started with Google News Lab today.

New to AdSense? Sign up now and turn your passion into profit

Posted by Jay Castro,
From the AdSense team
@jayciro

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. 

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

If you’re looking to #drawthecrowd to your site this summer, be sure that you’re familiar with the top-searched keywords and have a plan in place to create relevant content for it. For example, leverage Google Trends to identify the trending searches around Halloween. Using this insight, content can transition from ideas to evergreen articles that resonate with your users year after year.

If you’re looking for content ideas, think about this summer and cultural events the world will be searching to stay connected and informed about. Several big sporting events are happening this summer that will likely have a good amount of search interest considering past trends. For example, football related searches grew 180% during the soccer World Cup in 2014.[1]

When building your content strategy and timelines, think about important dates, specific games and popular keywords. Think with Google released an infographic showcasing that 70% of game-related searches happen in the month surrounding game day vs. the day itself. Their research shows that these events are more like a month-long series of digital moments–each one an opportunity to connect with fans through search, mobile, and video. 

Here are a few search related resources to help you optimize your site and your content: 

• Learn how Google Search works
• Mobile search engine optimization tips 

Regardless of what type of site you have, ask yourself if you’re providing your users with the content they need and want. 

New to AdSense? Sign up now and turn your passion into profit 

Posted by Barbara Sarti,  from the AdSense Team

[1] https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/intl/es-419/articles/marketing-copa-america-latam.html

Videos are easily consumable from desktop and mobile devices to social media platforms and email communications. Studies from the 2012 Olympics showed that 50% of users either watched Olympics related online video for the first time or watched more online video than their usual habits.

Video content can be incorporated into your content strategy in two ways:

1. Create, share and then embed your own original video content onto your site.
2. Embed public video content onto your site.

The first option may lead to greater revenue gains for your site through the use of pre-roll, mid-roll or post-roll ads. However beneficial this may sound, this option is far more resource intensive than the second and requires an upfront investment to create original video content. YouTube is a popular platform for you to upload and share your content. YouTube has over a billion users – almost one-third of all people on the Internet – and every day people watch hundreds of millions of hours on YouTube and generate billions of views.[1]

If you choose to create and monetize original video content as an additional format for your audience to consume your unique perspective, check out these resources.

• YouTube Creator Hub is the destination for resources to help you make great videos, find your audience, and grow your YouTube channel.
• YouTube Audio Library is a place for you to browse and download free music to use for your original videos.
• Google+ Hangouts On Air can help you connect directly with your audience and then distribute your content to engage your users on your site or on YouTube after the event.
• Read the article In Video Advertising, Is Longer Strong? to learn about video advertising.

• On a computer, go to the YouTube video you want to embed.
• Under the video, click Share.
• Click Embed.
• From the box that appears, copy the HTML code.
• Paste the code into your blog or website HTML.

New to AdSense? Sign up now and turn your passion into profit

Posted by Barbara Sarti, from the AdSense Team

[1] https://www.youtube.com/yt/press/statistics.html
[2] Google internal data
[3] YouTube Internal Tools, 2015, +/1 one month of games

What are “Native Ads”? They’re a variety of paid ads with the goal of being “so cohesive with the page content, assimilated into the design, and consistent with the platform behavior that the viewer simply feels that they belong,” says the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB). You might recognize some of the more popular native ad formats, such as custom sponsored content, content recommendations, and in-feed ad units.

• Search for opportunities throughout your site where native ads can unlock new ad revenue
• Determine how to maximize your user experience and ad revenue before implementing native ads
• Ensure allocation of time and resources needed for proper implementation

Posted by Kate Pietrelli from the AdSense Team

DO

• Use one to three #hashtags per post, any more is generally overdoing it. 
• Use #hashtags that are relevant to your audience or ones that your industry is using. If you’re writing an article on the food to try, you could use #hashtags like #Foodie and #Yummy so users will find you when they search for those always trending keywords.
• It’s ok to be specific. In most cases, the more specific the #hashtag, the better. If you’re going to talk about do it yourself (DIY) summer projects, you’d want to use #hashtags like #diyprojects, #diyideas or #diyweddings instead of general keywords like #DIY or #DoItYourSelf. Using specific #hashtags helps users pinpoint the exact content they’re looking for. 
• Letters and numbers are OK to use in #hashtags.
• Keep #hashtags short.

DON’T

• Don’t string too many words together. #itbecomesreallyreallyhardtoread and it can take up most of your Twitter character count.
• Don’t use punctuation marks or spaces, they will break the searchable link.
• Don’t use the same hashtag twice in the same social post. It’s just #weird.

Let’s take a simple example. There’s no sense in a fashion blogger writing a piece on Coachella fashion when the annual music festival season is over. If that blogger could know when events relevant to fashion were approaching, she could much better plan her content. That’s where content calendars come in.

This initial list is just to get you started, once you get into the habit of planning your content in advance, you can start to do your own research into what upcoming events might interest your audience. Need an insight into what your users like? Google Analytics can help you get to know your audience better.

Get started and plan your year today to begin drawing the crowds! New to AdSense? Sign up now and turn your passion into profit.

Posted by Jay Castro, AdSense Content Marketing Specialist

To understand what’s happening you need to look at your performance reports. Analyzing your AdSense performance allows you to see how well your ads are performing and which devices your ad units were viewed on.

To view this report simply log into your AdSense account, click “Performance reports” and select “Platforms” from the “Report type” dropdown.

You may notice that your CTR or RPM is lower on mobile than it is on tablet and desktop. This might be caused by one or more of the following reasons:

• Your site may be displaying suboptimal ad sizes
• Your responsive design is using the column drop approach
• You’re not focusing on optimizing for viewability

1) Use high-impact mobile ad formats to ensure you have optimal ad sizes throughout your site. 

• The 300×250 ad unit is a popular ad size used by advertisers across the globe, resulting in a large ad supply, increased competition, and a potential increase in earnings. Research on viewability has shown that a 300×250 ad unit placed just below the fold has generated approximately a 50% viewability rate for other publishers. This ad unit could potentially help you maximize the impact of your ad space. 
• Responsive ad units automatically adapt to your page layout and the space available for the ad unit across desktop, tablets, and smartphones. AdSense identifies the appropriate ad size and then determines the best size for the screen. 

2) Pay close attention to your ad placements, especially if you’re using a responsive design column drop layout.

Responsive websites are a great multi-screen strategy, but they present a challenge for high-impact desktop ad units that can be easily avoided. Responsive websites commonly use a column drop approach to design. This is where the entire right-hand column on a desktop screen drops down to the bottom of the page when the website is viewed on a mobile screen.

This means that a strong performing ad unit on the right-hand column of your desktop site could become an underperforming unit below the fold on mobile devices.

If this is how your site is designed, you should consider alternative ad placements, for example: moving your right-column ad units above the fold on mobile devices.