This November, our international teams will be hitting the road to host more AdSense in Your City workshops around the globe. During these workshops, we’ll provide product updates, offer individual optimizations to help boost revenue, and share tips for getting started with solutions like DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) Small Business. Also, these workshops offer attendees networking opportunities and the chance to meet with local publishers.
Here are the cities we’ll be visiting in the next few weeks -- please take note of the language of the sessions:
Week of November 5:
Salvador, Brazil (sessions in Portuguese)
Fortaleza, Brazil (sessions in Portuguese)
Week of November 12:
Manchester, UK (sessions in English)
Edinburgh, Scotland (sessions in English)
Bogotá, Colombia (sessions in Spanish)
Budapest, Hungary (sessions in Hungarian)
Week of November 19:
Montevideo, Uruguay (sessions in Spanish)
Stockholm, Sweden (sessions in Swedish)
Madrid, Spain (sessions in Spanish)
Week of November 26:
Tokyo, Japan (sessions in Japanese)
Interested in attending one of these upcoming AdSense in Your City workshops? Please fill out our interest form. Space is limited and so we won’t be able to accommodate all requests, but we’ll let you know if we’re able to extend an invitation. We also recommend ensuring you’re opted in to receiving ‘Special Offer’ emails so we can reach you in the future.
We hope to see you at an upcoming AdSense in Your City workshop!
Every Friday, we’re posting Google+ tips to help publishers make the most of all of the features and resources available. Be sure to check back each week for the latest in our educational Social Fridays series!
While the world of communications has changed quite a bit since the Brazilian newspaper O Estado de São Paulo was founded in 1875, sharing high-quality news, analysis and reporting has remained its constant goal. In order to provide information in real time, the influential paper launched the portal Estadao.com.br in March 2000. And with social media a growing priority, Estadão launched its +Estadão page on Google+ in the second half of 2011.
According to Digital Content Director Claudia Belfort, an early discovery was that Google+ offered a slightly different opportunity from other social media channels already in use by Estadão. “I realized that the comments on Google+ were more elaborate. Our followers are very interested in contributing to a discussion so we decided to invest more, always with this focus.”
Over time, Estadão has built Google+ into its content strategy as a result of the platform’s unique ability to stimulate conversation and discussion. Cláudia believes that Estadão’s audience is interested in a network that’s not just social, but also enables knowledge exchange. With this in mind, the team publishes content specifically relevant to Google+ followers, rather than replicating the same content across all of the social media outlets that Estadão uses. They’ve found that the network responds particularly well to serious themes, so posts cover topics like economics, politics and current affairs, often with an informal tone.
But it’s not only the exchange of ideas through the written word that Google+ facilitates for the newspaper. Estadão takes advantage of the visual strengths of the platform by posting full images, captivating video content and stimulating face-to-face discussion through frequent Hangouts, the free, high-quality video chat feature unique to Google+. Plenty of creative channel-specific initiatives are underway: a daily video of economic analysis, a nightly podcast summarizing the main news of the day and a weekly trailer previewing new cinema releases.
Estadão uses Google Analytics to understand visitor behavior, and it’s clear that Google+ is having a positive effect on traffic to the portal. Over a five-month period, Analytics showed that visitors to the Estadão site from the Google+ page increased 540%. At the same time, this traffic generated an uplift in page views per visit of 18%. Currently, the Estadão Google+ page has over 500,000 followers.
Want to replicate the brand’s success? Read all about it in the full case study, and feel free to share your experiences with us on our AdSense +page.
Italian site Ultimoprezzo.com provides a unique service to online consumers. It supplies information on stores and their opening hours, as well as their best prices for smartphones, TVs, tablets, laptops and other consumer electronics products.
As a supplier of free services, Ultimoprezzo needs to be savvy about its strategy for generating revenue. AdSense provides a straightforward solution.
“The Google AdSense program is the ideal way for us to monetize our publishing efforts,” explains founder and CEO Alberto Giacobone. He says Google AdSense not only provides Ultimoprezzo’s users with relevant and interesting advertising information, but also provides its advertisers cost-effective ad placements since Ultimoprezzo doesn’t need to maintain a sales network.
Globally, smartphone usage is on the rise. In Italy alone, 69% of smartphone owners never leave the house without carrying their device and 82% use their smartphone to perform research on a product or service. “Certainly, the numbers speak for themselves,” Alberto affirms. “In Italy and abroad, we are increasingly in a ‘post- PC’ era where smartphones and tablets accompany us at all times and everywhere, often even while we are doing other things.”
Very early on in Ultimoprezzo’s development, Alberto’s team perceived an opportunity in the mobile space. An internal team developed Ultimoprezzo’s mobile-optimized website, while a special agency developed applications for iOS and Android.
So has the company seen an uplift in mobile traffic? “The trend is clear,” says Alberto. “Mobile traffic is growing and is now already more than 15% of our total traffic. And this is not only down to the growing popularity of smartphones which cost less than $100; what we notice is that the users are getting better at exploiting the technological tool at their disposal more and more frequently.” With Ultimoprezzo’s non-mobile traffic volumes booming as well, by the end of 2012 Alberto estimates mobile will account for one-third of the company’s total traffic.
AdSense provides a way for Ultimoprezzo to monetize its content across devices. As new digital platforms emerge, AdSense makes new revenue streams available. “The AdSense program has allowed us to invest in the growth – both in terms of quantity and quality – of the services to our visitors, so we can keep them free always. ”
This information is current as of October 23rd, 2012.
Posted by Cristina Miscimarra - Inside AdSense Team
Every Friday, we’re posting Google+ tips to help publishers make the most of all of the features and resources available. Be sure to check back each week for the latest in our educational Social Fridays series!
We've shared quite a bit of information on using Google+ for your business in the past few weeks, and so we'd now like to pause for a moment to hear from you. After reading our Social Fridays posts, do you have specific questions about developing a Google+ strategy for your site? Are you interested in hearing more about a certain topic like using Ripples or avoiding common pitfalls?
To address your Google+-related questions and experiences, we’ll be hosting a Hangout On Air on Tuesday, October 30th at 10:00am PT with a Google+ specialist from the AdSense team. Visit our AdSense +page to RSVP to the event, and feel free to post your Google+ questions there. Anyone will be able to watch the live Hangout On Air, and if you miss it, we’ll post the recording to our YouTube channel so you can watch at a later time.
We hope to see you in our upcoming Hangout! We’ll be back next week with another Google+ publisher success story.
Watch this video to meet Voitek Klimczyk, the creator of simplyadditions.com. AdSense let him take his business online and keeps him healthy.
Tell us your AdSense story to get featured in future posts. Complete the sentence "Because of Google AdSense..." and send it to pubstories@google.com along with a photograph of what Google AdSense has given you. Be sure to include your publisher ID and main website URL. Please note we won't be able to respond to all submissions. We’re looking forward to reading your responses! This post is part of the PubTalk series of conversations with Publishers
Your performance reports are the key to understanding your AdSense account activity and earnings. This is where you can get vital information about your account, quickly and easily. We’re constantly working to enhance performance reports, and so today, we’re introducing some changes that improve the usability of the reports and make them more visually compelling.
When you visit your “Performance reports” tab, you’ll notice changes like these:
The graph area covers a wider area of the screen.
The list of metrics has been moved from the right hand side to the top in an interactive scorecard.
There are new buttons for day, week and month for the usual timeline graph to allow for more control over granularity when analyzing activity over longer time periods.
You can choose “Events” on a timeline report graph or select the “Events” report from the left navigation to see how specific account changes are related to account performance.
There are new graph types available, such as pie or bar charts, to visualize the data you’re looking at. In addition, the “Countries” report shows you where your users are located on a world map:
We hope you enjoy these changes -- stay tuned for more updates. For additional information visit our Help Center and feel free to leave comments and feedback on our AdSense +page.
Posted by Daniel White - Software Engineer, AdSense Reporting
Every Friday, we’re posting Google+ tips to help publishers make the most of all of the features and resources available. Be sure to check back each week for the latest in our educational Social Fridays series!
Temptalia is one of the most popular beauty and makeup review blogs on the web, responsible for delivering the latest product information, tutorials and in-depth reviews to numerous fans. Given the blog’s global following, it’s easy to imagine a huge staff working behind the scenes, but in fact founder Christine Mielke still runs the blog herself and creates the vast majority of the site’s content.
In addition to running the blog herself, Christine maintains a focus on social media for Temptalia. Christine established the +Temptalia page on Google+ not long after the platform launched, and continues to encourage fans to +1 and link to the brand’s page. On average, six new posts appear on Temptalia every day, and each of these is promoted through Google+. She says content that includes photography shines on the channel, and pretty products and colorful cosmetics tend to grab more attention than skincare.
Google Analytics is key to helping Christine understand how each social media channel contributes to the blog’s traffic. Designed to make analysis easy, Social Sources reports in Analytics automatically segment referral traffic from hundreds of social networks. By using these reports, Christine can see that Google+ is among the top 10 social referrers to Temptalia, along with other Google properties including YouTube and Blogger.
But to get further insights into the audience, Christine looks beyond the numbers and goes straight to the users themselves. “We try to listen in what our readers are asking for, what they are looking at, what they are most excited about,” she explains. This user-focused approach continues to drive Temptalia’s success. Christine’s advice to those getting started with Google+ pages is to use the channel as a valuable research tool in understanding a site’s readership.
While Temptalia may be a small operation, its impact is significant – already Temptalia has over 600,000 followers on Google+. To read more about how Christine, a lifelong beauty enthusiast, is using Google+ to maintain, build and serve her blog’s audience, read the full case study.
The end of 2012 is coming closer and we’d like to thank you for another fantastic year and your continued partnership with AdSense! We’re already busy planning our objectives for next year and would like your suggestions about what could be improved.
In the next few weeks we’ll be sending out our bi-annual satisfaction survey to a sample of publishers opted in to receiving “occasional surveys”, so if you’d like to participate, make sure to update your email preferences. We’re looking forward to reading about the things you love about AdSense and the aspects which could be improved.
Your suggestions and feedback are very valuable to us. Based on feedback you’ve provided in previous surveys, our forums and at in-person events, we’ve made a number of improvements to the AdSense program and product this year. For example, we introduced user management enabling you to share your account with business partners, delivered resources to help you maintain a healthy account, and added additional blocking functionality to control the ads that appear on your sites. While these types of changes and new features do take time to build and test, please know that we incorporate your input as we continuously work to make improvements.
Keep your eyes peeled for our survey, which will be sent the week of October 23rd. We read through every comment, so don’t miss the chance to let us know your thoughts and ideas. We’re looking forward to hearing from you, and we appreciate your time.
Posted by Sahar Golestani, on behalf of the AdSense Publisher Satisfaction Team
We’ve blogged before about Google Affiliate Network, which helps you earn more from your site with ads that pay based on conversions. Earlier this year, we launched Google Affiliate Ads for Blogger in the U.S. The positive results and feedback we’ve received are very promising, and we’re excited to announce that this gadget is now available to Blogger users in the U.K.
Google Affiliate Ads for Blogger is a gadget that makes it easy for Blogger users to insert an affiliate ad into a blog post and earn a commission when someone clicks the link and makes a purchase on the advertiser’s site.
Watch the video below to learn more:
Here’s how to get started:
If you’re a Blogger user in the U.K. (or the U.S.), sign in to AdSense and go to the Earnings tab in Blogger, or sign up if you don’t already have an AdSense account.
When logged into your AdSense account, you may see the Google Affiliate Ads for Blogger gadget when you write a new blog post. This gadget is available to select U.K. (and U.S.) Blogger users whose blogs match available ad categories, so that’s why you may not immediately see the gadget even if you have an AdSense account.
Select a relevant affiliate ad from the 'Advertise Products' gadget.
Publish your post, and voilà! You may earn a commission when someone clicks your affiliate ad and makes a purchase.
Participating U.K. advertisers:
Advertisers including Bestbathrooms.com, Cheapsuites.co.uk, Crooked Tongues, Diamond Manufacturers, eFlorist, Hudsonreed.com, Perfume Click and The Snugg have already come on board, and more are joining every day.
Your use of the Google Affiliate Ads for Blogger program is governed by the Google Affiliate Ads For Blogger Online Program Terms and Conditions. Please review the Office of Fair Trading's Q&A that discusses a blogger's obligation to disclose financial benefits you may receive for endorsing products or services. As a reminder, under your Google Affiliate Ads For Blogger Online Program Terms and Conditions, You must comply with all applicable laws relating to the disclosure of financial benefits You receive for endorsing any products or services. For example, when you include a Blogger Affiliate Ad on Your blog, you will clearly identify, in a manner prominently displayed with editorial content on your blog such that it would be unavoidable to the average user, that the Blogger Affiliate Ad is an advertisement.
Every Friday, we’re posting Google+ tips to help publishers make the most of all of the features and resources available. Be sure to check back each week for the latest in our educational Social Fridays series!
A few weeks ago, we talked about the possibilities around using Google+ Hangouts on Air to hold live broadcasts. This free feature allows you to live stream a conversation between 10 participants, directly from your Google+ page, your YouTube channel, and even your website, for a global audience to view.
The New York Times has been hosting frequent Hangouts on Air to engage with their audience, with topics ranging from foreign affairs to professional baseball to voter concerns. Since setting up the +New York Times page in November 2011, the Times has aimed to create a hub for their online readers to not only discover news, but to also participate in discussion.
Recently, the Times used Hangouts on Air to cover a breaking news story and reach a wide online audience. Just hours after the the Supreme Court’s monumental decision to uphold President Obama’s Affordable Healthcare Act, the Times became the first major media outlet to discuss the news via live web video. The Hangout video was broadcasted live on the +New York Times page as well as on the NYTimes Opinion page, allowing the discussion and analysis to be shared with a wider audience.
The Times team prepared for a smooth Hangout by securing guest participants for their live broadcast a week in advance. When the date of the decision arrived, the Times added a graphic placeholder to the NYTimes Opinion page and published a post to their +page to publicize the upcoming Hangout. Once the Hangout started, they embedded the video directly into the Opinion page and also added a homepage promotion to their site to drive awareness. After the Hangout was completed, the Times team quickly edited the video footage on YouTube and uploaded it to the front page of NYTimes.com for additional visibility.
For more information, read the full case study. If you’re ready to start broadcasting, be sure to review our tips and then get started with your own Hangout on Air. If you have any advice of your own to share about Hangouts, feel free to post them to our AdSense +page!
This is the final post of a three-part series highlighting five user experience principles to keep in mind when designing your site. Using these principles will help provide a great experience for users on your site. To see these principles applied to an AdSense publisher’s site, we'll host a live Google+ Hangout on October 9th at 10:30am PT with an AdSense publisher. We will be applying these very principles to help improve their site! Go to the Google AdSense G+ page on the 9th to see it live!
In our firstand second posts in this series we discussed how to identify your user’s goals, the structure of your site, how to help guide users through your site and a few tips for a better experience on mobile. In this post we’ll provide our fifth and final user experience tip and lay out some strategies for converting a casual user into a loyal one.
5. Turn casual visitors into loyal users
So far we’ve discussed ways to make sure you understand what your users are looking for and how to present it to them. But you may be wondering how do you keep users coming back again and again? After all, repeat business is the lifeblood of businesses both online and offline. To get users to return, you need to do more than just answer their questions; you need to give them reasons to return to your site.
Tips: Below are a few ways you can turn one-time visitors into repeat visitors:
New content: First and foremost, make sure to constantly provide new, high-quality content. Next, make sure you are showcasing new content on your top landing pages.
Related content: Show users similar content elsewhere on your site. Create a section that links users to popular content on the same subject. This will drive more engagement.
Social: Make it easy for users to connect with you via their favorite social networks. All major social networks have widgets that you can put on your site to allow users to follow you. Once you have them make sure you push out your most popular content to drive return visits.
Email: Make sure you have a way for users to subscribe to your email list for updates and/or a newsletter.
User engagement: Make it easy for users to interact with your content, through forums, a rating system or recommendations.
Example: If you have a deal site where users can search for deals, you can first prompt them to sign up to be notified via email when new offers that match their interests are added to the site. You can also showcase how many people recommend a deal so users see which deals are popular.
We hope you enjoyed this three part series on user experience and we welcome your comments below!
Thinking about implementing some of these changes? We’d love to hear about it! Let us know what you changed in the comments section below.
Don’t forget to check out the User Experience Google+ Event Page on October 9th at 10:30am PST/1:30pm EST to join a Hangout On Air and see a real AdSense publisher put these principles in action!
Posted by David Richards - Google AdSense Resources:Get a Google+ Page - http://www.google.com/+/business/ Allow users to subscribe to your updates via Google+.
This is the second of a three-part series highlighting five user experience principles to keep in mind when designing your site. Using these principles will help provide a great experience for users on your site. After the next post we’ll host a live Google+ Hangout on October 9th at 10:30am PT with an AdSense publisher. We will be applying these principles to help improve their site! Visit the AdSense Google+ page on the 9th to see it live!
In our last post about user experience, we provided two tips to help you identify some goals for your site and your users.
In this post we’ll share another two tips; you’ll learn how to steer users around your site and how different use cases (desktop or mobile) require different setups. 3. Ensure that users know what action to take on your site
Users should always know what action to take next on your site. When a user lands on your page it should be very clear what they should pay attention to first, second, and so on. There should also be a clear next action for them to take whether it's clicking “buy” to make a purchase or reading a related article.
Tips: Consider these points when creating meaningful calls to action:
Emphasis: Give emphasis to the call to action by its size, color, contrast and/or use of white space.
Simple: Don’t clutter your page with too many different actions. Really think about what you want your users to do and prioritize those actions in your design.
Incentive: Give an incentive to take action. This can be seen in discounts, gifts, raffle entry or access to more content
Proximity: Make sure your call to action is in a logical placement on the page. For example, if the page features an article, you may want to put the call to action below the article.
Consistency: Have your call to action show throughout the site and keep its appearance consistent.
4. Tailor your experience to your users’ situation
Your site needs to provide a great experience to users whenever and wherever they need it. It’s important to put some thought into how your users use your site differently in different situations. Be sure to consider their time constraints and whether they are on a mobile device or a computer.
Tips: Use these tips to help you think about the use cases your users might experience:
Situation: What situation is the user in that caused them to seek out information on your site?
Limit features: The mobile version of your site should only include the core features of your site that will help your users find the information they’re looking for. Save the other advanced features for your desktop site where your users have a little bit more time.
Speed: Users only have a couple of seconds so make sure your site loads lightning fast. Google’s Page Speed tool can help you optimize your load time.
Forgiveness: Users make mistakes, especially on mobile. Let them easily undo and return to where they were, without having to use the back button.
Example: Suppose you’re a restaurant review site. How does a mobile user’s behavior differ from that of a desktop user? First off, mobile users are probably on the move; they could even be walking down the street as they browse your site. They won’t have time to navigate through several pages of restaurants like they do on the desktop site. They expect your site to use the phone’s GPS to locate them and show them popular restaurants nearby based on their search. Your site can even optimize the review experience for mobile by showing the most popular short reviews since users don’t have time to read long reviews.
Remember, it’s all about thinking about the situation that the user is in when they reach your site and tailoring the user experience to match.
Check in tomorrow and we’ll talk about generating return visits to your site and creating customer loyalty through a great UX.
Posted by David Richards - Google AdSense
Resources: Google Analytics Events - http://www.google.com/analytics/ Measure the impact of design changes and monitoring the continued usage of your site will keep you updated on how your users are interacting with your site, and how their usage can shift, change or evolve over time. Google Analytics Events will help you measure these changes by measuring clicks on pre-defined elements of the page. Site Speed Tool - https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/ Google has provided some great tools to helping improve your site speed. How to GoMo - http://www.howtogomo.com/ Google has created a quick tool to see how your website looks on a mobile phone. It also provides some great resources to help build your mobile site. DUDA mobile - http://gomo.dudamobile.com/ Duda Mobile is a partner with Google GoMo and allows you to create your mobile site in minutes.
This is the first of a three-part series highlighting five user experience principles to keep in mind when designing your site. Applying these principles will help provide a great experience for users on your site. After the series we’ll host a live Google+ Hangout On Air on October 9th at 10:30am PT, when we'll put these principles in action by helping an AdSense publisher make UX improvements to their site. Visit the AdSense Google+ page on the 9th to see it live! User experience can make or break your site’s success. With many other sites offering similar services, it’s important to differentiate your site in the eyes of your users by providing a better experience. Because a user’s attention is limited, you'll only have a few seconds to provide a good experience and quickly guide the user to what they’re looking for.
Today, we've provided our first two important design tips and techniques to help you identify goals for both your site and its users. 1. Focus on your users’ goals
Step back and first ask yourself, “How can I give my users what they want while getting what I want?” The first step in answering this is to figure out what your users’ goals are, what your goals are and how they work together. You’ll need to think about what your site’s core offerings and strengths are. We recommend keeping this to one or two strengths. Though your site may be good at many things, you should focus on what it’s great at.
Tips: Some questions to ask yourself when starting out are:
How are your users finding your site?
What are they looking for?
Do you give them what they want?
What do you want from your users?
How do you get a desired response from them?
Example: You’re a tech news site and after considering each of the questions above, you determine that:
Most of your users come from search engines and land on the article page
Your user is looking for the content of the article they searched for
You show them a full page article on the landing page
Your goal is to keep the user engaged, so that they stay longer and see more content
The answer to here is the real challenge. You need to prove to the user that there’s other valuable content on your site and encourage them to read more. This can be accomplished by including some related or popular articles at the bottom of each article.
2. Employ a clear structure to guide users
No matter what page a user lands on, you only have a few seconds on that first screen with the space above the fold to get their attention and show them what you’re all about. Employing a simple hierarchy will give your page a clear structure that will guide users and highlight what you want them to see.
Another thing to keep in mind is the information architecture of your site. Users are able to recognize familiar pages from unfamiliar based on the consistent way you organize and display information on your site. If your website’s structure is not logical or what they expect, users will be lost and not sure where to go next. This adds to overall frustration and can lead to users leaving your site. Tips: Use these simple design tips to create a structure for your page:
Contrast: Using color, saturation, or opacity to juxtapose elements on the page.
Size: Size is one of the easiest design levers to guide your users. Don’t be afraid to use BIG and BOLD elements to draw users’ attention to the most important information on the page.
Alignment: Elements that share a common axis appear related.
Whitespace: Drawing attention to specific elements by leaving empty space around them. It also makes your design more appealing to the eye.
Grid: Using a simple grid to layout elements on your page will create a sense of order and structure.
Example: Newspaper sites usually do a great job creating structure through hierarchy. The breaking story or most important piece of news dominates the screen. This ensures it’s the first thing you see. Major headlines from other sections are also big and bold so a user that’s browsing can quickly and easily pick them out. The size and contrast of photos and headlines helps to guide users through the page.
Thanks for reading and check back tomorrow for our second installment of Publisher Insights!
Posted by: David Richards - Google AdSense
Resources: Google Analytics: Google’s free tool to help you measure your traffic and how users are currently using your site. Additionally, it can help you test how changes to your site affect performance. Webmaster Guidelines: Creating a clear hierarchy and sitemap will help Google crawlers find and rank content on your site.
As part of our ongoing GoMo initiative, we’re hosting weekly "Mobile Q&A Sessions" for the month of October every Tuesday at 4pm GMT+1 / 8am PT on our AdSense +page. To learn more about going mobile or monetizing your mobile sites and apps, please drop by and join our interactive mobile hangouts. We’ll be answering frequently asked mobile-related questions and helping publishers with mobile-related issues.
To join the Mobile Q&A Hangout sessions, follow these steps:
Create a Google+ account, if you don't already have one.
Let us know if you are planning to attend through the ‘Are you going?’ drop-down menu.
Once the Hangout starts, you’ll receive a notification in the Google bar.
Join the Hangout and ask your mobile-related questions.
The sessions will be regular Hangouts where up to 9 people can join at a time. If the Hangout is full, keep checking back in, as people will drop in and out as their questions are answered.
Please keep in mind that these sessions will be mobile-focused, so we’ll only be answering mobile-related questions.
