What’s the best mobile solution for you?

Last week we looked at how to analyze your traffic to get an understanding of which platforms your audience is using to reach you. By comparing the content that your users are accessing via desktop, mobile, and tablet, you'll gain insights into which implementation will best suit your business. In today’s post, we’ll look at the three most common ways of doing this. We’ll explore building a responsively designed site, dynamic serving solutions, and lastly, a separate mobile site.

Responsive Web Design (RWD):

A responsively built site automatically rearranges and resizes content to fit the screen of any device used to access the site. This allows you to optimize the user experience across different devices - without needing to create redirects or make unique pages that cater to each platform. For the user, this means a smooth user journey, and for a content manager, it means content only needs to be updated once. From a developer viewpoint, RWD may require rebuilding your site framework with flexible templates, grids, style sheets and JavaScript but with very rewarding results. Take a look at this case study to see how TowerGate Insurance adapted RWD to increase mobile and tablet users by over 200%.

Dynamic Serving of Content:

Another solution is to dynamically serve content. Similar to RWD, with this approach the web server detects the type of device the visitor is using and presents a custom page on the same URL. This allows for a fully customised device experience, but also means that your content will need to be maintained separately for each platform. To ensure your users have a smooth navigational experience, prioritize building dynamic content for the most popular pages that users are accessing through mobile, and similarly apply the same for tablet.

Separate Mobile Site:

The final implementation you might want to consider is creating a separate mobile site, where smartphone users will be directed to a mobile-optimized version of your site. This implementation allows you fully customise your content for a mobile audience, since it’s often an independently hosted solution. Similar to creating dynamic serving content, this means you need to make separate updates for content or styling pieces to ensure a smooth user experience. Take a look at how Adidas reached a winning formula with their dedicated mobile solution.

To read more about what we’ve discussed today or to find a list of recommended vendors that can help you to develop your mobile solution, check out this article by the Google Think Insights team. Also, join us next week when we’re going to take a look at how you can best use AdSense to monetize your mobile sites.

Posted by Federico Gomez Kodela - Mobile Specialist
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Introducing the Google AdSense Certified Partner Program

Since 2003, AdSense has helped publishers from around the world earn from their content and grow their businesses. Over time, we’ve also seen growth in the number of consultants and service providers who have built their own businesses around helping publishers succeed with AdSense. With this in mind, we’ve created the Google AdSense Certified Partner Program to work more closely with these service providers and recognize the expertise they’ve developed.

If you use AdWords or Analytics, you may be familiar with the similar Certified Partner programs we offer for those products -- qualified companies can become certified to help you manage your account, should you require additional support for your business. Just like in these other programs, AdSense Certified Partners are carefully vetted by Google, and meet rigorous qualification standards. AdSense Certified Partners can assist with dedicated services ranging from setting up AdSense ad code on your pages to running ongoing optimization tests for you.

For service providers interested in this new program, we’ve put together comprehensive training and testing resources that cover all aspects of AdSense. Once a company has passed our qualification exam and met additional criteria to become a Certified Partner, they’ll be added to our official program website and receive a program logo for their own site. Certified Partners will also have access to marketing resources and tools to help them manage client accounts, and will join a group of accredited companies. We currently have 13 active Certified Partners, and will be adding more to the list throughout the year.

If you’re a prospective Certified Partner or a publisher interested in the services offered by these Certified Partners, you can visit our program website or Help Center for more information. We look forward to working with this group of partners and continuing to expand the range of options available to publishers in the AdSense program.

Posted by Catherine Downes - AdSense Certified Partner Team

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Get your multi device strategy off the ground

As tech-savvy consumers, we’ve all contributed to the growth in online traffic coming from mobile and tablet platforms, and as publishers you've likely heard the importance of adapting a multi-device approach to cater for this growing trend. But exactly how important is it? How do you develop a multi-device strategy? And how does all of this equate to increased revenues for you? 

Over the coming weeks, we’ll run a series of posts that aim to answer exactly that. We’ll explore building mobile solution options to suit you, and also explain how you can use AdSense to monetize your mobile sites or AdMob.

Where are your users coming from?
We're living in a multi-screen world where users expect to have access to information, people, and computing power from any screen. Here are just a few findings from a recent survey*:

• 81% of consumers use their smartphones while also watching TV
• 66% use their smartphone at the same time as their laptop
• 83% of mobile users said that they wouldn’t leave home without their smartphone
• 63% of users said that while they may not make their final purchase through a mobile, they would definitely use their phone to gather info and help them with their purchasing decision. 

To see how these shifts in consumer behavior are relevant to your site, check the Platforms report in your AdSense account. It’s a good idea to pull a comparison report and track the growth in your percentage of mobile and tablet users over the past quarter or year. Chances are, you’re going to see a shift away from desktop with more of your online content being reached via tablet and mobile. If your site isn’t designed to cater for this growing market then now is the time to start building your multi-device strategy. And we’re here to make you aware of some of the options open to you! Join us next week when we’ll be covering a range of mobile solutions to help you discover the right one for your business.

If you’d like to learn more about what we’ve discussed today, you can also check out a recording of our recent Hangout, “Mobile - The Time is Now”.

*Study completed by Google in collaboration with Sterling Brands and Ipsos, on a sample of 1,600 users, (2012).

Posted by Federico Gomez Kodela - Mobile Specialist
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Learn how to evaluate the user experience on your site

With only a few seconds to capture a user’s attention, we all know it’s important to have a great user experience on your site. One of our goals is to help you create a user experience that will keep users coming back to your site.

In the past, we shared our guiding principles for user experience and asked some of our most successful publishers to share their thoughts. However, many of you told us you’d like to see more examples of how to actually apply the principles to your site. We’ve heard your feedback and, on November 1st, we’ll show you how in a Learn with Google Hangout on Air that takes you behind the scenes of a user experience consultation.

During the Hangout on Air, we’ll evaluate a pre-selected AdSense publisher’s website and teach you how to take a step back, apply a critical eye, and evaluate whether or not the user experience on your own site complements your site goals. We’ll identify specific changes the publisher can make to improve the user experience, walk through our recommendations, and answer a few of your user experience questions, which you can submit when you RSVP to watch the live stream.

RSVP to let us know if you’ll be watching the Hangout on Air and we’ll see you on November 1st!

Click here to RSVP

Posted by Laurie Shiau - Inside AdSense Team 
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Share your feedback on AdSense and other Google publisher solutions

As the publisher landscape evolves, we’re constantly looking at how we can develop our products and solutions to help you grow your online business. Your feedback plays a key role in shaping our publisher offerings, and so we hope to hear from you in our upcoming semi-annual publisher survey.

Launching the week of October 15th, the goal of our survey is to collect as much of your feedback as possible. It covers a range of topics across all of our publisher products, ranging from new feature requests to help resources and much more. Since our last survey, we’ve addressed your feedback with new features like in-account policy notifications, responsive ad units, a mobile app for AdSense, and new functionality in the Publisher Toolbar.

We’ll be sending the survey out by email shortly to a sample of publishers. If you’d like to participate, there’s a couple of steps you should take as soon as possible:

• Ensure your contact information is up to date.
• Ensure your email preferences are updated so that you’re opted in to receiving ‘occasional survey’ messages.

Whether you’ve filled out every previous survey or you’re providing your feedback for the first time, we’re really grateful for you taking the time to tell us how we’re doing and look forward to hearing your thoughts and ideas!

Posted by Sahar Golestani, on behalf of the AdSense Publisher Happiness Team
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