Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Optimize your mobile presence with Google Analytics 2 of 6

How does your site perform across devices? With multi-device usage growing rapidly, understanding how mobile users access and interact with your site’s pages is becoming more and more essential. You can use Google Analytics to measure mobile sites and apps interaction as well as visits from web-enabled mobile devices, including both high-end and basic phones and tablets. Check out the following tips to grow your mobile presence with insights from Analytics.

1. Use Mobile App Analytics to measure the end-to-end value of your app
Mobile is changing the way that people communicate, work and play, and much of the growing adoption and innovation is driven by mobile apps. With Mobile App Analytics, you can measure your entire user journey on your app from first discovery and download to in-app purchases and engagement, helping you make better, data-driven decisions for mobile investment. Watch this video for more details on monetizing your app with AdMob.


2. Make sure your user experience delivers across devices
Google Analytics mobile reports can be found under the Audience section on the Reporting tab. They show you statistics by location which lets you understand the current origins of mobile traffic, and make predictions about where traffic will increase. With key insights and metrics such as which devices are driving traffic to your site, bounce rates and visit duration, you can design your website to give visitors what they need on smaller smartphone screens as well as tablets and desktops.


3. Consider different strategies for multi-screen and set goals for mobile monetization
There are no rules around mobile strategies, but mobile sites need clearly defined goals in order to be successful. For example, your goals might revolve around engagement and visits. If you have location-specific content, you may want to incorporate local elements into your mobile offering. Your site goals should align with the needs of your users. Google Analytics mobile reports provide a breakdown of visitors by whether or not they visit using mobile devices. Use this information to shape your multi-screen strategy. If you’d like to place ads on a mobile site designed for users of high-end devices, use AdSense for content to create your ad units.

To help you optimize your mobile presence, we’ve created a custom Mobile Key Metrics Dashboard for you to download. Once downloaded, just select which profile you’d like to import. You can access this dashboard any time by clicking ‘Dashboards’ under the Reporting tab in your Analytics account.

Don’t forget to submit any questions you have on the topics covered in this blog post. We’ll share a video at the end of this series answering your top questions. Next week, we’ll continue our blog series, looking at how specific Analytics insights can help you grow user loyalty on your site.


Posted by Cemal Buyukgokcesu - Google Analytics Specialist
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Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Busting Bad Advertising Practices — 2013 Year in Review

(Cross-posted from the Google AdWords Blog)

Advertising helps fund great web services and enables companies of all sizes to grow their businesses online. However, this economy can also attract bad actors that want to abuse online advertising tools for harmful or deceptive purposes. 

We've allocated substantial technical, financial, and human resources to stopping bad advertising practices and protecting users on the web.  Hundreds of our engineers, policy experts and others have dedicated their careers to this work.

Following up on our 2012 report, below is an overview of how we fought bad ads and bad ad-funded content in 2013.

Stopping more bad ads from fewer bad sources

We removed more than 350 million bad ads from our systems in 2013.  To put that in perspective, if someone looked at each of these for one second, it would take them more than ten years to see them all.  This was a significant increase from approximately 220 million ads removed in 2012.  This trend has been consistent in the last several years and we attribute it to several factors, including: the growth of online advertising overall and constant improvement of our detection systems.

The number of advertisers we disabled, however, dropped from over 850,000 in 2012 to more than 270,000 in 2013.  In part, we attribute this decline to scammers — counterfeiters, for example — being thwarted by our safety screens and searching for less-secure targets.

Counter-attacking counterfeiters 

We continue to see positive results in our work to combat counterfeiters.  Attempts to market counterfeit goods on AdWords decreased by 47% in 2012 and 82% in 2013.  In parallel, the volume of complaints about these ads dropped by 85% in 2012 and by another 78% in 2013.

As these numbers have declined, we’re pleased to report that we’ve also banned fewer bad advertisers for counterfeit violations.  Last year, we banned approximately 14,000 advertisers for trying to sell counterfeit goods  — a decline of more than 80% compared to 2012.

Preventing good ads from funding bad content

Maintaining a healthy ads ecosystem isn’t just about stopping bad ads and advertisers; we closely monitor the sites and mobile apps that show our ads as well.  Early last year, we outlined some of this work, with a particular focus on our efforts to stop scammy ad-funded software, like toolbars, that provides a poor user-experience.

By the end of 2013, we had blacklisted more than 200,000 total publisher pages, an encouraging decline from last year, and disapproved more than 3,000,000 attempts to join our AdSense network.  We also removed more than 250,000 publisher accounts for various policy violations.  This includes more than 5,000 account removals for violating our copyright policies, an increase of more than 25% compared to 2012.

Here’s a more complete overview of our work to bust bad advertising practices in 2013:




This is an ever-evolving and ongoing fight.  Bad actors are relentless, often very sophisticated and will not rest on their laurels.  But neither will we.  Nothing is more important than the security of our users and we’ll continue to work tirelessly to keep them safe online.

Posted by Mike Hochberg, Director, Ads Engineering
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Monday, January 27, 2014

20(14) Publisher Stories: Parainmigrantes migrates to new heights


As part of our ‘20(14) publisher stories’ blog series, every Monday we’ll introduce you to a publisher and share their success story. Read on to meet this week’s featured publisher, and feel free to share your own success story with us.


Lawyer Vicente José Marín created Parainmigrantes.info in 2007 to advise immigrants in Spain on immigration law. The site gives transparent and accessible information and currently receives over 500,000 page views per month.

Vicente first heard about Google AdSense when attending a web optimization course and began using it immediately. “It’s such a simple and easy to use tool, and on top of that it’s free”, he says. Nowadays, AdSense is an essential part of his business, that’s allowed him to hire two new employees. With these earnings, he’s been able to grow his team hiring two new people.


(You can enable English captions by using the captions button under the YouTube video)

Looking ahead, Vicente plans to promote his new site, Paraemigrantes.com, aimed at those requiring information on emigrating from Spain. He also plans to continue investing in the quality of his site content and to focus on constant innovation, all the while continuing to partner with Google. 

Read the full story here.

Posted by Alicia Escriba - Inside AdSense Team
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Thursday, January 23, 2014

Grow your business with Google Analytics part 1 of 6

One key piece of growing your site is understanding your users and their interaction on your pages. Google Analytics is a powerful tool that can help you uncover these insights by giving you a complete picture of your audience and their needs. To help you build a loyal and engaged audience, we’re rolling out a blog series focused on helping AdSense publishers like you pull key insights out of your Analytics reports.

This week, we’ll focus on getting started with Analytics. Next we’ll share tips on how to learn more about your mobile users. Then we’ll move on to more advanced topics like engagement and loyalty analysis to help you improve your content strategy. Check out the following steps to get started.

1. Link your AdSense and Analytics accounts for richer insights
The first step is to link your AdSense account to a new or existing Analytics account. From here, you’re on your way to accessing new information that can help you identify opportunities to monetize your content more effectively. Keep in mind that you can only link one AdSense account to one Analytics account, and that the AdSense login must be an ‘Administrator’ on the Analytics account.


2. Set your site goals and conduct experiments to improve them
Think about what you want users to do on your site. Once you know these intended actions, you can map them to goals and conversion actions in Analytics to track how your site is performing. A goal is either a visit to a specific page of your site, or a specific action completed on your site. Once you’ve devised your goals, you can use Experiments to test how well different versions of your pages work in getting your visitors to accomplish these goals. For example, growing your AdSense revenue can be set up as a Content Experiment Goal. 


3. Create custom dashboards / reports  for quick access to insights
The next thing you’ll want to do is to start accessing the broad range of insights that Analytics offers. Analytics dashboards provide a performance overview by displaying summaries of different reports on a single page. Custom reports allow you to customize the dimensions  (City and Browser, for example) and metrics (Visits, Pageviews, and Bounce Rate, for example) in a report to gain insights into your user visits and behavior. To help you get started with your AdSense data in Analytics and show you some relevant information at a glance, we’ve created this easy-to-use dashboard. Select one of your profiles to import, and you’ll be able to quickly see and customize the reports which matter most to you. You can access this dashboard any time by clicking ‘Dashboards’ under the Reporting tab in your Analytics account. You can also visit the solutions gallery to download ready-to-use custom dashboards and reports that will be most helpful for your site. Alternatively you can create/edit your own dashboards and reports.

Once you’ve completed these three steps, we also encourage you to opt in to the Account specialist data sharing setting and our customized help and performance suggestion emails in your AdSense email preferences. You’ll be eligible for targeted optimization tips from our marketing and sales specialists.

If you have any questions about the topics covered in this blog post, share them with us by filling out this form. At the end of this series, we’ll record a video with answers to the most frequently asked questions and share it on Google+ on February 26th. See you back here next Wednesday when we’ll take a closer look at how you can optimize your mobile presence with Google Analytics.

Posted by Cemal Buyukgokcesu - Google Analytics Specialist
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Tuesday, January 21, 2014

Introducing AdSense Direct - a simple way to manage your direct sales

We’re happy to introduce AdSense Direct, a new feature for publishers getting started with their first directly sold ad deals. You can easily manage directly sold ads from within your AdSense account, and show them on your pages without needing to make any changes to your site’s code. AdSense Direct is currently available to publishers and advertisers located in the U.S., and we hope to expand further in the coming months.

To use AdSense Direct, you’ll first need to arrange a direct deal with an advertiser -- this can be any advertiser, regardless of whether or not they’re using AdWords. Once you’ve both agreed on the terms of the deal, enter the details into your AdSense account. You’ll get a link to send to the advertiser, where they can upload their ad and pay for the deal with Google Wallet. Once you approve the ad creative, the campaign will be ready to launch at the time period specified. 


Managing your directly sold ads through AdSense Direct can help you:

  • Maximize revenue: You’ll never miss an opportunity to earn revenue as your ad space will automatically revert back to showing AdSense ads as soon as a direct deal ends.
  • Save time: There’s no need to create contracts for every direct deal, as both parties contract with Google. Invoicing and payments are also handled automatically; your earnings from these deals will be included in your monthly AdSense payments cycle.
  • Control your brand: You and Google review all creatives submitted by advertisers before they run on your site.

Just getting started with direct ad deals? We suggest adding an ‘Advertise here’ form or link to your page that will enable interested advertisers to get in touch with you. Once you’ve secured an ad deal, you can set up the campaign in a few short steps.

If you’ve already expanded to running multiple direct ad deals and ad networks on your pages alongside AdSense, try our ad serving solution DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP).   

We look forward to hearing your feedback on AdSense Direct as we continue to refine this feature. Please share your comments and feedback over on our AdSense +page

Posted by Matt Goodridge - AdSense Product Manager
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Monday, January 20, 2014

20(14) Publisher Stories: Lbo.lk capitalize on Google Analytics insights to grow revenue

As part of our ‘20(14) publisher stories’ blog series, every Monday we’ll introduce you to a publisher and share their success story. Read on to meet this week’s featured publisher, and feel free to share your own success story with us.

Lbo.lk is a Sri Lankan English-language business and economy portal providing news and analysis to a worldwide audience since 2000. “LBO educates the business community, policy makers and general public on the implications of the monetary and fiscal policy and economic challenges,” says Lakshaman Bandaranayake who founded LBO (Lanka Business Online).

“A strong relationship with Google is key to achieving our growth strategy,” says Lakshaman. With the goal to accelerate AdSense performance and invigorate revenue growth across channels, Lbo.lk collaborated with Google to optimize their web design.

By making some simple changes, Lbo.lk were able to increase their revenue and user engagement. These changes included using the In-Page Analytics report from Google Analytics to inform site layout decisions. They also replaced low-performing ad units with global standard ad formats to cater for their global audience.

In the 14 weeks following the redesign, page views increased 3.4X and clicks increased 2X. Placing globally popular ad formats in optimal locations also helped LBO scalably earn from their channels, with AdSense earnings growing 2.5X.

Building on the success of these initial changes, LBO has set new business goals for the coming year, and these include more substantial site modifications. With the additional revenue earned, LBO also plans to expand its editorial staff. Lakshaman concludes “If we didn’t use AdSense, we would be losing out on revenue”.

Read the full story here.

Posted by Catherine Candano - Inside AdSense Team
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Thursday, January 16, 2014

Introducing the new policy FAQs, now available in the AdSense Help Center

As part of our ongoing efforts to increase transparency around our policies, we've recently launched a policy FAQs section in our Help Center to address some of the commonly asked questions that we receive from our publishers.

Some example questions in this new section include:

Would an image of a girl in a bikini be considered adult content?

When blending ads to match in with my site, how do I make sure that the ads don’t mimic the format of the content without having gaudy ads?

Is placing a 300 x 250 ad unit on top of a high-end mobile optimized page considered a policy violation?

My account got disabled and my appeal was denied. Is there any way I can start over?

Our AdSense policies are in place to ensure that Google’s display and search networks provide a safe and positive experience for our users, advertisers, and publishers.  We hope that you find these new FAQs helpful and we thank you for helping us maintain a compliant network.

Posted by Eri Shikamura - Inside AdSense Team
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Wednesday, January 15, 2014

Google Publisher Plugin beta: Bringing our publisher products to WordPress

We’ve heard from many publishers using WordPress that they’re looking for an easier way to work with Google products within the platform. Today, we’re excited to share the beta release of our official Google Publisher Plugin, which adds new functionality to publishers’ WordPress websites. If you own your own domain and power it with WordPress, this new plugin will give you access to a few Google services -- and all within WordPress.

Please keep in mind that because this is a beta release, we’re still fine-tuning the plugin to make sure it works well on the many WordPress sites out there. We’d love for you to try it now and share your feedback on how it works for your site.

This first version of the Google Publisher Plugin currently supports two Google products:
  • Google AdSense: Earn money by placing ads on your website. The plugin links your WordPress site to your AdSense account and makes it easier to place ads on your site -- without needing to manually modify any HTML code.
  • Google Webmaster Tools: Webmaster Tools provides you with detailed reports about your pages' visibility on Google. The plugin allows you to verify your site on Webmaster Tools with just one click.

Visit the WordPress.org plugin directory to download the new plugin and give it a try. For more information about the plugin and how to use it, please visit our Help Center. We look forward to hearing your feedback!

Posted by Michael Smith - Product Manager
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Monday, January 13, 2014

20(14) Publisher Stories: Doodle’s success on schedule

January is typically a time for new year’s resolutions and setting yourself up right for the year ahead. The same often applies to your websites, too. As we know many of you are thinking about what you want to achieve with your site in 2014, we’re kicking off a new success story series here on the blog. 

Every Friday, we’ll meet a publisher from around the world who has grown their business with Google. Take inspiration from their stories, learn about how they’ve successfully integrated Google tools into their strategies and hear about their plans for the future. To keep the momentum going with our new year’s resolutions, we’ll hear from a new publisher every week for the next 14 weeks. So let’s get started and meet Malte Schiebelmann from Doodle.com.

As the largest scheduling service in the world, Doodle is a free service that helps people manage their time. The company started in 2007 and today it has over 15 million monthly users.

Doodle started working with Google early on, using AdSense and then DoubleClick Ad Exchange to monetize their service and grow their business. Malte tells us that their partnership with Google has been “essential in helping Doodle increase our revenue”. Since then, they’ve continued to partner with Google, regularly using other products like DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) along the way. 
According to Malte, aside from the monetization opportunities they bring, Google products are “low maintenance and easy to use”. They give him lots of handy features to help him make decisions on changes to the site. Looking to the future, he’s looking forward to helping many more users save precious time, all the while continuing to partner with Google.

Have a Google success story you’d like to share? Tell us about it. 

Posted by Suzy Headon - Inside AdSense Team
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Thursday, January 9, 2014

Naruto Shippuden Characters Profile

Naruto Shippuden Characters Profile

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