Mobile Mondays: Wrap up and SEO resources

As we wrap up the Mobile Monday series, we?d like to leave you with one final tip on improving search engine optimization (SEO) for your mobile site. Although mobile may be a new space for you as a publisher, SEO for your mobile site should be as easy as creating your mobile site through the DudaMobile tool. That?s why we?ve consolidated resources from our Webmaster team to address common concerns around indexing content from your mobile site. Read Google?s recommendations on building smartphone-optimized websites. Watch this video to demystify the myth of mobile sites resulting in duplicate content. Read this blog post for steps on how you can help Google index your mobile site. If you missed any of our previous posts, here is a recap of the Mobile Mondays series, along with relevant mobile posts:Is your site ready for mobile users?Going Mobile - Why FindTheBest went mobileSetting goals for mobile monetization Mobile site or mobile app, what?s right for your business right now?GoMo and DudaMobile offer a do-it-yourself mobile site builderOn Mobile, it?s as much about the user as it is the contentQLife receive 560% increase in mobile app revenue with Custom Search AdsHow to monetize your mobile friendly websiteAlso, don?t forget to check out the GoMo for Publishers webinar that will walk you through specific best practices on going mobile. Posted by Tuyen Nguyen, Mobile Publisher Advocate, AdSense

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Mobile Mondays: On Mobile, it?s as much about the user as it is the content

For this Mobile Mondays post we?ve invited Netbiscuits to offer you best practices and tips for creating a good mobile experience for your users.   Netbiscuits is a leading cloud platform for the development and delivery of next generation web apps across all mobile devices and connected platforms. Cultivating a user-focused mobile experience isn?t just about shrinking your existing website to fit a mobile screen. In a single day, a connected consumer interacts with your brand and consumes your content across smartphones, tablets, smart TVs and game consoles. To meet consumer demand for instant, optimized access, marketers must design engaging ?connected experiences? that respond differently for each device as they each present unique size, capability, and content consumption challenges. In solving these challenges, marketers need to focus on a responsive design that takes the multiplatform world into account and allows for a device-optimized ?Content Centric? user experience. The layout should morph depending on the size and shape of the device?s screen ensuring the experience adapts as new devices are introduced in the marketplace. Touch enabled devices have evolved the digital user experience by providing users with a ?Parallel Response Experience? to their request as opposed to a ?Sequential Response Experience? found in a traditional ?Point and Click? mobile user experience.   Designing a ?Parallel? mobile experience with many touch enabled features ensures a more natural flow of information which  dramatically increases site effectiveness. For example, instead of re-using a traditional website interface, many mobile commerce clients use a drag and drop interface for placing items in a shopping cart which has greatly increased sales on touch enabled devices. Along with the design layout, responsive design must adapt a content centric approach to the user experience. Your users must be served content based on the topics for which they have shown interest as well as based on time of day, weather, or geographic location. A system remembering the items in your shopping cart has been an essential element of a cohesive e-commerce experience for some time. But this concept can be expanded upon by associating a broader range of content to the individual that results in the serving of an article that interested the customer earlier in the day or weather information for an upcoming trip. To foster a good user experience, this needs to be done in a streamlined, accurate manner that limits clutter. One of the more challenging attributes of going mobile is the varying screen sizes of tablets and smartphones. When it comes to tablets, we advise clients to take a layered approach to designing and delivering a ?one-page? experience. By embedding or layering a video or photo gallery on top of a page, consumer engagements and actions happen without forcing the user to leave the page. Being responsive to the user?s device and serving appropriate content is done by using analytics. The insights gleaned from mobile, including device models, screen resolution, device capability, service provider, and preferred user language cannot be matched by traditional marketing activities. Compared against geographic location, savvy marketers use this data to define product offerings and regionalize discounts. Once you understand these strategic points, you should also keep in mind these simple best practices:Mobile is not a channel. Mobile is an integrated solution where CMS, CRM and commerce updates should occur at the same time and in the same systems as updates to your traditional website.   Research! Engage your team, friends and family to get insights on how they use their mobile devices. Conduct a competitive analysis to learn how your competitors illustrate and deliver their product and services.  Design your site to solve the main problems or situations customers might find themselves in. Consider what features, tasks or existing site elements translate best on mobile and implement them. And finally, don?t simply duplicate your traditional website. Consumers want and expect a different experience on mobile. Posted by Craig Besnoy, Managing Director, The Americas, NetbiscuitsVisit Netbiscuits. com to learn more about the Netbiscuits platform.

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Mobile Mondays: QLife receives 560% increase in mobile app revenue with Custom Search Ads

QLife is a leading hospital finder, drug database and health-care information website. QLife?s mobile application, ?Medicine Search? is one of the biggest health-care applications in Japan. The app enables users to search for information on a range of medicines. QLife reached 2. 5 million downloads of their app after the 3/11 Japan Earthquake, when Japanese consumers sought to pay greater care and attention to their family?s health-care. Recently, QLife?s Executive Producer, Yoshimasa Mine spoke to us to describe why they choose to use Custom Search Ads for Mobile Applications and AdMob mobile advertising, and shared some optimization best practices. Why and when did QLife choose to start building a mobile application? In 2008, when the iPhone was introduced to the Japanese market, there was a mobile industry event, Mobitec, where I felt the potential of high-end mobile. Mobile phones are a device that's always with a consumer, regardless of whether they're at home, at work, or at play. This was a good match with our business of providing a medicine search service - a search that is done instantly at a time of need. Next, we took a look at our own company's data. We began to see large increases in traffic from mobile, even more than PCs. We wanted to build and encourage mobile activity to complement desktop traffic, particularly during holidays and weekends where we saw mobile traffic surging. Why did you decide to monetize your mobile app using AdSense and AdMob? We originally started using AdSense on our desktop site. As a health-care review site, we need to protect our objectivity and integrity to our users. As a result, advertising is the best solution for monetization, over paid reviews from other health-care services and companies. We chose AdSense because of the quality of the ads, the content matching technology, and the limited number of sales resources we had internally.   Serving relevant ads is important to our business; we view ads as useful content for our business, and irrelevant ads have not been successful in bringing revenue to us. We used to use only AdMob to monetize our application. But last year, when Custom Search Ads for Mobile Apps was released, we decided to implement it for two reasons. First, we already used Custom Search Ads for our desktop site. Secondly, we?ve heard that using both Custom Search Ads and AdMob will increase CTR because Custom Search Ads will show more related ads in search results.    What did you see as a result of implementing Custom Search Ads for Mobile Apps? We?ve seen revenue from mobile increase by 560% after implementing Custom Search Ads for Mobile Applications. We?re seeing CTRs, CPCs, and RPMs maintain healthy levels in line with our internal benchmarks. Ad engagement tends to be higher with users who own our free app. When we compare how these perform to our desktop site, we find that the mobile app generates lower CPCs but higher CTRs for us. To increase more app downloads, we are working hard to create high quality content to meet our user's needs.  How long did it take to implement Custom Search Ads on mobile apps?We took some time to implement Custom Search Ads on our app, since changes won?t go live until our users update their version of our app. It took us three to four days including the test period to implement this. Could you share any publisher best practices you?ve found across using Custom Search Ads and AdMob? Show Custom Search Ads on search result pages. Use AdMob on other content pages. We also use the AdMob House priority level to serve direct ads to users. With Custom Search Ads, you'll see a variation in the number of ads that show, depending on the amount of organic search results you're delivering.   We'll always place one ad above search results. We'll also choose to show another ad below when there are more than five search results. In doing so, we can maximize revenue while complying with the program policy, which permits only one ad per view. What?s next for QLife?We've found a lot of success with the medicine/health-care search and service business. We'd like to expand our business in a couple of new directions. First, we're interested in growing our business as an app developer for the health-care and medical service sector. We saw good success with the consumer application, and so our reputation as a medical app developer has increased in the industry overall. We're looking to take our app to new global markets. There is a need for a quality medical and health-care search service anywhere in the world. With a publisher solution like AdSense, we are excited to expand and monetize our business beyond our home market in Japan. Finally, I?m excited to announce that we just launched a new iOS app, Find Clinic that seeks to help people easily find and access hospitals at home and abroad. We?ve implemented Custom Search Ads for mobile apps on Find Clinic as well, and look forward to seeing similar successes! Posted by Tatsuo Sakamoto, Account Strategist

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?Hangout on Air? and learn how to build a mobile site in minutes

Did you know that 40% of mobile web users reported that they???ve turned to a competitor???s site after a bad mobile experience? With 44% of Americans owning a smartphone, publishers have the opportunity to meet their users??? expectations by delivering a mobile experience that???s on par with the desktop experience. If you haven???t yet developed a mobile-optimized site, we???re here to help. We recently teamed up with DudaMobile to release a free mobile site builder.   In three easy steps you???re able to get started with mobile: (1) enter your site???s URL, (2) customize your site and (3) redirect mobile users automatically to the new mobile-friendly version.   It???s free and takes just a few minutes to complete! Join us tomorrow, May 24th at 1pm ET/10am PT and watch as we showcase how ScienceDaily. com can use the mobile site builder to build a mobile-friendly site--live on air. You???ll also hear from the CMO of DudaMobile, Dennis Mink; he???ll talk about best practices when using the mobile site builder and walk through important questions to ask yourself when building a mobile-friendly site. Details on how to tune inSign into Google+ on Thursday, May 24 at 1pm ET/10am PTGo to the Google AdSense+ PageLook for the stream post and click to enter the live streamIf you have questions before or during the Hangout, post them on Google+ with the hashtag #GoMoSite. Posted by Joseph Corral, Google Mobile Ads Marketing

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Watch our latest Hangouts On Air to learn how to get started with DFP Small Business and Mobile

This past month we hosted two Hangouts on Air to help publishers get started with DFP Small Business and to create mobile websites using DudaMobile?s free mobile site builder. If you missed either Hangout, don?t worry -- we've included short recaps below, and you can watch the recordings at any time from our YouTube channel. Getting started with DFP Small Business If you?re thinking about using an ad server, just getting started using DFP or would like to learn some best practices you may have missed, then be sure to check out the video from our DFP Hangout. In the video, DFP specialist Rishan first explains how an ad server works and the benefits it can provide to growing publishers. He then discusses orders, line items and your ad units, and the ideal way to set up each. Before closing, Rishan talks about the different ways to traffic direct ads versus other ad networks and enable dynamic allocation for non-guaranteed inventory. Learning to build a mobile siteIn our mobile Hangout, specialists from Google and our partner DudaMobile, work with Dan from ScienceDaily. com to build a mobile version of his website. You?ll learn about available resources and important questions to ask yourself when starting to ?go mobile? with your site and how to create mobile ads to monetize mobile traffic. We hope you?ll join us for our future Hangouts -- be sure to stay connected with us by adding Google AdSense to your circles on Google+. Posted by Jason Sanio - Inside AdSense Team

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Mobile Mondays: Mobile site or mobile app, what?s right for your business right now?

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Mobile Mondays: GoMo and DudaMobile offer a do-it-yourself mobile site builder

An important first step to attracting customers on-the-go is to create a mobile-friendly website which can sometimes be complicated and confusing. We???re happy to announce that GoMo and DudaMobile have joined forces to make it even easier for small businesses to create a mobile-friendly website. You can create a free mobile site directly from howtogomo. com using a tool powered by DudaMobile. This do-it-yourself site builder, customized specifically for GoMo users, easily converts regular websites into mobile-friendly sites in five simple steps. And it allows you to add features like a click-to-call button, mobile maps and Google AdSense. Sites that are created with the GoMo-DudaMobile tool will be hosted free for one year. Here???s a before and after screenshot of Dog Nanny???s site. Dog Nanny???s website was not mobile friendly. Visitors had to pinch and zoom to read content. Dog Nanny???s new mobile site - created in just a few minutes - looks great on mobile devices. Please note that DudaMobile???s technology is best for converting simple sites. If your site uses a lot of Flash content, framesets or e-commerce, we suggest that you Go Mobile by talking to your agency or working with one of our suggested developers. Many small businesses are discovering that mobile sites mean more business. Now you have an opportunity to easily create a professional mobile site which will delight your customers when they visit you on the mobile web. Visit howtogomo. com/getstarted and build your site today.   It???s time to GoMo!Posted by Nabil Haschemie, Product Marketing Manager, Mobile Ads

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Mobile Websites vs Responsive Design: What?s the right solution for your business?

The following post originally appeared on the Google Mobile Ads Blog. As more of your competitors Go Mo, building a mobile-friendly site becomes more of a priority for your business. Over the past two years alone, mobile search traffic has increased five-fold. Customers are searching for your business from their mobile phones, and you need to engage them with a mobile experience designed for completing on-the-go tasks from their small screens. Recently many businesses have been asking us about an emerging trend among web developers???responsive design???and if they should use it. While we believe that building a separate mobile website is an appropriate solution for certain businesses, it???s also important to understand how responsive design might fit into your plans to Go Mo. What is responsive design? It is a website design technique that allows you to create a single website that will adapt to the device on which it???s being viewed, whether it???s a laptop, smartphone or tablet. A site built with responsive design will automatically resize for different devices, but it is up to you to prioritize the content that matters most to the mobile user. For example, a mobile user might need to quickly find your phone number or directions, whereas a tablet user might want a simpler way to make couch-surfing purchases. A site built using responsive design could prioritize click-to-call and click-to-map buttons, while the tablet site would focus on simplifying the shopping cart. For the technical details on how responsive design works for building mobile-friendly sites, read this blog post from the Google webmaster team. So how do I know if I should build a separate mobile website or use responsive design? Here are some guidelines to help you decide what makes sense for your business:If I decide responsive design is a better fit for my business, do I have to build my site from scratch?Not necessarily. A sophisticated web developer might be able to adapt an existing site with responsive design, but there will still be costs in terms of time and budget. Will a site built with responsive design have more than one URL?No. A site built with responsive design will have the same URL for desktop, mobile and tablets. When building a separate mobile optimized site, typically there is a different mobile URL, but the users will be taken there automatically as long as your desktop site is enabled with the auto redirect code. How much does it cost to use responsive design for mobile?Prices vary across developers and agencies. We recommend reaching out to a developer and/or agency for help on getting started. Responsive design can definitely minimize long term maintenance of your site, but many businesses can effectively connect with their customers with a separate mobile-friendly site. If you have the technical resources and a clear business need, then responsive design is a more advanced way to make your site mobile-friendly. No matter how you go about it, you need to ensure you are designing for mobile first, and engaging your customers when they're using their mobile phones to search for your business. For additional resources on the value of mobile, testing your site and finding developers to help you build your mobile-friendly site, visit howtogomo. com. Posted by Jessica Sapick, Associate Product Marketing Manager

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