We've had a lot of questions recently from AdSense publishers about viewability and the new Active View metrics in AdSense accounts. Active View can really help you improve your AdSense earnings, so let's take a closer look.

What are Active View and viewability?

Active View is Google’s ad viewability measurement solution. It tracks the viewability of ads served by AdSense: that is, the percentage of ads that are considered viewable out of the total number of ads measured. We use the online ad industry standard: a display ad is counted as viewable when at least 50% of the ad is within the viewable space on the user’s screen for one second or more.

So an ad that is (for instance) placed below the first screen on a given page won't be counted as viewable if the viewer never scrolls down. This is why viewability a good way of determining whether your AdSense ads are actually being seen by your website visitors or simply loading without a chance of catching the viewer's eye.

Why is viewability important?

The industry shift towards viewability is good for both publishers and advertisers for many reasons.

• Benefits for advertisers and the advertising industry

Without viewability metrics, advertisers could be paying for ads that loaded on a page but were never seen. If you're an advertiser paying per click you might not care, but if you're paying by the impression it could be a much bigger deal.

Active View metrics help because they show advertisers what percentage of their ads are actually being seen by users and which publishers provide the highest level of viewability. This helps advertisers make smarter decisions about where they should buy ad impressions. That makes display ads both more measurable and more effective.

• Benefits for publishers

Viewability metrics also help publishers understand the true performance of the AdSense ads they display. Whether the ad is being paid for by click or by impression, ads that aren't seen by the user can’t have an impact. In the long run, they won’t generate reliable ad revenue.

If publishers notice that the Active View percentage for certain ad units is lower than others, that ad position is probably underperforming and ought to be optimized. Active View can help publishers increase their AdSense earnings as they take corrective action and improve the performance of these ads.

How to improve your ad viewability

Once you become familiar with viewability statistics, there are two changes you can make to improve your results.

• Change ad sizes

Vertical ad units such as 160x600 and 120x600 tend to have higher Active View percentages. This makes sense: vertical ad units are in view for longer as the user scrolls up or down the page. Other ad sizes with high viewability rates include the 120x240 and 240x400 ad units.

• Change ad positions

Rethinking the position of your AdSense ad units can also help improve your viewability rates. It's not always just a matter of putting more ads at the top of the page: for example, ads positioned just above the fold tend to have higher viewability rates since they remain within view for longer as the user scrolls down. Experiment with what works best on your site.

Paying close attention to your Active View numbers will help you bring your visitors the targeted ads you want them to see and remove the uncertainty around unviewable ads. In the end, that should mean fewer underperforming ad units and a potentially a new way to achieve better revenues overall.

We think that in the long term viewability will change the way that advertisers allocate their budgets to online display. And if you're a publisher, it's a good idea to start paying attention to these new numbers and make adjustments to your ad sizes, ad units, and ad positions to improve viewability and potentially achieve better results.

To learn more about viewability and Active View, see the AdSense Help Center.

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Posted by Paul Healy

Publisher Monetization Specialist

Sometimes it's a good thing to step back and look at the basics.

With that in mind (and with the new AdSense interface now in place), we'd like to recap the big five AdSense reports you should start with to analyze your overall account performance.

Let's take a look at these reports.

1. The reporting dashboard: Get an overall summary of your performance

As the name suggests, the reporting dashboard gives you a quick summary of three main reporting metrics: estimated earnings, page views, and revenue per thousand impressions (RPM). 

This report is a great way to get a quick check of your recent AdSense performance. You can switch to a wider date range, too, like the past month or year. If you see a sudden change in your results for any area, you can see a more detailed report with a click on the View report button.

2. The entire account by day report: Monitor your daily performance

To see this report, visit the Performance reports tab, click Common reports on the left-hand panel and then select Entire account by day.

Use the Entire account by day report to analyze your daily performance. Try selecting estimated earnings, impressions, CTR, and impression RPM to view them all at the same time and get a better idea of why your earnings change over time. 

For example, if the drop in estimated revenue is mainly due to a drop in CTR, take a closer look at ad units and ad placement to understand what caused that CTR drop.


3. Ad units + Platforms: Check ad performance by device

To use this report, visit the Performance reports tab, click Common reports on the left-hand panel, select Ad units and then add Platforms from the top as a secondary dimension.

This combination offers a good look at how your ad units are doing on different device types. Maybe every ad is doing great across the board, or maybe some ad units are doing well on desktop but not on mobile (or vice versa). 

CTR and Active View Viewable are two key metrics to check first. Active View Viewable shows how many of your total measurable impressions were truly viewable. Google considers an ad viewable if 50% of the ad is visible for at least one second*. With some impressions, for instance, the visitor may not scroll down your page to see an ad. 

If an ad unit has an active view percentage below 50%, check the ad's placement and try to improve this.

Hungry to learn even more? Take it one step further by filtering the report for any individual ad unit that you would like to analyze.


4. The Platforms report: Compare platforms

The Platforms report enables you to see which devices your ad units were viewed on, for example, on desktop or mobile. You can see and compare the traffic and estimated revenue coming from any platform. If there’s a big discrepancy between these two, you might want to check the desktop ad placement and find ways to optimize it to close the revenue gap as much as you can.

5. The Sites report: Compare different domains

Manage multiple domains in your AdSense account? The Sites report can compare the overall performance of those domains.

If you have different versions of one site (like one for desktop and one for mobile), you'll see them separately. If you have a responsive site you can add Platforms as a secondary report dimension to analyze your mobile and desktop performance separately.

Start with these big five and you'll be getting a good basic view of how your site is running. Most of these reports can be found in the Common reports section under your Performance reports tab. You can also create your own reports and save them to run later.

Have a favorite report? Share it with us in the comments!

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Posted by Cansu Özaras

Publisher Monetization Specialist

Want to freshen up the AdSense performance on your site? Google Analytics can help. Here are some simple and effective places to start.

1. Find out where to focus

Content Groups let you bundle your offerings to analyze them more clearly. Instead of analyzing all shoes at once, for instance, a shoe company might divide content into shoes for adults and kids, for men and women, or by tennis shoes and high heels. You can view and compare aggregated metrics by group, or drill down to any individual URL or page title.

Suppose you want to know: What topics have the best AdSense CTRs?

• Group content by topic (such as food, politics and sport)
• Use the AdSense Pages report to view metrics

Once you learn which topics have the best clickthrough rates, you could then focus on creating more content for those topics.

Suppose you want to know: Which product groups have slow-loading pages?

• Group products by type (such as shirts and shoes)
• Use Page Speed reports to look at page load performance

Are some pages very slow? You might focus on fixing uncompressed images to improve the user experience (and your AdSense revenue).

Content Groups are easy to set up. Learn how to create them and then follow these best practices from Google Analytics evangelist Justin Cutroni.

2. Understand where your users arrive and leave

A Landing Pages report can show you how engaged visitors are with your content. You can analyze individual pages or the Content Groups we just talked about.

Suppose you want to know: What pages cause visitors to leave?

• Look for pages with high bounce rates, this usually indicates content that isn't appealing to visitors or is irrelevant to their needs
• Try changing the headline of your article or finding better images
• You may also want to analyze the page speed for pages with high bounce rates; visitors may be giving up on a very slow-loading page 

Both Content Groups and Landing Page reports can help you find underperforming pages on your site and take action to fix them.

3. Get to know your users 

Demographics and Interests data helps you understand the age and gender of your users, as well as their interests based on their online browsing and buying.

Suppose you want to know: How old are my visitors?

• Try Demographics Report > Age  
• Check the bounce rate: if it’s high, consider changing the headline or the visuals to make your pages more relevant and engaging for your target audience

Suppose you want to know: What are my users interested in?

• Try an Interests report
• Then shape your content based on the user interests you see; if viewers of you tech blog are interested in photography, try publishing more articles on that theme

To get started with the Demographics and Interests reports, enable them in your Analytics account.

The key to making your site better is to jump into the data, have fun, and experiment. Find out what works and do more of it. Have any ideas to share about using these reports? Add them in the comments below!

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Posted by Stephen Dunleavy

AdSense Analytics Expert

The holiday season is the busiest time of the year, with shoppers out in full force to gather their holiday gifts, round up their decorations, and treat themselves to something special. 2014 was a record-breaker in terms of ad spend, which goes to show just how important it is that your advertising is as targeted as possible, and that you’re fully prepared for the final, and most lively, quarter of the year.

Check out these stats and tips below which can help you be in tip-top form for the season:
(viewing from mobile? Download it here.)

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Posted by Yigit Yucel

Marketing Communications Specialist

5 tips to grow site visitors

If you're like most publishers, you think a lot about how to grow your site audience. It should be no surprise that for this topic, content is key. Great content attracts and engages new users and keeps your wonderful old users coming back again and again.

But how do you produce content that is high in quality, value, and unique? For the answer, look back to why you became an AdSense publisher in the first place. Do what you love and your content will naturally be at the heart of all you do.

As you build your new content, use these five tips to make what you create as engaging as it can possibly be.

Be targeted, be consistent, be frequent
Take time to figure out who is reading your content and what topics they find most interesting. Does your blog about dogs get 20 comments about Chihuahuas for every one comment about Great Danes? Maybe you should focus on the little guys!

Update your content as often as you can. With regular updates you’ll build trust and engagement with your users, and they’ll be more likely to share your content with their friends and family.

Create engaging videos
People crave video. In fact, the average mobile viewing session on YouTube is now around 40 minutes. You could boost the amount of time your visitors spend on your site by using video and photos.

Create your own videos; it gives your site personality and unique content. Try adding a separate video section, or integrate video within your articles. Use A/B testing to find the best spot for your video: for instance, see how a video performs in the middle of article versus at the end. Remember, if you use videos that aren't yours, make sure that you have the rights to distribute them.

Be mobile-friendly
The number of smartphone users is estimated to grow by 16% to two billion users in 2015. In all, web access from mobile phones will represent 69% of all traffic by 2017, according to emarketer.com. The average user now spends almost three hours per day on mobile devices.*

To win more visitors, optimize your site for all screens. Your site needs to be accessible anywhere and anytime, on smartphones and every other device. (Hungry to learn more? See more tips on going mobile.)

Go social
The way users find and share content has changed. Along with direct and search traffic, social sharing is key for your site visitor strategy. Remember, your article or video could be the perfect fit for someone’s micro-moment, so make sure you have the most important message in the first few moments.

Use social plugins and sharing buttons to help users share your content on the spot. Use large icons to highlight those sharing options. Try to A/B test where those buttons get the best engagement: at the top, at the bottom or embedded right in the article. For the best user experience, keep those buttons separated from your AdSense ads.

Look at what the numbers are telling you
If great content is job #1, great measurement is job #2. Google Analytics can bring you a deeper understanding of your audience and their demographics, time on site, which pages people leave fast, and which they visit most.

Use these insights to provide your users with the right content that works across devices. For instance, try the long-term revenue framework.

Have some top tips of your own? Share them with us in the comments below.

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Posted by

Jason Le

Account Strategist 

and

Draven Leong

AdSense Onboarding Agent

What is human-centered design, and why should you care?

Suppose you want to come up with a new way to engage your site visitors and attract more of them. You could lie on the couch and hope to dream up a genius idea... or you could try human-centered design.

Human-centered design is a creative approach to problem solving. It's taught by innovative institutions such as IDEO and the Stanford Design School and is often used to design new products.

But it's not just for designers. Publishers like you can use human-centered design to understand what audiences want and create new content to match. Why not give it a try?

The steps go like this:

1. Empathize: Observe, engage, and immerse

To get started, look at your users’ behavior and think about why they behave that way.

• Meet some of your users and watch what they do with your content.
• Engage with them. Ask them why they read or watch your content. Try to uncover their needs. 
• Immerse yourself in their experience however you can. Try to discover the emotions that guide their behaviors. Which specific users do you want to create new content for?

Let's say we have a blog focused on the millennial generation and their interests. By meeting and talking with our audience, we learn that a small but growing group of young professional women find our blog really valuable. We decide to focus on this audience.

2. Define: Focus and paraphrase

What is the main user need? Based on what you've heard and learned, create a problem statement. It should look something like this:

"Young professional women need to know more about how to advance their careers, because they aspire to move into management roles."

This is a good problem statement because it:

• Targets a clear cohort of users.
• Addresses a specific need.
• Is something you can take action on.

3. Ideate: Explore

Now it's time to explore as many possible ideas as you can think of. Here are some key ideas for brainstorming:

• Be prolific. Go for a high quantity and wide variety of ideas.
• Be positive. Use the mantra "Yes, and" to build ideas on top of each other.
• Be patient. Don't interrupt yourself or critique ideas as you think of them. You can judge them later.

Use guiding questions. For instance, "How might we…"

1. Connect relatable role models with our young professional women readers?
2. Give them useful strategies for managing up?
3. Address the biases women may face in the workplace? 

4. Prototype: Create

Now you're ready to start building. Choose your best idea and build as many prototype solutions as you can. Prototypes can be things like:

• Post-it notes
• Role playing
• Storyboards
• Objects

Use any prototype you like, as long as it's something you can show to test users to judge their reactions.  For our blog, we might:

Create a video interview with female executives and transcribe it for the blog.

Go to a conference on women in leadership and post notes on conversations we have there.

Present data that shows how progressive companies have tried to address the problem and what can be implemented at smaller companies. 

Hold a Google Hangout and invite readers to join in and talk with a guest speaker.

5. Test: Experiment, refine

Now you're ready to take things back to your target users again. Show them your prototypes and once again observe, empathize, and immerse yourself in their experience. Ask for feedback. Listen. Then use what you hear to refine the prototype. Refine and repeat as necessary.

You'll need patience for this creative problem-solving approach. But when you're done, your ideas will be stronger because they grow from the needs of your users. The more you get to know your audience, the better you can anticipate their needs and adjust your content strategy to engage them in the future.

We hope you find this new thinking useful whenever you design something new. Let us know what you think about the human-centered design in the comments below.

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Posted by Michael Le

Strategic Partnership Manager

We live in an exciting time, where the number and variety of connected devices are growing at a rapid pace. People are coming online for the first time, and they’re accessing the Web through a mobile device.

Having a solid multi-screen strategy will help you prepare for the next wave of mobile web users. By following the simple steps below, we can help set you up for success on mobile web and answer questions like: How will my users react?, how do I keep my brand identity?, and what will happen to my earnings?

1. Test your site 
Start by understanding how your site currently runs on mobile devices. Use Google PageSpeed Insights to see how your site is performing on mobile and identify your site’s most crucial needs and what to take care of first.

2. Pick your strategy
Next, it’s time to make a choice on which multi-screen strategy to move forward with. The most common solutions are:

• Separate mobile/tablet site
• Responsive web design
• Dynamic serving

The choice is yours and all strategies have both pros and cons. When making the decision, you should consider the following:

• Do I want to serve the same content to all platforms? If so, a responsive design should do the trick.

• What’s more important; speed or flexibility? A separate mobile site or dynamic serving allows for better optimization.

• Do I have the resources to maintain more than one site? Responsive design can help you save valuable time and resources.

• What kind of technical capabilities do I have? Pick a strategy that best suits your skill set.

3. Follow best practices
We’ve finally made it to the fun part – building the site. No matter what solution you choose, every multi-screen developer should follow these general rules of thumb.

• Focus on the main action that you want the user to take: While you had plenty of space on desktop, you’ll have to be resourceful on mobile.

• Make your navigation easy to understand: Users want quick access to key actions, so make things easy to find.

• Use existing design paradigms: Do you already have a brand identity on your desktop site? Reuse the same design elements when possible. Try adapting to the user’s device, for example using Material Design for Android: users like familiarity.

• Make sure videos work: Design your look and feel and page animations using modern web technologies. Read more about Look and Feel for video in our Web Fundamentals guide.

• Limit image-based text: Make use of web fonts when possible. Mobile means lower bandwidth.

• Simplify payment processes: Auto-populate shipping addresses and contact details. Use existing payment solutions such as Google Wallet.

4. Avoid common mistakes
Learn from other developers by checking out some of the most common mistakes on mobile sites. This can save you time as you plan and launch your multi-screen strategy.

We hope these guidelines are useful when thinking about your multi-screen strategy. Let us know if you have any other tips that have worked well for you in the comments below.

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Posted by Felix Nermark

Marketing Communication Specialist

74% of people say that when a site is mobile-friendly, they're more likely to return to that site in the future, according to a Think With Google study.

If that's not enough to encourage you to build up your mobile audience, consider this: 52% of users in the same study said that a bad mobile experience made them less likely to engage with a company.

Designing a mobile-friendly site is important, and so is creating the best mobile user experience. That includes ads: if you want to make the most of every opportunity to earn, your ads should be designed for mobile, too.

Download The AdSense Guide to Mobile Web Success to learn practical ways to engage and delight your mobile audience. Get tips on how to:

• Potentially boost mobile ad revenue with the best ad placements
• Choose the right mobile ad formats for your site
• Send push notifications to your audience just like an installed native app
• Help your audience jump back into your content with just a single tap

What’s your favorite way to engage your mobile audience?  We’d love to hear from you in the comments or on Twitter.

Not yet an AdSense user? Sign up today!

Posted by Jay Castro

Audience Development Specialist
@jayciro

You might have heard about Contributor through recent posts from the Google team, publishers, and the press. Today we want to share more about the product and provide you an easy way to promote this new revenue source to your site visitors.

Think about your own experience surfing the web. Are there publishers whose content you particularly love and keep going back to? Do you wish you could support these publishers, but see fewer ads? We’ve learned that users want an option to directly support the open web and the people who make it hum with great content, while also seeing fewer ads.

We understand that as a publisher your most pressing concerns are keeping your users happy and generating revenue to support your business. Contributor presents a new option to meet both of these goals.

Here’s how it works
With Contributor, users pick a monthly contribution level (of $2, $5, or $10) and those funds are used to pay for the sites they visit.

By choosing to contribute to publishers, users essentially participate in the ad auction. If the user’s bid wins, no ad is shown, but you’ll get paid by Google as you normally do when ads are served.

Help spread the word
Let your visitors know about Contributor by putting a customized Contributor badge on your site.

Find out how and learn about more ways you can help spread the word here. And if you’re interested in seeing how it works, try Contributor for yourself.

Posted by David Stanke

Contributor Product Manager

Editor’s note: John Brown, the Head of Publisher Policy Communications, is explaining what to do if you receive a policy warning message.

In this post, I’d like to talk about policy warning messages and what steps you should take if you receive one. I’ll also answer some of the most common questions around warning messages.

What is a warning message?
We send out warning messages to our publishers if their site, or a page of their site, violates our AdSense policies. For minor policy violations that can be fixed fairly easily, our first step is to issue a warning.

Where can I see my warning message?
Warning messages are sent to the email address associated with your AdSense account. You can manage your contact email address under Personal Settings in your account. You can also check out outstanding policy violations by visiting the Status page in your AdSense account.

What do I do if I get a warning?
If you receive a warning message, follow these steps to fix the violation as quickly as possible:

1. Read the instructions in the warning message very carefully to understand how the flagged policy violation corresponds to the particular page of your site.


• Optimally, we would recommend simply removing Google AdSense code from the violating pages. You do not need to remove Google AdSense code from your whole website, just the violating pages.


• If you are unable to or unsure of how to remove the ads from these pages, or would like to continue monetizing the page with Google ads, please modify or remove the violating content to meet our AdSense policies.


2. Multiple pages of your site might be violating the policies. Check all your pages of all of your sites to make sure they’re compliant. 
3. When adding new content to your site on pages with Google ads, ensure that these pages comply with Google policies. Our warning emails include a URL from your website of a violating page, but it is possible that other pages on your site have violations as well. Review all your sites and pages to make sure they are policy compliant.

What is the timeline to fix the violation?
After receiving a warning, you should immediately take time to review your pages where Google AdSense code is implemented and ensure that it complies with our policies. If you fix the violation or remove the ad code from violating pages, you don’t need to contact us.

How do we determine how to send warning messages?
It is a common misconception that AdSense disables websites and sends warning messages randomly. We rely upon a detailed set of guidelines when looking at policy violations, which you can find in the AdSense Help Center.

Do we ever disable ad serving to a site without first sending a warning? 
There are some situations when we would need to disable ad serving to a site without first sending a warning. We usually take this action for extreme violations like adult content and copyright infringement, as well as cases of violent content. We may also disable ads to a site when we find a violation that we’ve already contacted a publisher about in the past.

How can I appeal a disabling and get ad serving reinstated?
If ad serving on your site is disabled due to a policy violation, there are steps you must take in order to have ads reinstated. First, the page(s) of your site that is in violation of Google policies must be reviewed. As mentioned in my previous blog post, our obligations to advertisers drive many of our policies and enforcement of our policies. Therefore, we simply ask that you remove our ad code from the violating page(s), ensuring our advertisements do not appear alongside content that violates Google policies. Once the ad code has been removed, you can then file an appeal after reviewing our policy appeals Help Center article. Sometimes users delete all their Google AdSense code; you don't need to remove the ad code from non-violating pages before sending the appeal.

To make sure that the appeal is a strong one, please tell us exactly what action you've taken on your site to resolve the violations and also tell us how you'll prevent similar occurrences in the future. I recommend that you include some other example URLs that you've taken action on proactively.  We want to work with our publishers to help them grow their businesses while remaining policy-compliant.

You can find more information about policy appeals here.

Is there a point at which an account can get shut down completely? 
The final and most severe action that our teams can take is to close down an account completely. This normally only happens when we find egregious policy violations, if a large portion of a publisher’s network consists of violating sites, or for repeat policy offenders.

I hope this helps you to deal with policy violations. For more information about policy warnings, check out this Help Center article. We’d love to hear your thoughts to improve our processes. Let us know what you think in the comment section below this post.

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Posted by John Brown
Head of Publisher Policy Communications

Late last year we announced Hindi as the first Indic language supported by AdSense. It means you can earn money by displaying Google AdSense ads on Hindi webpages.

But why does Hindi matter? If you have a large user base in India; or you’re looking to grow in this strategic emerging market; catering your content to Hindi speakers is key. Check out this infographic to learn more:

Keen to start creating? Here are our top five tips for publishing Hindi content online:

1. Create Hindi content that is unique and provides value to your users.

Check out Google Trends in Search and YouTube to see what’s popular in India right now. You can also see a selection of high quality Hindi content from fellow publishers at hindiweb.com.

2. Get a professional translation, or have a native speaker review content.

If you plan to translate your site for Hindi speakers, ensure you provide good quality translations. Avoid auto-translation as it risks a low quality user experience. Read the Webmaster Quality Guidelines to learn more.

3. Be multi-screen and fast-loading.

Delight users with a mobile-friendly site that works well even on low-bandwidth connections. Explore these multi-screen guidelines to get your site ready.

4. Use Devanagari script. 

Access up to 40 free, beautiful fonts for publishing your Hindi content and benefit from better indexing of your site. Select Devanagari script at Google Fonts to add fonts to your collection.

5. Monetize with Google AdSense.

You can use your existing Google AdSense account and create a new ad unit to get started. If you’re new to AdSense, sign up now. 

We look forward to seeing the content you create in Hindi.

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Posted by Amelia Walkley

Marketing Communications Specialist

Recently, we announced that Google Search will be using mobile-friendliness as a search ranking signal. This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in Google Search results. Make sure your website is ready for this search change. Here are some frequently asked questions that can help you.

How can I check if my site is mobile-friendly? 

You can check your site by testing your pages with the Mobile-Friendly Test tool. This tool shows how Google Search sees your pages. To get a list of mobile usability issues across your sites, log in to your Webmaster Tools account and use the Mobile Usability Report.

How can I make my site mobile-friendly?

Get started with the guide to mobile-friendly sites to build your mobile-friendly site. If you need more customized advice for publishers, you can check out the AdSense Multi-Screen Starter Guide.  

My website is already mobile-friendly. Do I need to take any action?

If you already have a mobile-friendly site:

• Double-check your site’s pages using the Mobile-Friendly Test tool and see how Google Search sees your pages.
• Check out the AdSense Multi-screen Implementation Guide to learn about growing audience and revenue from your site.
• Use the Mobile Search Engine Optimization guide to help your site show up in search results.

Go mobile today to provide your visitors a good user experience and to make most of your mobile traffic.

Posted by Inside AdSense Team
Was this blog post useful? Share your feedback with us.

We hear from publishers around the world that they are looking to grow their site traffic and increase revenue. To help you accomplish these goals, we'd like to share the Long-term Revenue Framework—a tool often used by our AdSense optimization experts.

The Long-term Revenue Framework below is a simple, but powerful framework to help you understand the four levers that can help you to grow your site. With this framework, consider your site optimization efforts in terms of the four levers outlined below.

At the highest level, to help grow your site's revenue, try focusing on attracting more unique users and/or increasing the value of the users already visiting your site. To earn more from your existing users, you can maximize the value of each page view, get visitors to look at more pages and visit your site more often. Let’s look at each of these levers in more detail.

1. Number of users

Growing the number of unique users starts with understanding your site’s traffic. Check your Google Analytics reports to see where your visitors are coming from and what content on your site drives the most traffic. You can use these insights to create compelling content that users can find and share.

2. Revenue per page view (RPM)

To help maximize the value of each page view, try focusing on two areas.  First, make sure your ads get seen by placing them near the content users are paying attention to. Next, increase competition for the ads on your website by following these best practices:

• Allow both text and image ads.
• Implement the top performing ad sizes on your site.
• Allow as many ad categories as possible.
• Enable AdSense to compete against other ad networks if you're also using DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP)

3. Page views per visit (Depth of visit)

To encourage visitors to look at more pages and spend more time on your site, clearly demonstrate the value of your content. Create a great first impression by making sure the information your visitors are looking for is the first thing they see.

You can further increase your site’s page views per visit by showing your visitors that you have more great content they’d be interested in. You can achieve this by showcasing related or popular content near the end of the main content of the page.

4. Visits per user (Loyalty)

Creating a loyal user base is all about conveying to users that your site is regularly updated with new and interesting content. You can build loyalty by asking your visitors to subscribe to your email newsletter or social media channels.

We hope this framework is useful when thinking about how to grow your website’s traffic and revenue. Let us know what you plan to do using the Long-term Revenue Framework in the comments section below.

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Posted by Adam Coelho - User Experience Strategist
Was this blog post useful? Share your feedback with us.

(Originally posted on the Google Webmaster Central Blog)

Have you ever tapped on a Google Search result on your mobile phone, only to find yourself looking at a page where the text was too small, the links were tiny, and you had to scroll sideways to see all the content? This usually happens when the website has not been optimized to be viewed on a mobile phone.

This can be a frustrating experience for our mobile searchers. Starting today, to make it easier for people to find the information that they’re looking for, we’re adding a “mobile-friendly” label to our mobile search results.

This change will be rolling out globally over the next few weeks. A page is eligible for the “mobile-friendly” label if it meets the following criteria as detected by Googlebot:

• Avoids software that is not common on mobile devices, like Flash
• Uses text that is readable without zooming
• Sizes content to the screen so users don't have to scroll horizontally or zoom
• Places links far enough apart so that the correct one can be easily tapped

If you want to make sure that your page meets the mobile-friendly criteria:

• Check your pages with the Mobile-Friendly Test 
• Read our updated documentation on our Webmasters Mobile Guide on how to create and improve your mobile site
• See the Mobile usability report in Google Webmaster Tools, which highlights major mobile usability issues across your entire site, not just one page
• Check our how-to guide for third-party software like WordPress or Joomla, in order to migrate your website hosted on a CMS (Content Management System) to use a mobile-friendly template

The tools and documentation above are currently available in English. They will be available in additional languages within the next few weeks.

We see these labels as a first step in helping mobile users to have a better mobile web experience. We are also experimenting with using the mobile-friendly criteria as a ranking signal.

If you have any questions or want to help others make mobile-friendly sites, visit our Webmaster Help Forum. We hope to see many more mobile-friendly websites in the future. Let’s make the web better for all users!

Posted by Ryoichi Imaizumi and Doantam Phan, Google Mobile Search

For AdSense publishers: Don’t forget to check our Multi-Screen Starter Guide to start building your mobile-friendly website today.

In recent years, mobile devices have brought the web to new users and introduced many new device capabilities, screen sizes, input methods, and more. To help publishers and developers navigate this new space, the Google Developers team recently built Web Fundamentals, a useful source for modern best practices aimed at web developers. We’ve also made it even easier to build multi-device experiences with the Beta release of the Web Starter Kit.

Whether you are creating a mobile site yourself or hiring a developer to create one for you, this resource will offer you useful guidelines to get started.

Web Fundamentals' guidelines are intended to be fundamental to the web platform: useful no matter which framework you choose or which browser your users run. The guidelines include a range of useful articles to help you build a site including articles focused on responsive layouts, forms, touch, and performance, just to name a few.

Inside Web Fundamentals you will find a web starter kit - a lightweight kit to help you or a developer get started with creating your mobile-optimized site. This kit is highly useful and includes helpful tools, including a visual style guide, that you can implement on your site.

Keep in mind, this content is pretty technical and is geared more towards web developers.  If you find the content to be too technical, we do offer a list of recommended vendors that can help you build a mobile-optimized site.

Keep an eye on this space moving forward. We will be updating the Web Fundamental guidelines with more content and resources in the future.

Posted by Matt Salisbury,  Multi-Screen Specialist
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This blog post was adapted from content originally posted on the The Chromium blog.

A combination of offering users the best experience and efficiently monetizing your content is important for the long-term success of your website. With that in mind, here’s some tips to help you to achieve both of these goals:

Content: Is your site content relevant to your users? Ask yourself if the content on your site is well-researched and well-structured. Will it capture and engage your users' attention?

Ad types: When choosing an ad type for your site, consider if it improves the user experience on your site. It's important to be mindful of designs that are prohibited by our AdSense program policies, such as pop-ups and pop-unders, floating or static ads, or any other type of ad that could make it difficult for users to access your content. Where possible, test potential designs with focus groups or an AdSense experiment.

Ad placement: Advertising on your site should provide additional value to your users. Ads should be visible without limiting your site audience's ability to interact with the rest of your content. For instance, if ads are visible above the fold on your site, make sure they're not making it difficult for users to view your content. We may be less likely to display pages with obstructive above the fold advertising in our search results.

Multi-screen: Don't forget to think about the impact of your design and ad placement on the accessibility of content across platforms. Our research indicates that users are increasingly relying on multiple digital touch-points throughout the day.

In addition to the four tips above, check out the Webmaster Quality Help Center for website quality guidelines that have been created specifically for AdSense publishers. You’ll also find insights and tools to help you understand and improve your site on the Google Webmasters website.

Posted by: 

Andrey Lipattsev, Search Quality, Outreach Specialist

Alexey Petrov, AdSense Product Specialist

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Welcome to the final part of our World Cup series. Today we’ll share some AdSense-specific tips and tricks to help grow your revenue potential. We'll cover some old but steadfast recommendations plus more advanced seasonal optimisation tips to help ensure you’re well prepared for the World Cup.

1. Increase ad coverage: Place up to three ad units, plus three link units per page. This can help increase the click rates and views on your site, and potentially boost your earnings. It’s important to remember that a good balance between content and ads is essential. Placing too many ads on a page may cause a high bounce rate and loss in revenue.

2. Use the best performing ad formats: Wider ad formats usually perform better compared to others. Some ad formats also have more advertiser demand. Typically ad formats like the 728x90 Leaderboard, the 336x280 Large rectangle, the 300x250 Medium Rectangle, and the 300x600 Large Skyscraper are the most popular formats among the advertisers and more effective in terms of potentially increasing revenue. During big sporting events, advertisers are often focusing on viral engagement. Enabling expandable ads will help you capture this opportunity.

3. Be careful with blocking controls: Review which ad categories you’re currently blocking and why you’re blocking them. Overblocking can lead to a decline in your earnings potential, especially in times of increased traffic to your site and bigger advertiser spend on categories such as CPG, Auto, Entertainment Food and Beverage and Travel.  

4. Ensure optimal ad position: Choosing the best locations to insert the ads can be challenging.  Use Google Analytics to get a heatmap on where your users are clicking. You’ll also find more new resources on the AdSense Help Center regarding the best performing ad placements for each website category. Recently we have new articles about ad placement specific to sports and travel.

That wraps up our World Cup blog series. We hope you’ve gained some new insights, inspiration and ideas on getting your site ready for the World Cup. Check back here in a two weeks when we’ll be sharing news of a fantastic Google initiative around World Cup insights.

Posted by Marta Lysiak - Inside AdSense Team
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Mobile empowers users to access your site at anytime and from anywhere. Is your site ready for them? Your mobile site should allow users to quickly and easily find what they’re looking for without sacrificing richness of content. While there are a lot of expert opinions about how to do this, very few are based on actual data and research. So we partnered with AnswerLab to study more than 100 mobile users as they completed conversion-focused tasks across a diverse group of sites. From this research, we developed 25 principles of mobile site design to help you develop a mobile site that both delights your users and drives engagement.

Let’s take a closer look at three findings from the research:

Primacy of site search
Study participants with a specific need, especially those visiting retail sites, turned to site search to find what they were looking for. Participants were quick to abandon sites that returned irrelevant search results or a large set of results that they were unable to narrow.

Key takeaway: Ensure site search is visible on the homepage via an open text field, returns relevant results, and is equipped with advanced features, like auto-complete and filters, to get users what they want quickly.

Mobile site misconceptions
If presented a choice, study participants would often tap on the link to visit the “full site” due to a perception that they’d be missing out on something by staying on the mobile site. Choosing the “mobile site” implied to them that they were not getting the “full” experience, when in reality, the mobile site offered most, if not all of the functionality in an easier-to-view format.

Key takeaway: If your mobile site provides the same content and functionality as your desktop site in an easier-to-use format, then there is no need to provide a link to the desktop site. If you do decide to provide users with a link to the desktop site, then use terms like “desktop site” instead of “full site” to be clear that both sites offer a complete experience.

Sites with a mix of mobile optimized and desktop pages provide a poor user experience
Unsurprisingly, it was easier for participants to navigate mobile-optimized sites on their mobile devices than desktop sites on their mobile devices. However, sites that included a mix of desktop and mobile-optimized pages were actually harder for participants to use than sites with all-desktop pages.

Key takeaway: To improve user experience, task completion and conversion rates, go all in and optimize your entire site for mobile. If launching in phases, then make sure users don’t have to traverse between desktop pages and mobile optimized pages to complete their tasks.

To review our complete findings, download the Principles of Mobile Site Design from Think Multi-Screen. Use the principles to review the effectiveness of your existing site or to guide the creation of your first mobile-optimized site.

Posted by Jenny Gove, User Experience Researcher, Google

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Google Analytics can be an incredibly valuable source of information for AdSense publishers,  and today we’re announcing a new way for you to use those insights to improve your site’s performance. Google Analytics has created a data sharing setting to give you the option to let our optimization specialists proactively analyze your Analytics account data to find new ways for you to grow your business online. We’ll help you understand how people find your site, how they navigate through it, and how they become loyal users - and we’ll help you take advantage of Analytics features like Content Experiments to help you determine the most optimal layout for your site.

If you’ve linked your AdSense account with Analytics, opt in to the Account specialists data sharing setting under the Account Settings tab. Then we’ll be able to build targeted recommendations to help you improve the user experience on your site and monetize with AdSense more effectively.

Additionally, if you want to help make our other products work better for content publishers like yourself, you can opt in to the existing With other Google products setting under the same Account Settings tab. Sharing your Analytics data with other Google products can help us create new publisher solutions to achieve your website goals. For example, AdWords could recommend more effective keywords based on an understanding of how users behave on your site or AdSense could suggest more effective ad placements.

You can find full instructions for updating your Analytics settings in the Analytics Help Center.

Update your Analytics settings

Your website data will not be used for any purposes other than those that you specify in your settings, which you may change at any time. If you haven’t linked your AdSense account with Analytics, you can learn more about using Analytics with AdSense in our Help Center.

Finally, to receive more targeted optimization tips, make sure you’re opted into Performance Suggestions in your AdSense email preferences. We look forward to helping you grow your site!

Posted by Anitra Appa - AdSense Optimization Specialist
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