3 easy tips to build a relationship with your audience

Drawing new visitors to your site is only half of the battle. Having a plan for them to follow once they get there is the key to encouraging repeat visits and building a meaningful relationship with your readers.

To engage user-focused design for your site, it’s important to consider the following:


1. Keep It Simple

Gating desirable content can be a great way to learn more about visitors by prompting them to fill out a form or sign up for your newsletter to access it. However, roughly 67% of users will abandon an effort to obtain information or purchase something online if there are too many steps to take. Make sure your users get what they need in as few steps as possible. Matched content is another way to keep visitors from checking out too soon by increasing your odds of presenting them with content they are directly interested in.

2. Identify User Moments

People often look for inspiration and ideas while they complete a task online. Anticipating your visitors’ needs can help you set up your site to better serve them so you can capture and capitalize on these important moments. Whether they are purchasing something or just browsing, presenting this information in the right format can greatly increase the amount of time they spend on your site. 

For example, if you’re an eCommerce site selling chocolates, having recommendations alongside each product such as gift boxes, complementing candy, and drink pairings can get your site visitor thinking about the holidays or gifts for their loved ones.

3. Create engaging Calls to Action 

Bold “sign up” buttons and friendly prompts or reminders move visitors to take action. From bold colors and text to exaggerated size and other visual clues, there are a number of ways to make these important actions stand out on your site and even fun for users to engage with. In fact, our own AdSense team tested different campaign graphics on our marketing campaigns and saw higher implementation and engagement rates.

 

To learn more about familiarizing your audience with your brand, check out the AdSense Guide to Audience Engagement.

Posted by Jay Castro

From the AdSense Team

@jayciro

Optimize your content for mobile to #drawthecrowds

Throughout the summer, fans are looking for great content, regardless of whether they’re viewing it from a desktop, tablet or mobile device. Did you know that 1/3 of followers used more than one screen to follow the 2012 Olympic games?[1]

With this in mind, think about whether your content is mobile-optimized and easily accessible for your users in the moments that matter. If they receive a link on their smartphone but are unable to view the content because it’s not mobile-optimized, it’s easy for them to feel frustrated with the poor user experience. On the other hand, If the users are delighted with the content and their first visit to your site is a positive one, they’re more likely to share your content and come back again.

If you already have a mobile optimized site, don’t forget that you can grow your earnings potential by understanding which mobile ad sizes are most effective for you. Finally don't forget these 4 important tips to maximize your earnings with AdSense:

1. Swap out the 320x50 ad units for 320x100 for a potential RPM increase.
2. Place a 320x100 ad unit just above the fold or peek the 300x250 -- that is, place a small portion of the ad unit just above the fold (ATF).
3. Use the 300x250 ad unit below the fold (BTF) mixed in with your content.
4. Prevent accidental clicks on enhanced features in text ads by moving ad units 150 pixels away from your content.

Is your site mobile ready for the summer? 

Download the #AdSenseGuide to Mobile Web Success to learn more. Are you new to AdSense? If so, sign up now and turn your passion into profit.

Posted by Barbara Sarti, AdSense Account Associate

[1] Google internal data

How to make the most of Matched content

Matched content is a recommendation tool that allows you to promote relevant content from your site and sponsored content to your visitors. Matched content can help capture visitor attention and loyalty by showing relevant content which could increase pageviews on your site. Here’s a few tips to help you get started with Matched content.

Strategically place your ads to improve viewability.

According to a Think With Google study, “56.1% of all impressions are not seen.” So when determining the placement of your Matched content units, think about which spot(s) would improve viewability and engagement. To increase these metrics we recommend placing this unit directly below your article and either above or below your ad unit. This way readers can easily click on the next piece of content that is interesting to them. Placing it directly below the article often drives higher click-through rates (CTR) than other placements.

Since Matched content units help your users learn more about similar content, you should think about placing it at points in your website where your user will engage more with the content.

Track performance.
To determine if your placement is effective for your site, be sure to track the performance of your Matched content units. Understanding performance is key to maximizing your ad revenue and satisfying your readers. On your Performance reports tab, you’ll see an updated way to view two metric families -- the Overview metric family and the Matched content metric family:
Overview metric family

Selecting this metric family will allow you to understand how much you’re earning from your Matched content units and how these units compare to other ad units on your site. You can also review metrics such as impressions, clicks, and estimated earnings.

Matched content metric family

To get a more detailed performance of your ads and recommendations, use this metric family to view metrics like total impressions, ad impressions, ad clicks, ad revenue per thousand impressions (RPM), and recommendation clicks. Since this metric family is more specific, you should be able to use this data to optimize the ad unit itself.

To see all metric offerings and how they work, take a look at the AdSense Help Center.

By optimizing your Matched content units, you will allow your readers to learn more about topics they are interested in and potentially increase your site’s engagement rate and revenue. If you do not currently have Matched content but are looking to add the feature, determine if you’re eligible by viewing our Help Center article.

Posted by Bserat Ghebremicael
From the AdSense team

Deliver more viewable impressions to get your ads seen

Viewability is a trendy word in the advertising world. This popular metric has become key for advertisers to measure the success of an ad campaign. But what is Viewability?

Viewability is the measurement of a viewable ad impression, meaning that it has appeared within a user’s browser and had the opportunity to be seen. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) defines a viewable impression as an ad that meets the following criteria:

50% of the ad’s pixels are visible in the browser window for a continuous one second.

Think with Google says “If an ad isn't seen, it can't have an impact, change perception, or build brand trust. That's why measuring viewability matters.” For AdSense publishers, this means that increased viewability may encourage greater investments from advertisers.

Global events are opportunities for advertisers to connect with larger audiences and create brand awareness. For advertisers with these goals in mind, viewability matters. Here are a few resources to help get your ads seen this summer.

• Viewability for Spotlight for Sellers
• Four ways to boost your ad viewability on mobile
• 5 Factors of Display Viewability.

See Google’s Active View in action and move towards delivering more viewable impressions this summer.

New to AdSense? Sign up now and start drawing the crowd.

Posted by Barbara Sarti, from the AdSense team

Amplify your content with social

Social media is more than just vacation photos and stories about babies, it’s about sharing experiences and creating interactions with people.

Content on social media can instantly reach millions of users and create thousands of online stories. Do you remember the social media storm that Ellen DeGeneres created with a single photo? Her selfie from the 2014 Oscars started a global conversation and has since been added to Google’s 2014 web culture guide. Her content holds the win for the most retweeted tweet with more than 3M retweets, 6.8M site embeds, and even temporarily led to Twitter going down.

Big events like the Oscars create opportunities for publishers to interact with users through both original content and viral content. This summer, users will be searching, sharing, and consuming content like never before. Be sure to examine your content strategy, and find ways to spark conversations on social channels or, contribute to an existing digital conversation.

How can AdSense Publishers participate in big events? If you're new to AdSense, you can sign up now and turn your passion into profit.

1. Include editorial coverage around topical events.
2. Make sure your content is easy to consume and share.
3. Create a social media strategy around a big event.

Here are four tips to help jumpstart your social media strategy:

1. Know your audience. Trigger an emotional response from your viewers by humanizing your brand.
2. Be social to win on social by creating relationships with your users.
3. Don’t be afraid to follow the leaders and the trends. If there’s social proof behind it, do it.
4. Use tools to help you create great content.

More on the fourth tip, here are a few tools to help you #drawthecrowds through social channels:

• Buffer is a well-known tool used by social media marketers. It helps streamline your social media management.
• Pablo is a tool created by Buffer that is “the simplest way to create beautiful images that fit every social network perfectly”.
• Canva is another image creating tool that can help you create visual content on a budget.
• Feedly can help you organize and read relevant content in your industry to help fuel your content creation.
• Google Trends is a widely used tool to help you identify key trends happening around the world.
• IFTTT is a popular tool used to streamline many tasks. For example, here’s a pre-built recipe that will automate the process of tweeting each new wordpress blog post.

According to the New York Times, 68% of users share [online content] to give people a better sense of who they are and what they care about. To amplify your content this summer, be sure to create content that resonates with your audience.

New to AdSense? Sign up now and turn your passion into profit. Let us know your thoughts on Twitter @AdSense.

Posted by Barbara Sarti and Jay Castro from the AdSense team

4 steps to build a strong brand experience

Exposing your audience to a rock solid brand leaves a lasting impression on your site’s visitors, and helps separate you from your competitors. To establish brand consistency across multiple touch points, it’s important to create and stick to guidelines unique to your brand.

Building a strong brand experience comes down to four things:

1. Find your voice

A brand’s voice means more than just the tone you use in your content and communications. It also applies to style, colors, and graphics. Is your brand bubbly, bright, and fun? Or is it straight to the point with clean lines and a matter-of-fact tone? Often times, the type of product or services you're selling as well as your company philosophy can help you determine an appropriate tone. There’s no secret for determining what an audience will respond best to, as all styles can be effective in their own way. So choose what works for you and your creative vision.

2. Be consistent

Once you’ve laid the groundwork for what defines your brand, it’s important to stick to these principles. This applies to your website, emails, social media posts, and any other place users come into contact with your brand. Taking the time to stick to an easy to read font, finding a color scheme that draws the eye and guides your readers, or having consistent verbiage can do wonders to further cement your brand’s presence and make it memorable.

3. Know your audience

While it’s important to decide what your brand is, it’s also important to know your audience, their interests, and how they prefer to communicate. For example, if you’re targeting busy, high-level decision makers, they may prefer something short and sweet—perhaps bullet points are the way to go. If you’re targeting creative individuals, it may be worth investing in a personalized logo and site. Highly visual assets such as videos would also be a great way to go. The more you know and cater to your intended audience, the more successful your brand will be.

To understand your users’ interests, use Google Analytics to view your bounce rates, time on pages, and pageviews—three indicators of user engagement. Understand where you stand in comparison to other sites and, if needed, improve on these rates by creating a stronger connection between your site and your audience, i.e. creating content relevant to your audience’s interests.

4. Prove your Worth

Having a particular value that you provide to your customers (not to be mistaken for price) can help separate your brand from competitors. For instance, what do you provide to your customers that is different or special? This can include everything from innovative products to great customer service and can also be an emotional value (think Kleenex being associated with comfort and support). Just make sure to deliver on any and all promises made on your site.

To learn more about how to develop your user experience, check out the AdSense Guide to Audience Engagement.

Posted by Jay Castro
From the AdSense team
@jayciro

Learn how Google’s research tools can enhance your content

When you know what the world’s talking about, you can participate in the conversation. But the online world moves quickly, so if you want to keep the crowds coming back to your site, your content needs to move with it.

Google’s News Lab is Google’s effort to empower innovation at the intersection of technology and media. Its mission is to collaborate with journalists and entrepreneurs to build the future of media. An important part of that is ensuring that Google tools are available and easy-to-use for journalists around the world.

Google News Lab offers lessons on how to use Google tools relevant to publishers’ needs. Say something newsworthy at a sports event is grabbing headlines, Google tools can ensure that you’re informed. It’s then over to you to draw on this story and incorporate it into your content.

A great way to keep your finger on the pulse is Google Alerts, a tool that allows you to follow developing stories from your inbox. Simply select the topics you want to follow and have emails sent directly to your inbox any time that Google finds new results for this topic.

Google Alerts removes the need for you to keep checking back on a topic and simplifies the journalistic process by having all your information come from one reliable source. Once you’re using Google Alerts to stay informed about an event, you can ensure that the content on your site stays current and keeps users coming back for more.

If you want to take a more proactive approach, Google Trends gives you access to global data, to power insightful storytelling. One way to use this data could be to look at what users are searching globally. You can select topic areas and drill down into regions for those topics, ensuring that you can take advantage of the data relevant to you and your users to create the most timely and engaging content.

Google tools are designed to help you create great content. The more topical your content, the more likely you are to keep drawing the crowds.

Get started with Google News Lab today.

New to AdSense? Sign up now and turn your passion into profit

Posted by Jay Castro,
From the AdSense team
@jayciro

AMP your content: A preview of AMP'd results in Search

Cross-posted from the Webmaster Central blog

It's 2016 and it's hard to believe that browsing the web on a mobile phone can still feel so slow with users abandoning sites that just don't load quickly. To us -- and many in the industry -- it was clear that something needed to change. That was why we started working with the Accelerated Mobile Pages Project, an open source initiative to improve the mobile web experience for everyone.

Less than six months ago, we started sending people to AMP pages in the “Top stories” section of the Google Search Results page on mobile phones. Since then, we’ve seen incredible global adoption of AMP that has gone beyond the news industry to include e-commerce, entertainment, travel, recipe sites and so on. To date we have more than 150 million AMP docs in our index, with over 4 million new ones being added every week. As a result, today we’re sharing an early preview of our expanded AMP support across the entire search results page --not just the “Top stories” section.

To clarify, this is not a ranking change for sites. As a result of the growth of AMP beyond publishers, we wanted to make it easier for people to access this faster experience. The preview shows an experience where web results that that have AMP versions are labeled with . When you tap on these results, you will be directed to the corresponding AMP page within the AMP viewer. 

AMP in Search Preview

Try it out for yourself on your mobile device by navigating to g.co/ampdemo. Once you’re in the demo, search for something like “french toast recipe” or music lyrics by your favorite artist to experience how AMP can provide a speedier reading experience on the mobile web. The “Who” page on AMPProject.org has a flavor of some of the sites already creating AMP content.

We’re starting with a preview to get feedback from users, developers and sites so that we can create a better Search experience when we make this feature more broadly available later this year. In addition, we want to give everyone who might be interested in “AMPing up” their content enough time to learn how to implement AMP and to see how their content appears in the demo. And beyond developing AMP pages, we invite everyone to get involved and contribute to the AMP Project.

We can’t wait to hear from you as we work together to speed up the web. And as always, if you have any questions, please visit our webmaster forums.

Posted by Nick Zukoski, Software Engineer

Measure what kind of content is a hit or miss with the fans

With the summer kicking off, it’s a great time to freshen up your content and try new things to #drawthecrowds. Google Analytics can help you measure what kind of content is a hit or miss with the fans. Here are a few simple and effective places to get started.


1. Find out where to focus
Content Groups let you bundle your offerings to analyze them more clearly. Instead of analyzing all sneakers at once, for instance, a shoe company might divide content into soccer boots, golf shoes, tennis shoes and so on. You can view and compare aggregated metrics by group, or drill down to any individual URL or page title.

Know what topics have the best AdSense CTRs (Click-through-rate)

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

Once you discover which topics have the best click-through rates, you could then focus on creating more content for those topics.

Know which content groups have slow-loading pages

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

Are some pages very slow to load? You might focus on fixing uncompressed images to improve the user experience (and potentially your AdSense revenue). Check out Google’s PageSpeed tool to test the speed of your mobile site.

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 enter and leave on your site The Landing Pages report can show you how engaged visitors are with your content. You can analyze individual pages or Content Groups.

Know what pages cause visitors to leave

• Look for pages with high bounce rates. This usually surfaces content that isn't appealing to visitors or is irrelevant to their needs.
• Try changing the headline of your article or finding different images to see how that affect bounce rates.
• Look at Google Trends to see what the world is interested in, then think about how you can incorporate it into your content. Sport is sure to be high on the agenda this summer.
• 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. Studies have shown that 74% of mobile web users are only willing to wait 5 seconds or less for a single web page to load before leaving the site.

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.

Know who your visitors are:

• Click on Demographics Report; Select a demographic category.  
• 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.

Know what your users are interested in:

• Generate and analyze an Interests report.
• Then shape your content based on the user interests you see. If viewers of your bakery blog are interested in a big sports event, see how you can incorporate that theme into your baking content.

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

The key to making your site better this summer is to jump into the data, have fun, and experiment. If you can find out what works and do more of it, you’re sure to draw the crowds. Have any ideas to share about using these reports? Add them in the comments below!

New to AdSense? Sign up now and turn your passion into profit

Posted by Jay Castro, from the AdSense team