How to monetize your mobile-friendly website

In our previous blog post we talked about how to create a mobile-friendly website. Now we’d like to show you how to best monetize your mobile site with AdSense Mobile product offerings.

AdSense for Mobile Content
AdSense for mobile content allows publishers to generate earnings from their mobile web pages using targeted Google ads. Below are some key features.

• Contextual targeting ensures ads match the content of your mobile site.
• Google advertisers bid directly for your mobile inventory.
• Mobile-specific ad formats are optimized for the small screen.

For mobile websites, AdSense automatically detects the type of phone viewing your site and delivers ads to match. For example, if someone views your site through a high-end smartphone, we'll deliver mobile ads specifically designed for the device’s full HTML browser.

It’s important to note that AdSense for mobile content ad units are meant to be used in mobile websites and not mobile applications - as noted in our policies. If you’re looking for an advertising solution for your mobile application, sign up for AdMob.

Custom Search Ads for Mobile 

If you currently use Custom Search Ads for your desktop, we’re happy to let you know that publishers can now also apply to use this feature on mobile sites and apps. Custom Search Ads for Mobile are highly targeted ads that are based on user queries from a mobile website.

These ads typically monetize at a high rate and publishers are able to customize the look and feel of the ads to best integrate with the user experience on the page. The ads can be fixed to the frame or scroll along with the results.

If you're already an AdSense publisher and want to get started with ads on your mobile site, you’ll find the Mobile Content button under the ‘My Ads’ tab. If you're not a publisher yet, sign up.

Posted by Anja Kuncic, AdSense Optimization Specialist

Create a mobile-friendly website

Did you know that there will be a mobile device for every person on earth by 2015, and that mobile searches have grown by 4x since 2010¹? That means that every day more and more of your users are looking for your content…on mobile devices. What’s their experience like? Can they easily read what’s on the screen without pinching and zooming? Do you have links that are difficult to click instead of user-friendly navigation buttons?

61% of users are unlikely to return to a site that isn’t mobile friendly². It’s important to remember that even if users can see a website on a smartphone, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the site is mobile-friendly and easy to navigate. Your users are going mobile as we speak, and so the most important thing you can do to grow your business using the mobile web is to create a mobile-friendly website.

Here are ten tips to help you design a mobile-friendly site:

1. Keep it quick - Design your site to load fast and make copy easy to scan
2. Simplify navigation - Create clear navigation and search functionalities
3. Be thumb-friendly - Design your site so any size hand can easily interact with it
4. Design for visibility - Make it easy for your customers to read
5. Make it accessible - Mobile sites should work across all mobile devices
6. Make it easy to convert - Create clear ways for your users to make purchases or contact you
7. Make it local - Consumers look for local info on their phones all the time
8. Make it seamless - Convert as much of the functionality of your desktop site to mobile
9. Use mobile site redirects - Ensure that visitors who visit your website from a mobile device are redirected to your mobile-friendly site
10. Listen, learn and iterate - Make testing and optimization an ongoing process

To review a detailed set of these best practices, download a copy of the 10 Mobile Site Best Practices. Visit howtogomo.com to explore actual mobile site examples of each best practice and use the GoMoMeter to see how your site is faring on mobile*.



Finally, take a look at Google Sites for Mobile Landing Pages*, a free and easy-to-use tool that enables you to build mobile pages.

¹Gartner, 2010; Google Internal Data, 2011; Cisco, 2011
²Compuware and Brand Anywhere and Luth Research
*Note: These resources are currently only available in English, but will be available in other languages shortly.

Posted by Dairine Kennedy, AdSense Mobile Specialist

Taking your channels to a new limit

As you know, channels in your AdSense account are powerful reporting tools. Custom channels help you track ad performance and enable advertisers to target their ads for maximum impact, while URL channels allow you to deep-dive into the performance of AdSense for content on your subdomains.

To date, you’ve been limited to a total of 200 custom and URL channels, and many of you have asked for more. That’s why today, we’re very excited to announce that we’ve raised this limit to 500 custom channels per product, and 500 URL channels for AdSense for content. You’ll see your available custom channels count clearly displayed in the custom channels table, and also highlighted in the “create new custom channel” pop-up.

This change will enable you to expand your testing, and you’ll be able to do more granular analysis of how different formats, ad styles, and ad types perform. In addition, you can use your increased allocation of custom channels to create new ad placements for advertisers to target directly. This can help increase the amount you earn from placement targeting, as advertisers will be able to review the information you’ve provided about your ad units to match their campaigns to your site and audience. As the holidays approach and advertisers look to create additional placement targeted campaigns, now is the perfect time to set up more custom channels and ad placements.

Log in to your AdSense account today and visit your My ads tab to get started.

Posted by Alex Benton -- AdSense Engineering