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Discover What Mobile Users Really Want From A Mobile Website

October 8, 2012 By Leave a Comment
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Mobile Websites: Give The Mobile User What They Want And Not What You Think They Want

In the following piece (original post), we are told exactly what mobile users want by Masha Fisch, from Google’s Mobile Ads Marketing department.

Earlier this week we shared how today’s consumers expect more — much more — from mobile sites. They told us so in our recent research survey, What Users Want Most From Mobile Sites Today.

Today we’ll share more results, with some great examples of businesses giving mobile users what they want. Whether you’re a Fortune 500 company or the pizza shop down on the corner, creating a mobile-friendly site is a critical step: 67% of mobile users say that they’re more likely to buy a product or service from a mobile-friendly site, and 74% say they’re more likely to return to that site in the future.

How are smart companies making mobile sites work for them?

Less is more: ProFlowers 
For their new mobile site, the flower retailer ProFlowers simplified things by highlighting the most popular bouquets to reduce scrolling, by trimming text, and by cutting checkout steps. How well has it worked? “Since becoming mobile-friendly, we’ve seen our mobile conversion rate jump by 20–30%,” says Leif Heikkila, the company’s senior director of online marketing. Download the case study.

Bigger is better: FragranceNet.com
FragranceNet sells perfumes and colognes, yes, but also face creams, shampoos, eyeliner and more. For Michael Nadboy, the company’s VP of online marketing and strategic development, the trick to mobile success was to show bigger product images and buttons, larger font sizes, and fewer images overall. Mobile users loved it: FragranceNet boosted mobile sales by 48% in just four months. Download the case study.

Speed sells: TicketNetwork
Rock concerts, Broadway shows, NASCAR races: TicketNetwork’s mobile site helps on-the-go fans find tickets for them all. The company redesigned its mobile site with speed in mind, stripping away all non-essential content and graphics. They also trimmed steps from the checkout process to help mobile users buy fast. Four months after introducing the new mobile site, web traffic from mobile devices was up 120% and overall sales from mobile had grown by 184%. Download the case study.

You can see the keys to mobile site success: big buttons and text, less content, fewer steps to checkout, and a focus on speed.

What kind of mobile content is most important? The users we surveyed listed “Get directions”, “Find operating hours” and “Click to call the business” as some of their most-wanted mobile tasks. They also showed clear differences in mobile usage by business category. For instance:

Mobile Banking and Finance customers are most interested in checking account balances, transferring money and paying bills.

Mobile Travel customers are most interested in checking flight status and confirming reservations.

Mobile Retail customers like to contact a store and find product information.

Mobile Automotive customers are most interested in contacting the dealership and making service appointments.

The bottom line: mobile users are ready to make choices on the go. Help them get there fast and you’ll help your business grow.

We reviewed these findings yesterday during our webinar: Mobilize your Site and Maximize your Advertising. If you missed it, please keep an eye out for the recorded webinar, which we’ll post soon.

In the meantime, check out howtogomo.com for more tips on how to build a mobile-friendly website.

Posted by: Masha Fisch, Google Mobile Ads Marketing

Google Retail Blog

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Tips For Creating High Quality Sites Part 2

October 6, 2012 By Leave a Comment
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The following article by Francesco Angeli, Google’s AdSense Policy team, gives further advice and tips on how to create a high quality websites for Adsense use.
The goal of the Google Display Network is to provide valuable and relevant content for our users and advertisers. We’ve previously provided some tips for creating high quality sites for AdSense. To build on that, we’d like to share some more information about which types of sites and pages are best suited for monetization.

Pages should provide originality and added value
The Google Webmaster Guidelines highlight the importance of providing original content that sets your site apart, but this is only one component of creating a high quality website. Our guidelines also recommend, for example, that you do not use doorway pages and doorway domains, pages with little to no content, or pages optimized for specific keywords or phrases.Strive for well-organized and information-rich content
Providing original content is only one component of creating a high quality website. The content should also be informative and organized in a manner that is easy for users to navigate.

Here is a short – but not exhaustive – list of things you may want to keep in mind:

  • Focus on topics you’re knowledgeable and enthusiastic about.
  • Avoid duplicating the same content on several pages or producing overlapping or redundant content.
  • Focus on engaging the user (i.e., providing an interactive experience with relevant information based on user interests) rather than generating content in the attempt to trick our bots, for instance with irrelevant high-paying keywords.
The organization and navigational structure of your site are also important, as users should be able to easily navigate through your pages and find the information or service they’re seeking. In addition, there should always be a good balance between the ad implementation and the content of your page. Ads should be an additional resource for users, enriching the value of the page and not be overwhelming or more prominent than the content itself.

Avoid placing ads on non-content-based pages
Sometimes websites that provide valuable content as a whole may have certain sections or pages that are not well-suited for monetization. This includes pages that users visit before potentially exiting a domain, such as a page where users are shown a “thank you” message for their visit or purchase. Another example are 404 error pages where users are informed there is no content to be found at that given URL.We hope you found this helpful. For more information about creating high quality content, check out Google Webmaster Guidelines, AdSense Program policies and the policy section of the AdSense Help Center.Our best suggestion is to follow what we at Google still maintain as our core principle: “Focus on the users and all else will follow.”

Posted by Francesco Angeli, AdSense Policy team


Inside AdSense

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Tips for creating high quality sites

April 25, 2012 By Leave a Comment
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We receive a lot of questions from publishers wanting to know best practices to grow your businesses with AdSense. While there’s no one right answer, our advice continues to be to focus on creating high quality content and delivering the best possible user experience on your websites. Here are some key suggestions on how to design and organize your website content with an overall emphasis on the quality of the site.

Don’t create multiple pages or sites with duplicate content.

We encourage you to create high quality sites rather than a large quantity of sites. Focusing on one site and making it richer in information and authentic in content not only benefits users, but also helps you win more of them. When users are browsing online, they want to find what they’re looking for quickly and easily without combing through endless multiple pages, subdomains, or sites with substantially generic or duplicate content. If you have pages or sites that are similar in content or template design, consider consolidating the pages or sites into one.

 
Provide content that gives users a reason to visit, and return, to your site.
When you create content on your site, it’s important to ask yourself if the page provides substantial value or service when compared to sites covering similar subjects. It’s worth the effort to create original content that sets your site apart from the rest. This will provide useful search results and keep your visitors coming back.
 
Provide the information or service promised.
Some publishers create sites that appear to offer a product or service, but instead trick users into navigating through several pages and viewing ads. This results in a negative user experience, and causes your site to be perceived as untrustworthy. Use keywords appropriately and in context with your content and make sure users are able to easily navigate through the site to find what products, goods, or services are promised.There’s no shortcut to success. Building high quality site takes effort and time. However, we’ve seen that publishers who focus on their users instead of using quick and deceptive techniques are the real winners and experience long-term revenue growth and success in our network. For more information, check out Google Webmaster Guidelines and the policy section of the AdSense Help Center.

Posted by Lingjuan Zhang, AdSense Policy team


Inside AdSense

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Another step to reward high-quality sites

April 25, 2012 By Leave a Comment
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(Cross-posted on the Webmaster Central Blog)

Google has said before that search engine optimization, or SEO, can be positive and constructive—and we’re not the only ones. Effective search engine optimization can make a site more crawlable and make individual pages more accessible and easier to find. Search engine optimization includes things as simple as keyword research to ensure that the right words are on the page, not just industry jargon that normal people will never type.

“White hat” search engine optimizers often improve the usability of a site, help create great content, or make sites faster, which is good for both users and search engines. Good search engine optimization can also mean good marketing: thinking about creative ways to make a site more compelling, which can help with search engines as well as social media. The net result of making a great site is often greater awareness of that site on the web, which can translate into more people linking to or visiting a site.

The opposite of “white hat” SEO is something called “black hat webspam” (we say “webspam” to distinguish it from email spam). In the pursuit of higher rankings or traffic, a few sites use techniques that don’t benefit users, where the intent is to look for shortcuts or loopholes that would rank pages higher than they deserve to be to be ranked. We see all sorts of webspam techniques every day, from keyword stuffing to link schemes that attempt to propel sites higher in rankings.

The goal of many of our ranking changes is to help searchers find sites that provide a great user experience and fulfill their information needs. We also want the “good guys” making great sites for users, not just algorithms, to see their effort rewarded. To that end we’ve launched Panda changes that successfully returned higher-quality sites in search results. And earlier this year we launched a page layout algorithm that reduces rankings for sites that don’t make much content available “above the fold.”

In the next few days, we’re launching an important algorithm change targeted at webspam. The change will decrease rankings for sites that we believe are violating Google’s existing quality guidelines. We’ve always targeted webspam in our rankings, and this algorithm represents another improvement in our efforts to reduce webspam and promote high quality content. While we can’t divulge specific signals because we don’t want to give people a way to game our search results and worsen the experience for users, our advice for webmasters is to focus on creating high quality sites that create a good user experience and employ white hat SEO methods instead of engaging in aggressive webspam tactics.

Here’s an example of a webspam tactic like keyword stuffing taken from a site that will be affected by this change:

Of course, most sites affected by this change aren’t so blatant. Here’s an example of a site with unusual linking patterns that is also affected by this change. Notice that if you try to read the text aloud you’ll discover that the outgoing links are completely unrelated to the actual content, and in fact the page text has been “spun” beyond recognition:

Sites affected by this change might not be easily recognizable as spamming without deep analysis or expertise, but the common thread is that these sites are doing much more than white hat SEO; we believe they are engaging in webspam tactics to manipulate search engine rankings.

The change will go live for all languages at the same time. For context, the initial Panda change affected about 12% of queries to a significant degree; this algorithm affects about 3.1% of queries in English to a degree that a regular user might notice. The change affects roughly 3% of queries in languages such as German, Chinese, and Arabic, but the impact is higher in more heavily-spammed languages. For example, 5% of Polish queries change to a degree that a regular user might notice.

We want people doing white hat search engine optimization (or even no search engine optimization at all) to be free to focus on creating amazing, compelling web sites. As always, we’ll keep our ears open for feedback on ways to iterate and improve our ranking algorithms toward that goal.

Posted by Matt Cutts, Distinguished Engineer


Inside Search

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GoMo: More Mobile Sites Mean More Business in Mobile, AL

March 20, 2012 By Leave a Comment
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It’s been four months since Google and its technology partners DudaMobile and Mobify provided over 500 Mobile, AL small businesses with free mobile-friendly sites.  The event was part of Google’s GoMo initiative, and provided small business owners with an opportunity to build sites made for the small screen complete with mobile-friendly features like click-to-call and click-to-map.  The Google team followed up with some of the business owners to see how the new mobile-friendly sites have helped their businesses grow.  Simply put, mobile-friendly sites drive results.  Check out how mobile-friendly sites helped to improve sales, site traffic and calls for five small businesses: Distinguished Young Women, Gulf Coast Exploreum Science Center, Spring Hill Medical Center, USS Alabama Battleship Memorial Park and Knotty N Nice.  

Stephanie Bradford, Communications Director for Distinguished Young Women, the largest and oldest national scholarship program for high school girls, commented on how the new mobile-friendly site is helping to raise nationwide recognition, “The stats we have seen further confirm the effectiveness of our new mobile site in reaching and engaging our target audience. With more than 85% of visits to the site from new visitors, we are confident that the mobile site is allowing us to realize greater awareness across the country. As we work to encourage participation in the Distinguished Young Women program, our mobile site is allowing us to connect with our potential participants, teenage girls, in a way they are familiar with and have come to expect from companies and organizations to which they are loyal.”

Kirsten Conley, Director of Marketing and Public Relations for the Gulf Coast Exploreum Science Center, talked about how she’s changing her marketing mix, “We’re able to give our guests and potential guests the information that they’re looking for on the go.  We were stunned by the sheer volume of phone calls that came from the mobile-friendly site and reevaluated our phone system to keep up with the increase in incoming calls.  Lastly, we’ve begun placing more mobile advertisements as part of our marketing mix.”  The mobile-friendly site has brought 40% more calls and 20% more sales and site visits.  

Glenn Geiger of Spring Hill Medical Center, a full-service hospital, had this to say about his GoMo experience, “Once the site was running, the reports from DudaMobile were very eye opening.  The best thing was the tracking of actual phone calls placed to our hospital. Something we have never been able to track was delivered to us instantly, on a silver platter.”  Overall, calls to Spring Hill have increased by 80% since optimizing the site for mobile devices, with visits to the site and hospital increasing by 20%.

Karen Conner, Director of Sales & Marketing for the USS Alabama Battleship Memorial Park, encourages other business owners to get started on building their sites if they haven’t already, “We are a military attraction and our potential visitors are most interested in just a few things, mostly admission prices and directions.  The new mobile-friendly site gives us that edge by making our information right at their fingertips.  No more zooming in to find the information and then potentially losing the customer due to their frustration.”  Conner said that sales, calls and site visits have increased by 20% since creating the mobile-friendly site.


Janna Peterson of Knotty N Nice, an informational site about natural styles for African Hair,

said that her mobile site has helped increase site traffic by 200%, “The business is growing and the mobile website would be to thank for that.  It’s easier for people to access my site now and of course we have more traffic now.”  

Each site owner will continue to track their site’s performance by using Google Analytics or DudaMobile’s site analytics reports.   

Success stories like these exemplify how mobile-friendly sites improve sales and traffic for all businesses, no matter the size or industry.  

Let us know your mobile-friendly site success stories in the comments.  Visit howtogomo.com to mobilize your site today!

Posted by: Suzanne Mumford,Google Mobile Ads Marketing and Jessica Sapick, Google Small Business Strategy


Google Mobile Ads Blog

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