We’ve recently made a few improvements related to AdSense reporting to help you find information more quickly and to address some of the most common asks we’ve heard from you. Good things come in threes -- so here are three recent updates to look for in your account:

1. View all-time reports

When selecting a date range for your reports, you’ll now have an ‘All time’ option to view all earnings, impressions, and clicks accrued since your first impression. If you used the previous AdSense interface, you may remember this feature -- it now has a new home in the current AdSense interface as well.

2. Quickly access reports from the My ads tab

We’ve added quick links to your reports under the My ads tab, eliminating the need to search for ad units or channels in your reports. When viewing your ad units, custom channels, or URL channels on the My ads tab, just click ‘View report’ below a specific line item to view performance data for that particular ad unit or channel. This feature is particularly useful if you’re looking for channel data that isn’t linked to ad units in the interface, and will help you save time.

3. Download CSVs in the correct local formatting

Just as the placement of commas and periods can change the meaning of sentences, the same is true when it comes to numbers and figures. As you may know, an amount written as $1,000.00 in the US or UK would be written as $1.000,00 in most of Europe and South America. Previously, only the $1,000.00 format was available for downloadable reports, which created difficulties for a number of international publishers trying to export CSVs to analyze the data. Now, based on your language preference, you can export CSVs with figures in the relevant format.

Have any feedback or suggestions to share? Feel free to leave a comment or post them on our AdSense +Page.

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

For this Mobile Mondays post we’ve invited Netbiscuits to offer you best practices and tips for creating a good mobile experience for your users.  Netbiscuits is a leading cloud platform for the development and delivery of next generation web apps across all mobile devices and connected platforms.

Cultivating a user-focused mobile experience isn’t just about shrinking your existing website to fit a mobile screen. In a single day, a connected consumer interacts with your brand and consumes your content across smartphones, tablets, smart TVs and game consoles. To meet consumer demand for instant, optimized access, marketers must design engaging “connected experiences” that respond differently for each device as they each present unique size, capability, and content consumption challenges.

In solving these challenges, marketers need to focus on a responsive design that takes the multiplatform world into account and allows for a device-optimized “Content Centric” user experience. The layout should morph depending on the size and shape of the device’s screen ensuring the experience adapts as new devices are introduced in the marketplace.

Touch enabled devices have evolved the digital user experience by providing users with a “Parallel Response Experience” to their request as opposed to a “Sequential Response Experience” found in a traditional “Point and Click” mobile user experience.  Designing a “Parallel” mobile experience with many touch enabled features ensures a more natural flow of information which  dramatically increases site effectiveness. For example, instead of re-using a traditional website interface, many mobile commerce clients use a drag and drop interface for placing items in a shopping cart which has greatly increased sales on touch enabled devices.

Along with the design layout, responsive design must adapt a content centric approach to the user experience. Your users must be served content based on the topics for which they have shown interest as well as based on time of day, weather, or geographic location. A system remembering the items in your shopping cart has been an essential element of a cohesive e-commerce experience for some time. But this concept can be expanded upon by associating a broader range of content to the individual that results in the serving of an article that interested the customer earlier in the day or weather information for an upcoming trip. To foster a good user experience, this needs to be done in a streamlined, accurate manner that limits clutter.

One of the more challenging attributes of going mobile is the varying screen sizes of tablets and smartphones. When it comes to tablets, we advise clients to take a layered approach to designing and delivering a “one-page” experience. By embedding or layering a video or photo gallery on top of a page, consumer engagements and actions happen without forcing the user to leave the page.

Being responsive to the user’s device and serving appropriate content is done by using analytics. The insights gleaned from mobile, including device models, screen resolution, device capability, service provider, and preferred user language cannot be matched by traditional marketing activities. Compared against geographic location, savvy marketers use this data to define product offerings and regionalize discounts.

Once you understand these strategic points, you should also keep in mind these simple best practices:

• Mobile is not a channel. Mobile is an integrated solution where CMS, CRM and commerce updates should occur at the same time and in the same systems as updates to your traditional website.  
• Research! Engage your team, friends and family to get insights on how they use their mobile devices. Conduct a competitive analysis to learn how your competitors illustrate and deliver their product and services. 
• Design your site to solve the main problems or situations customers might find themselves in. Consider what features, tasks or existing site elements translate best on mobile and implement them.
• And finally, don’t simply duplicate your traditional website. Consumers want and expect a different experience on mobile.

Posted by Craig Besnoy, Managing Director, The Americas, Netbiscuits

Visit Netbiscuits.com to learn more about the Netbiscuits platform.

An important first step to attracting customers on-the-go is to create a mobile-friendly website which can sometimes be complicated and confusing. We’re happy to announce that GoMo and DudaMobile have joined forces to make it even easier for small businesses to create a mobile-friendly website.

You can create a free mobile site directly from howtogomo.com using a tool powered by DudaMobile. This do-it-yourself site builder, customized specifically for GoMo users, easily converts regular websites into mobile-friendly sites in five simple steps. And it allows you to add features like a click-to-call button, mobile maps and Google AdSense. Sites that are created with the GoMo-DudaMobile tool will be hosted free for one year.

Here’s a before and after screenshot of Dog Nanny’s site.

Dog Nanny’s website was not mobile friendly. Visitors had to pinch and zoom to read content.

Dog Nanny’s new mobile site - created in just a few minutes - looks great on mobile devices.

Please note that DudaMobile’s technology is best for converting simple sites. If your site uses a lot of Flash content, framesets or e-commerce, we suggest that you Go Mobile by talking to your agency or working with one of our suggested developers.

Many small businesses are discovering that mobile sites mean more business. Now you have an opportunity to easily create a professional mobile site which will delight your customers when they visit you on the mobile web. Visit howtogomo.com/getstarted and build your site today.  It’s time to GoMo!

Posted by Nabil Haschemie, Product Marketing Manager, Mobile Ads

Since taking AdSense in Your City global earlier this year, our international teams have met with over 600 publishers in cities like Amsterdam, Rio de Janeiro, Melbourne, Istanbul, and Mumbai, just to name a few. During these events, we’ve shared product updates and best practices for getting started with solutions like DFP Small Business and Mobile. In addition, attendees have had the opportunity to network with other local publishers and participate in one-on-one consultation sessions with our optimization specialists.

As our U.S. events take place, we’re excited to continue visiting international cities to meet more publishers. Some of the cities we’ll be stopping by in the next few weeks include:

• Week of May 7: 
• Dusseldorf / Hamburg / Munich, Germany (sessions in German)

• Week of May 14: 
• Auckland, New Zealand (sessions in English)

• Week of May 21: 
• Mexico D.F., Mexico (sessions in Spanish)

• Week of May 28: 
• London, UK (sessions in English) 
• Curitiba, Brazil (sessions in Portuguese)

• Week of June 4: 
• Sydney, Australia (sessions in English)
• Paris, France (sessions in French)
• Tel Aviv, Israel (sessions in Hebrew)
• Buenos Aires, Argentina (sessions in Spanish)

• Week of June 25: 
• Porto Alegre, Brazil (sessions in Portuguese)

If you’d like to attend one of these upcoming AdSense in Your City events, please fill out our interest form. Space is limited at each event so we won’t be able to accommodate all requests, but we’ll do our best to include as many interested publishers as possible. In the meantime, we recommend ensuring you’re opted in to receiving ‘Special Offer’ emails so we can reach you in the future.

Thanks to all of our recent AdSense in Your City attendees for taking the time to join us and share your feedback. We look forward to meeting more of you in the coming weeks!

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

To make the payment process easier and more flexible, we’ll soon be introducing some changes to the “Payments” and “Account settings” pages in your AdSense account. At the moment, this new payments interface is available to a small set of AdSense accounts, but we’ll gradually roll it out to more publishers in the upcoming months. When the new Payments page is enabled for your account, it’ll look like this:

Here’s a summary of the changes and added benefits of the new payments interface:

1. Redesigned Payment summary and Payment settings pages
- Payment method is now called Form of payment.
- Unpaid finalized earnings is now called Current balance.
- Redesigned transaction history table shows you the latest activities at the top.
- New toolbar support allows you to filter, print, export, or download transaction information.

2. More flexibility with your payment settings
- New extended timeline allows you to change your payment information until the 20th of any month.
- You can choose any payment threshold greater than the default payment threshold based on your reporting currency.
- You can also hold your payments until a specified date.

3. Improved navigation of the payments interface
- Centralized locations to manage your Payment settings and Payee profile.
- Contextual help is displayed based on the pages you navigate to.

This is just a first step towards providing a better payment experience, and we’ll continue to add improvements over the coming months. For additional details, please sign in to your AdSense account and visit the Payments section in our Help Center.

Posted by Ernest Yip, Product Manager, Payments Team

Last month, we talked about why the time has come to mobilize your site and nurture what is most likely your fastest growing audience -- your mobile users. We also launched our GoMo initiative to help you get started. If you've started thinking about going mobile, chances are you've asked yourself whether you should create a mobile site, a mobile app, or even both.  The answer depends entirely on the needs of your business.

One thing to note — for web publishers, the best mobile strategy is rarely a “one or the other” choice between mobile sites and mobile apps.  Mobile sites are cheaper and less complex.  Many web publishers have elected to build mobile sites as their first foray into mobile, and the question becomes:  do I need to invest further in mobile and build a mobile app?  Below are a few questions to consider as you decide whether a mobile app is right for your business.

Who are your users?
Find out how users are currently accessing your content using the Platforms report on the Performance reports tab in your AdSense account. Understanding the devices your users are accessing your site from will help you tailor your content to provide them with the best mobile experience.  For example, if most of your visitors are coming from feature phones, then a smartphone app wouldn't do them any good.

How do you want users to access your content?
Connectivity matters. A mobile site requires users to have data access, while apps can allow the user to cache your content to consume at a later moment. Tourist information and maps are great examples of content that is extremely useful when downloaded and cached on a mobile device for later consumption.

How do you want users to interact with your content?
Mobile devices allow you to design a unique user experience with your content.  Mobile apps allow you to tap into native phone features that don’t exist on a desktop browser such as GPS, accelerometers, embedded cameras, etc.  While more of these device features are becoming available via HTML5 libraries on newer devices, mobile apps still offer the most robust suite of options for accessing mobile specific features.

How quickly do you want to make changes to your content?
Updates to mobile sites are instantaneous. Depending on the change you want to make, some app stores may require you to resubmit your app, which will then require the users to take action in updating the app package on their mobile devices.

What development and budget constraints exist?
Understanding your in-house capabilities and resources is crucial in making development choices. Without in-house capabilities to develop mobile assets, you’ll have to consider development and upkeep costs. In addition, you’ll only need to develop one mobile site, while apps require cross platform assets and skills to maintain. As with any other worthwhile investment, this should not be a set-it-and-forget-it project. Be sure to iterate often to keep the user experience fresh.

Finally, consider who will be responsible for further development and whether you’ll need to hire another head to maintain this new asset. Answering all of these questions above will help you to make the right decision for your business and your users.

Posted by Tuyen Nguyen - Mobile Publisher Advocate

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

(Cross posted to the Google+ Developers Blog)

When your visitors come across something interesting on your site, sometimes you want to encourage a simple endorsement (like +1). Other times, however, you want to help visitors share with their friends, right away. Today’s new Google+ Share button lets you do just that.

In line with the design of the new +1 button, here’s how it looks:

Before visitors share:

When clicked, visitors can add a comment and choose who to share with:

After they’ve shared, the button turns red. They can click to share again.

The new Google+ Share button is available to all publishers, globally. Try adding it to your site now - just visit Google Developers to get the code.

Follow the conversation on Google+.

Posted by Rick Borovoy, Product Manager, Google+

For our second post in the Mobile Mondays series, we’ve invited Grace Nasri of FindtheBest to share her company’s experience in going mobile.  Read last week’s post to learn about setting mobile goals.

Mobile is rising at a rate much faster than any other technology to date. Last year at Google’s Think Mobile Event, Kleiner Perkins’ Mary Meeker said the pace and force of mobile growth was unlike anything seen previously and Google’s Dennis Woodside predicted, “mobile will create the largest technology market ever. This market will dwarf the PC and all the PC industry has done.”

Seeing this global trend toward mobile, realizing that large segments of potential consumers only have access to mobile devices, and knowing that about 60% of time spent on smartphones is spent engaging in new activities—meaning potentially new customers— we at FindTheBest decided to launch a mobile-optimized version of our site.

FindTheBest is a data-driven comparison engine, and we launched our mobile site in January after realizing there was a large segment of potential customers we weren’t able to effectively reach. Before launching the mobile site, mobile visitors were 12% more likely to bounce and viewed 27% less pages than desktop visitors.

FindTheBest has gone mobile, and has been rewarded with a 3.5x increase in mobile revenue.

However, designing a mobile site doesn’t come without challenges and we had to consider three main issues:

1. While traditional desktops offer a lot of real estate, mobile devices are more limited in terms of space.
2. Desktops and laptops have faster Internet connections than mobile devices.
3. Mobile devices are primarily touch-based, which requires an entirely different user interface.

How FindTheBest went mobile

We hired a mobile expert to design our mobile site. Several decisions needed to be factored in to guarantee the best user experience, as users who visit mobile sites that don’t offer a great UX often leave a site and go to a competitor site. Since we offer a diverse amount of information presented in a range of ways on the traditional site, we had to limit what it would include in the mobile version. We took into consideration questions like, “What are the most relevant filters that need to be included?” and narrowed the data fields on each comparison’s search results page to only the top three most important ones. Similarly, we made design considerations to ensure users could access the information they needed within three taps and that the pages loaded quickly over 3G networks.

After developing and designing the mobile site, we were able to take some of our findings and apply it to the main site.

The Results: Increased customers and ad revenue for FindTheBest and its partners

Currently, 25% of our customers are accessing the site through mobile devices. While traffic to FindTheBest is rising by about 15-20% month-over-month, the percentage of mobile users accessing FindTheBest is rising by 25%.

Between January 2011 and January 2012, the total number of visits to FindTheBest has grown by 3X, while the number of visits from mobile alone has grown 7X. The week after launching the mobile version, visits from mobile devices increased 28% (as compared to 19% for non-mobile visits). Our user engagement has also significantly increased as page views per mobile visit increased by more than 15%--which reaffirmed the benefit of optimizing for mobile.

The mobile site has also translated into more ad revenue for us. After launching the mobile site, our ad revenue from mobile devices increased 3.5X. The benefits of having a mobile-optimized site have also carried over to our publisher partners, which currently include TechCrunch, VentureBeat and Android Authority.

What’s Next?

We constantly analyze user behavior and continue to optimize the mobile site accordingly. We’re currently researching ways to include responsive design technologies into the site, so that the mobile and desktop code bases can be merged into one. Maintaining multiple code bases is time consuming, but we believe this is the future and will be worth the investment.

Posted by Grace Nasri, Managing Editor at FindTheBest

Mashable is an independent news site devoted to digital culture and technology and was one of the first publishers to join Google+. Since joining, Mashable has been building their audience on the platform, growing Google+ into one of their top 10 sources of referral traffic. We chatted with Mashable’s Community Manager, Meghan Peters, about their first few months on Google+ and what’s made them so successful.


Mashable has used their Google+ page to expand their audience and deliver content in new ways. As Meghan says, “A lot of news organizations I think fall under the trap of just seeing social networks as broadcast platforms for their content... With Google+, I think that we have a lot of opportunity to take advantage of the cool features that the platform has, and really do more engaging projects rather than just posting our stories.”

For example, Mashable has been using Hangouts, a live multi-person video chat tool, to meet their audience face to face, creating deeper interactions. “I haven’t seen anything else like Hangouts in terms of crossing that barrier of really making a connection,” Meghan says. “I feel like it’s the deepest connection you could get.”

Hangouts has also connected Mashable employees with each other. With their headquarters in New York City and editors scattered across the U.S. and Europe, Mashable now uses Hangouts as a virtual meeting tool. The screenshare feature even helps Meghan train remote staffers who can follow along with her presentations.

Mashable has learned by doing, and that all started by creating a Google+ page. “We tried a lot of things early on, and were able to catch on quickly to what was working and what wasn’t, and have been able to shift our strategy pretty well from there,” Meghan says. Some of what she’s learned is below:

• Be active Meghan credits Mashable’s success in part to its strong and persistent presence on Google+. “We’re pretty hands-on. We have someone in there posting and moderating every day... which I think has been really important for us to maintain a presence there.”
• Add Google+ plugins When Mashable added the Google+ badge to their homepage, they increased their Google+ page audience by 38 percent. Mashable also uses the +1 button on articles and across the site to empower sharing to Google+.
• Co-create Another key to keeping Mashable’s fans engaged is its innovative approach to audience interaction and brand co-creation. A contest run via Mashable’s site to design their Google+ page sparked a wave of enthusiasm. As Meghan recalls, “We got really good feedback once we posted [the winning design]. A lot of people thought it was really cool – not only that the design was good-looking – but also that we did a contest like that and let people have the opportunity to participate.”

We think people can learn a lot from how Mashable has built a strong audience on Google+ through its use of in-depth posts, interactive Hangouts, and creative promotions, including the Google+ badge and +1 button. As Meghan notes, “Our community was very excited about this network, and we told them, let’s connect and let’s figure out...how we can both, you as a user and us as a brand, get the most out of it.”

Follow Mashable on Google+ and download the full case study here.

Posted by Rico Farmer, Product Marketing Manager