Inside AdSense: October 2019

Build your content during the holiday season

Wednesday, October 30, 2019

Holiday season is driven by users purchasing for themselves and for family’s gifts.
Don’t worry, even if your content is not related to the holiday season, a rise in internet traffic increases the probability of users landing on your page. Holiday season means an opportunity for all!

Create bespoke content

To attract and retain an audience, it’s important to tailor your content to your users’ needs. Here are some helpful insights to create engaging content during the holiday season.

Think mobile size
Users are increasingly searching on their mobiles. Smartphones accounted for the majority of digital shopping traffic for the first time this holiday season with 51% of visits according to Adobe1. Be mindful of the number of ads you show so users find it easy to digest on mobile. Keep your content short (and sweet). A recent Google study found that consumers ‘disliked mobile pages with ad densities greater than 30% and flashing animated ads2. Click here to learn more about mobile ad format optimization
Incorporate keywords into your content
- Mobile searches for “best” have grown over 80% in two years3.
- The searches for Black Friday shopping increased by 1,150% on Google in 2018 from November to December4.
- ‘Where to buy’ is a trending search phrase during the holiday season. For example, “where to buy cards,” and “where to buy gift boxes”5.
Keep up to date with this season’s trendsThe Google Trends tool will help you discover what are the big internet search topic of the moment for your audience. Check Google Trends tool. Internet users are also increasingly hungry for video content. For this holiday season, look at what’s trending amongst viewers with Youtube trends.
Let’s talk SEOLet Google Search find your site! Understand the basics of crawling, indexing, serving and how Google Search works. Get your site on Google.
It's not over until it's over
Keep publishing content throughout the season. Users are searching right up until Christmas. With new gadgets to unbox and explore, plenty of users will be online on Christmas Day itself, downloading apps, updating drivers and registering their devices. In fact, searches for ‘download’ and ‘activate’ are 30% higher on December 25th than during the week prior6.

Good luck on working with your content. Next week we'll review what publishers should do to get the most out of the time after the holiday season.

Posted by
Daryna Chushko - Publisher Growth Marketing Manager

Sources:

1. https://content-na1.emarketer.com/thanksgiving-day-is-now-the-no-3-online-shopping-holiday

2. https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-resources/better-ad-standards/

3. https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/data/holiday-search-statistics-store-hours/

4. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2018-11-01%202018-12-31

5. https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/data/holiday-shopping-search-statistics/

6. https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/intl/en-gb/marketing-resources/data-measurement/gift-guide-for-marketers

Start preparing for the holiday season now

Wednesday, October 23, 2019

Anticipation is key, start preparing now!

The holiday shopping season starts in September with queries starting to increase and users beginning to search for deals and gifts. Start planning and optimizing your AdSense account and site in October and plan to finish all optimizations by November1,2.

Timeline to guide your planning process

Here is our seasonality checklist to help your AdSense account and site be holiday season ready:

1. Optimize your AdSense account

Try the new and improved Auto ads:
Focus on creating your holiday content, while Google places and optimizes ads for you. Auto ads now work through any AdSense ad code. There is an easy preview of how Auto ads look on your site before implementing. You can choose ad formats and the number of ads per page with the new Ad load control. We’ve also updated reporting so that you can see Auto ads and manual ad unit performance side by side for each of your sites. Learn more about implementing Auto ads

Make your ads more visible with Viewability:
Did you know? If an ad is placed at the bottom of the page and the user does not scroll down to see it, the ad is not counted as a viewable impression3.
Make sure you increase the number of viewable ad impressions on your site during the holiday season. This will likely lead to more clicks and higher revenue potential. Learn how to optimize your viewability

Increase your revenue opportunities by reviewing your Blocking controls settings:
Take this as an opportunity to review blocked categories on your AdSense account. See and review ads that appeared on your site in the Ad review center. Learn more about ad blocking controls

2. Optimize your site

Go where your audience is:
It’s important to understand where your audience is located. If a certain holiday is not celebrated in your region, it might be where your audience is.
Discover where your users are by using the Google Analytics tool in AdSense. Click here to learn how

Make a great first impression4:
If visitors leave your site after looking at just one page, you've likely lost them and their potential AdSense earnings forever.

Giving visitors a great first impression is important to keep them interested so they dig deeper into your site. Here are a few tips to do this:

When it comes to design, remember that users are impatient. Organize your site so that it’s easy for people to navigate and browse through.
Focus your homepage and navigation on connecting users to the content they’re looking for.
Offer site search to ensure users who are in a hurry can find what they need.
Make sure that every piece of content links to more pieces of content using the Matched content recommendations tool.

Develop a traffic strategy:
We’ve already seen how internet user traffic increases during the holiday season. Now it’s time to consider how you’ll make sure your site is seen to attract new users. Here are some tips:

Develop partnerships with other content creators and share each other’s content.
Have a social media presence. Consider using YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter to share your content on different platforms.
Experiment with Google Ads. Use your performance report to understand the top countries where your audience is coming from and use Google Ads to ensure your content is visible in searches.

Check your page speed:
Use the Google PageSpeed Insights tool to check your page speed. Users who have to wait for pages to load or can’t easily browse will likely go elsewhere. Consider reducing your content to boost page speed. Videos and images that load can slow down your page as well.

Now it’s time to grow your audience by focusing on content. Next week we’ll provide you more tips on working with your content during the holiday season.

Posted by:

Daryna Chushko - Publisher Growth Marketing Manager

Sources:

1. Google Internal Analysis, 2018, Categories Apparel, Beauty & Personal Care, Computers & Consumer Electronics, Food & Groceries, Home & Garden, Occasions & Gifts, Toys & Games (DE, PL, UK, FR, IT, ES, GR).

2. https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/consumer-insights/four-types-holiday-shoppers

3. https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-resources/data-measurement/5-factors-of-viewability/

4. https://www.google.com/adsense/start/resources/best-shape-to-boost-your-earnings/

Your Google AdSense seasonal guide

Wednesday, October 16, 2019

This guide is here to help you learn about the importance of seasonality as well as provide you with tips on how to get more from your Google AdSense account and site during peak seasonal traffic. This guide is filled with easy, actionable insights you can start implementing today.

Here’s a sneak peek of what will be posted over the next couple of weeks to prepare you well for this busy time of the year. Let’s get holiday season ready!

Pre-holiday season: How to prepare?
During the holiday season: How to maximize the opportunities
Post holidays: Looking at 2020

Defining seasonal periods

What is seasonality?

Any predictable fluctuation or pattern that recurs over a calendar year is defined as seasonality. It can be categorized into 3 types of events and holidays:

Cultural (e.g. Ramadan, Thanksgiving, Christmas)
Commercial (e.g. Black Friday, Singles’ Day, Mother’s Day)
Ad-hoc events (e.g. Olympics, Elections, TV series)

By spotting events and holidays impacting your audience, you can identify your seasonality opportunities to increase revenue and attract new users.

What drives seasonality?

Publisher revenue is driven by two interlinked factors: RPMs and traffic.

Advertisers are willing to pay more for inventory, leading to higher RPMs. Increased traffic leads to more impressions. These two factors drive seasonal spikes and dips in publisher earnings.

RPMs traffic

Why is it important for publishers?

Seasonality offers publishers opportunities to attract new audiences and maximize revenues. The upcoming holiday season (October - December) is the biggest annual seasonal opportunity. Let’s explore why!

Starting the holiday season marathon

Let’s focus on the upcoming season. The October-December period is a global seasonal marathon offering the greatest annual opportunity to maximize your earnings. In fact, this seasonal opportunity is increasing all over. In 2018, the average global interest in Black Friday grew more than twice over the previous 5 years.

Get your calendar open and mark the following dates:

Let’s see what you can do to make the most out of your site and AdSense account before, during and after the holiday season.

In the blogpost next week we’ll provide you with tips on how to prepare your site and AdSense account for the rush of the holiday season.

Posted by:
Daryna Chushko - Publisher Growth Marketing Manager

Introducing the new and improved Auto ads

Tuesday, October 08, 2019

This time last year, we committed to making AdSense more assistive and powerful. We're excited to announce a significant update to AdSense; Auto ads are now easier to use and come with better controls to customize the ad experience for your users.

What’s changing

Easy setup and management

- No more messing with ad codes! Auto ads now work through any AdSense ad unit code, so using them on your existing sites is as easy as turning them on in your account.
- For new sites, just add them in the Sites page, copy-paste the AdSense code and turn on Auto ads.

- For pages where you don't want to use Auto ads, add those URLs to your “Page exclusions” list. You can exclude individual pages or entire sections of your site.
- You can see the full summary of your Auto ads settings for each of your sites as an overview.

Greater customization

- You can preview how Auto ads look on your site before they go live.

- You can delete specific ad placements inside the preview using the “delete” button. Auto ads will immediately generate a placement in a new location for you to review.
- You can easily specify the Ad formats that Auto ads places on your site, including Matched content.
- You can control the number of Auto ads you'd like to show on your pages by using the Ad load slider.

Updated reporting

- We're updating our reports to allow you to easily see Auto ads and manual ad unit performance side by side for each of your sites.

Don’t forget to check your Auto ads settings in the new Ads > Overview page to see these changes apply to your sites.

Over the coming weeks, we'll email to let you know that your account has the new Auto ads, and provide further information.

Experiments are coming!

We've received many requests to make it easier to test Auto ads and get accurate performance metrics. We're currently working on creating a new experiment type to make this possible.

Together with the changes highlighted above, and a new experiment type, you'll be able to see how Auto ads will look on a site, and test out the performance on a portion of the traffic of a site before enabling them fully.

Posted by:
Google AdSense Product Team

Inside AdSense

Build your content during the holiday season

Start preparing for the holiday season now

Your Google AdSense seasonal guide

Introducing the new and improved Auto ads

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