A tenfold revenue increase in just three months - nanapi.jp's success story

nanapi.jp is a Japanese site which provides helpful tips for everyday life.  From tips on romance to how to use web services, it has all sorts of advice for everyone.

Recently, nanapi started using AdSense and has seen a steady revenue increase. We spoke to Mr. Furukawa, the CEO, and Mr. Saito, the Director of Ads, and asked them about their experiences with AdSense.

■ Inside AdSense (IA): Please tell us the history of nanapi and how you built your site.  
We established nanapi in September, 2009.  We realized that there was a need for an information site where people could find tips for everyday life, so we decided to provide this content in the form of articles on various topics.

Initially, we only had a desktop site but now we’ve created a mobile site for smartphones too. As of August 2012, we receive 42 million page views and 9 million unique users per month.  The number of unique users is bigger on the desktop site, but the smartphone site receives more page views.

■ IA: How and why did you start using AdSense?
When we first established the site, we decided not to implement ads as we wanted to focus on creating quality content first. After our number of monthly visitors reached 10 million, we implemented a medium rectangle (300x250) in the upper right corner of the site.  As a result, we earned higher revenue than we’d anticipated.

We were surprised by the quality of the ads and how well they matched the content of our site. We’d been concerned that ads might damage the design or usability of our site, but we didn’t feel that way about the site post-implementation.  That’s why we decided to use AdSense more.

■ IA: What results did you see after implementing AdSense?
We started to use AdSense more after the pilot in April 2012.  More specifically, we switched from another ad network to AdSense, and increased the number of ads per page. Our revenue increased more than ten times in just three months!

nanapi covers a lot of topics, and it can be difficult to show relevant ads, but with AdSense's contextual targeting, relevant ads are shown automatically.  People visit nanapi before they take action, and that's why it's natural for our visitors to click relevant ads and leave the site. We implemented 336x280 ads below our articles to capture this kind of user behavior.

■ IA: Did you have any issues after implementing Google AdSense?
We didn’t have any difficulty in implementing or setting up AdSense. Compared to the ad network we used before, AdSense’s account interface is easy to use. It was also very easy to implement AdSense on our smartphone site. We pasted the ad code from the account interface, just as we’d done for the desktop site. It’s very good that AdSense allows us to check performance by platform too.

As for resources, we only need one person to manage AdSense. The account interface is very easy to use. For example, when we experiment with changing an ad format, we can check its performance immediately.

We were concerned that ads would deteriorate the usability of our website.  However, ad quality was very good and we didn’t have to worry.  Since the ads match our content, they enhance the information on the site and we haven’t received a single complaint from our users

■ IA: Please tell us about your plans for the future.
We plan to keep adding more and more articles to our site. Our goal is to make users think that “if you visit nanapi, you’ll find answers for all kinds of topics.” From an ads perspective, we’re considering using DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) to manage our ad units more easily.

Posted by Ayaka Sakakibara - Strategic Partner Manager
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10 for 10 publisher stories: Lessons from Teaching Ideas

In our third ‘10 for 10’ publisher success story leading up to AdSense’s 10th anniversary, we’ll hear from U.K. publisher Mark Warner of Teaching Ideas. The site offers thousands of free learning resources for teachers around the world, from ideas for classroom activities to printable posters. Mark launched the site in 1998 as a hobby while training to become a teacher, and it now attracts an average of 25,000 unique visitors a day.



Today, Mark generates 90 percent of the site’s income with AdSense, and also uses DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) Small Business to manage additional sources of advertising. “AdSense has had a big impact on my life,” says Mark, “allowing me to work part time, work from home, and spend more time with my family. My long-term goal is to continue building the website, making it bigger so more teachers have access to even more resources.”

For more of Mark’s story, read the full case study. We know there are many more success stories out there in the publisher community, so please feel free to share your own with us as well.

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team
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10 for 10 publisher stories: Complementing Videdressing’s profitability

Welcome back to our ‘10 for 10’ series, where we’re sharing publisher success stories each week as we count down to AdSense’s 10th anniversary in June.

Today we’re heading to Paris to say bonjour to Videdressing, an e-commerce site founded in 2009 by American expat Meryl Job. After looking for a medium to sell some of her clothes and noticing that a number of fashion bloggers were opening wardrobe sales, Meryl started the site to enable others to buy and sell fashion items they no longer wear. Today, the site employs over 20 people and receives over 25 million visits each month.

Since joining the AdSense program last year, Videdressing has used its AdSense revenue to complement the earnings it generates from sales and transactions. The additional income adds to the profitability of the site and is used to offer better services to its customers. Company chairman Renaud Guillerm sees advertising as “being first and foremost an additional service that we can offer our customers. Our conversion rate is only two per cent, as 98 percent of visitors browse the site without buying anything. By using AdSense we can monetise these many visits.”

Videdressing uses AdWords to advertise the site, and also makes use of Analytics to understand the site’s visitors. To date, the company has seen strong growth in France, and is looking to expand to additional markets in the future.

Read more about Videdressing’s success, and feel free to share your own AdSense success story with us. We’ll be back next week to introduce you to another publisher!

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team
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Introducing 10 for 10 publisher stories: Crafting with Cut Out + Keep

This June 18th is a major milestone: the date marks the 10th anniversary of AdSense’s launch. Over the years, AdSense has evolved from a small contextually-targeted text ad network to a complete publisher solution, serving Display, Mobile, Video, and more for over 2 million publishers -- with powerful new features, reports, and controls to boot. As we’ve grown over the last decade with your support and feedback, we’ve heard inspiring stories about how you and your businesses have done the same.

June 18th falls exactly 10 weeks from today, so we’re kicking off a ‘10 for 10’ success story series here on the blog. Each Tuesday leading up to the anniversary, we’ll introduce you to a publisher who has grown their business with AdSense and other Google tools. Stay tuned for more information on AdSense’s 10th anniversary -- but in the meantime, let’s get started by meeting Cat Morley and Tom Waddington from Cut Out + Keep:



Cat originally launched Cut Out + Keep as a blog where she could share her craft ideas. With the help of her business partner and fiancé, Tom, she transformed the blog into a popular crafting community where over 140,000 registered users now share their own projects. As the site grew, the Edinburgh-based couple turned to AdSense to earn from their site without needing to spend time selling ads. “Both of us are bad at sales,” Tom admits. “We don’t want to sell ads -- we want to focus on building the site, which is our true passion. We regard AdSense as our third employee.”

Thanks to the revenue from AdSense, Tom was able to quit his day job to focus completely on the site. More recently, the couple attended a Learn with Google for Publishers workshop in Edinburgh to learn how to improve the performance of their site. Since making changes recommended to them by an optimization specialist at the workshop, including updating their ad formats and getting started with DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) Small Business, Cat and Tom have seen their revenue quadruple.

Hear more about Cat and Tom’s AdSense experience by reading the full story. Do you have a success story to share as well? We’d love to hear from you. Join us here on Inside AdSense next Tuesday to hear another AdSense story and meet another publisher.

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team
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Succeeding with enhanced campaigns

About two months ago, we launched enhanced campaigns to help you more simply and smartly manage your campaigns in today’s multi-device world. Recently we’ve been hearing some great stories about ways that advertisers have improved their performance and saved time with enhanced campaigns. While every advertiser’s business and potential gains may be unique, here are a few examples that highlight actual strategies and results achieved so far with enhanced campaigns.

e-Travel has improved CTR and conversion rate with context-optimized ads, mobile app downloads, and upgraded sitelinks.

e-Travel is one of the leading online travel agents in Greece, Cyprus and Russia, and has presence in other markets in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. After upgrading to enhanced campaigns, Managing Director Nikos Goulis reported, “We can now show our ads according to people's context like location or time of day [... and] count app downloads as conversions in AdWords reports, which is very important for us because so many of our new customer leads come from our mobile app. These features along with the upgraded sitelinks helped us boost clickthrough rate by 43% and conversion rate by 32%."

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American Apparel has doubled its volume of phone leads with enhanced campaigns, improving return on ad spend.

American Apparel, a multi-channel fashion retailer, upgraded all its campaigns to take advantage of new features like upgraded call extensions and sitelinks. By extending call extensions across all device types, and counting calls over 10 seconds in duration as a conversion, American Apparel has seen their conversion volume from phone calls double. Return on spend has improved significantly.

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A luxury online shopping brand has grown sales by 20% by tapping into secondary markets, thanks to the ease of optimizing bids in multiple locations in a single enhanced campaign.

A luxury online shopping destination had been focusing its search engine marketing efforts on optimizing bids in location-specific campaigns aimed at primary markets like New York City and Los Angeles. Since upgrading to enhanced campaigns, the company started using location bid adjustments to test and expand its AdWords presence in new geographies, including affluent areas of Delaware, South Carolina, and New Mexico. Already, the company has grown total conversion volume by 20% while achieving target return on ad spend.

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Hotwire’s SEM analysts are saving 5-10 hours per week with more efficient campaign management.

Hotwire.com, a leading discount travel website upgraded all of their paid search accounts to Enhanced Campaigns, both domestic and international, within the first month. Clay Schulenburg, Director of Search Engine Marketing at Hotwire shared that upgrading to Enhanced Campaigns really helped his team manage AdWords more efficiently because all the key adjustments for location, time of day and device are now managed in a single campaign: “Time saved per SEM analyst is somewhere in the range of 5 – 10 hours per work week that can now be reallocated to either new strategic SEM initiatives or more granular account/campaign optimizations.”

Get started in 3 steps
If you’re among the 95% of advertisers whose legacy campaigns currently run across all device types, you can upgrade in just three steps to take advantage of enhanced campaigns:

1. Click the “Get started” button when you log into the AdWords interface
2. Select a mobile bid adjustment
3. Click “Complete upgrade”

Here's a short video illustration.

If you have questions about upgrading to enhanced campaigns, please contact AdWords support, ask for advice from your fellow advertisers in our AdWords community, or check out our comprehensive upgrade guide (.pdf download).

Share your results and feedback
Once you’ve started using enhanced campaigns, please let us know about your results and any suggested improvements using our feedback form.

Posted by Surojit Chatterjee, Group Product Manager

With a refreshing makeover, MakeupAlley.com boosts interactions, clicks and revenue

When users of MakeupAlley.com, one of the web’s largest beauty communities, review any of the 130,000 products that appear on the site, community engagement motivates them to add reviews. Is the product easy to use? Is it visually appealing? Does the product compare well to other products in its category?

After mastering the art of product reviews, MakeupAlley.com conducted a review of its own site and implemented changes.  In doing so, MakeupAlley.com achieved a 171% increase in on-site interactions, 21% more clicks to affiliate links, and a 50% uplift in AdSense revenue. A host of Google tools contributed to the overhaul, and to these compelling results.

Small changes, big impact
In all, the site hosts well over 2 million reviews. Aiming to improve user experience and increase engagement, MakeupAlley.com first made some simple changes to its product pages, home to the site’s latest reviews. Using Google’s tips and resources for publishers, MakeupAlley.com organized and streamlined content and design to make relevant information easier to find.

Product names and rating statistics were made more prominent to make it easier for users to gather product information at a glance. MakeupAlley.com also restructured the layout by separating review content from member profiles. To encourage deeper engagement, MakeupAlley.com grouped and clearly labeled related content. A final tweak saw an existing AdSense unit move to a more visible placement below the navigation, creating space on the page for an additional ad unit.

Tallying up through testing
To measure the effectiveness of the changes, the team set up Google Analytics Custom Variables to track and compare visitor activity, as well as Event Tracking to evaluate in-page interactions. MakeupAlley.com also created custom channels in AdSense to track the performance of ad units.

MakeupAlley.com ran a month-long A/B test, splitting traffic between the original and new landing pages. The new, user-friendly landing page demonstrated promising results. Featuring related content in a clear way helped grow on-site interactions, while organizing affiliate links in an easy-to-find “Where to buy” section encouraged clicks. And the new ad unit placements resulted in a notable upward surge in AdSense revenue.

A beautiful future
Considering that MakeupAlley.com’s revenue comes primarily from advertising and affiliates, the lessons learned are valuable to the brand. “We’re excited to continue improving the usability of our site using this methodology,” says one team member. Based on these successes, plans are already in the works to apply the same tactics to improving user experience and engagement throughout the site.

Want to replicate this kind of success for your own brand?

●      Read the full case study on MakeupAlley.com.
●      Get tips and best practices for content and design from Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
●      Learn about measuring visitor activity, Custom Variables and Event Tracking with Google Analytics.
●      Find out how to use Google AdSense custom channels to group and track ad units.

Posted by Ian Cohan-Shapiro - Inside AdSense Team

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Diversifying revenue sources in an e-commerce site - dinos’ success story

dinos is a Japanese mail order company that relies on catalogs, TV and the Internet for its business. In their online shopping site, visitors can purchase items they've seen on TV or in catalogs. Their site was established in September 2000 and, as of July 2012, dinos now receives 2.5 million user visits and 58 million page views per month. Revenue from their site accounts for about half of dinos' total revenue.

We recently interviewed Hiroyuki Kikuchi from the dinos marketing team, to find out more about the company’s experiences with AdSense.

■ Inside AdSense (IA): Could you tell us why and how you started to use AdSense?
We started to use AdSense to diversify the sources of revenue from the site and also to monetize the traffic from users leaving the site. The major reason why we decided to use AdSense is because of its flexibility: we can shut off or turn on a campaign at any time. We started out with a pilot in April 2012. Then in May, we began using AdSense more, dramatically increasing the number of pages with ads. As a result, our revenue increased significantly.

■ IA: Did you use any other service before you implemented AdSense?
We used an affiliate service before using AdSense. We piloted this service because it provided control over which ads we served. We also analyzed the results from our pilot to be able to optimize our ad network implementation later on. Our main concern with trying AdSense was that we would not be able to choose the ads we served, but after implementation, we found that we could easily control the ads at the URL and ad category levels. The revenue coming from AdSense is much higher than the revenue we earned from the affiliate network.

■ IA: When implementing AdSense, was there any opposition from within the company?
There was internal concern that using AdSense would decrease product sales on dinos.com. We explained that sales revenue had not changed since AdSense was implemented. In addition, we offered to stop using AdSense if we received any complaints from our users. In the end, sales levels remain constant and we did not receive any complaints. This shows that we're providing useful information to our users and showing high quality ads

■ IA: Was it easier to implement AdSense than you’d expected?
It was very easy to introduce AdSense. It was very helpful that we could set up the ad categories that we wanted to block in the account interface. It was also good that we could block ads on a URL basis.

■ IA: What resources do you use to manage your account?
Since we don’t need many resources to manage AdSense, only one person is managing it.

We hope you enjoyed learning about another publisher's AdSense journey. Stay tuned for more stories.

Posted by Kensuke Ishida, Strategic Partner Manager

Understanding the full value of mobile: adidas and RadioShack drive in-store traffic with mobile

We live in a multi-screen world where people are constantly connected and moving seamlessly across devices. Not only do mobile devices keep us connected anytime and anywhere, but they play an increasingly important role in shopping, both online and offline. With mobile, consumers no longer just take linear paths to purchase that begin and end on the same device. Instead, there are a range of customer journeys - like starting on a smartphone and ultimately buying in-store, continuing on a different device, or making a phone call.

This era of mobility is bridging the digital and physical worlds, so marketers need to fully understand mobile’s impact both online and offline, and evaluate how each of these actions applies to their business. Here’s a look at two brands who’ve invested in understanding the full value of their mobile efforts:

adidas
Being locally relevant is key for any brick and mortar business, and adidas worked with its agency iProspect to leverage mobile’s power to reach local customers. They recognized that in order to build an effective mobile presence, they had to pivot their thinking to understand how mobile drives value beyond mobile commerce, particularly in-store sales. “If we look at a 1:1 response or 1:1 measurement of what our media budget is driving on a mobile site, we're missing a big part of that picture. As performance marketers, a lot of the times we look at direct responses, and what mobile is requiring us to do is redefining direct response," says Kerri Smith, head of mobility at iProspect.

adidas and iProspect partnered to estimate the value of each store locator click on their mobile website. Based on internal benchmarks, iProspect theorized that 1 out of every 5 people who visited the mobile site store locator page went into an adidas store. In-store conversion data from adidas indicated that around 13% of shoppers who go into stores completed a purchase, and that their average order value is $71. Since an active search usually demonstrates stronger intent to purchase, iProspect applied a 20% conversion rate and an $80 average order value. As a result, they determined that 4% of the people who clicked on a store locator translated into an actual sale for adidas, meaning that each store locator click is worth $3.20.

To put that in perspective, for a hypothetical mobile investment of $1 million, in-store sales from store locator clicks was an extra $1.58 million beyond direct mobile purchases. [Download the full case study here]

RadioShack
To fully understand how mobile drives in-store sales, RadioShack collaborated with its agency Mindshare to redefine mobile success: “User behavior is much different on smartphone compared to the desktop experience. It became obvious that to be successful, we had to measure mobile performance by focusing on different criteria,” says Lisa Little, Search Marketing Manager at RadioShack.

RadioShack worked with Mindshare to understand how mobile impacted foot traffic into stores. Using mobile search ads to promote their mobile site, they found that 36% of the clicks were going to the store locator page. Based on internal studies, the teams estimated that 40-60% of people who used the store locator on a mobile device visited a store. RadioShack’s internal analytics team also determined that approximately 85% of customers who visited the store as a result of the store locator made a purchase in store. [Download the full case study here]

A holistic view of the mobile customer
This new model can help marketers better understand the return on investment they’re getting from their mobile efforts. Both companies also found mobile success because they developed a holistic view of their mobile customers and created strong synergies across all marketing channels. For example, RadioShack’s social, email, digital, video and search marketing teams work collectively to create the best user experience possible for mobile customers. Little says, “This allows us to better understand the behavioral path of our customers, from the initial research phase through the final purchase stage including all the marketing they were exposed to along the way. To be successful, you have to adopt this holistic vision of the mobile user behavior.”

Posted by: Julie Pottier, Product Marketing Manager, Mobile Ads

lastminute.com Finds That Traditional Conversion Tracking Significantly Undervalues Non-brand Search

Understanding the true impact of advertising

Advertisers have a fundamental need to understand the effectiveness of their advertising. Unfortunately, determining the true impact of advertising on consumer behavior is deceptively difficult. This difficulty in measurement is especially applicable to advertising on non-brand (i.e. generic) search terms, where ROI may be driven indirectly over multiple interactions that include downstream brand search activities. Advertising effectiveness is often estimated using standard tracking processes that rely upon ‘Last Click’ attribution. However, ‘Last Click’ based tracking can significantly underestimate the true value of non-brand search advertising. This fact was recently demonstrated by lastminute.com, a leading travel brand, using a randomized experiment - the most rigorous method of measurement.

Experimental Approach

lastminute.com recently conducted an online geo-experiment to measure the effectiveness of their non-brand search advertising on Google AdWords.  The study included offline and online conversions.  The analysis used a mathematical model to account for seasonality and city-level differences in sales.  Cities were randomly assigned to either a test or a control group. The test group received non-brand search advertising during the 12 week test period, while the control group did not receive such advertising during the same period. The benefit of this approach is that it allows statements to be made regarding the causal relationship between non-brand search advertising and the volume of conversions - the real impact of the marketing spend.

Full lastminute.com case study

Findings

The results of the experiment indicate that the overall effectiveness of the non-brand search advertising is 43% greater¹  than the estimate generated by lastminute.com’s standard online tracking system.

The true impact of the non-brand search advertising is significantly larger than the ‘Last Click’ estimate because it accounts for

1. upper funnel changes in user behavior that are not visible to a ‘Last Click’ tracking system, and
2. the impact of non-brand search on sales from online and offline channels.

This improved understanding of the true value of non-brand search advertising has given lastminute.com the opportunity to revise their marketing strategy and make better budgeting decisions.

How can you benefit?

As proven by this study, ‘Last Click’ measurement can significantly understate the true effectiveness of search advertising. Advertisers should look to assess the performance of non-brand terms using additional metrics beyond ‘Last Click’ conversions. For example, advertisers should review the new first click conversions and assist metrics available in AdWords and Google Analytics. Ideally, advertisers will design and carry out experiments of their own to understand how non-brand search works to drive sales.

Read more on AdWords Search Funnels
Read more on Google Analytics Multi Channel Funnels

Anish Acharya, Industry Analyst, Google; Stefan F. Schnabl, Product Manager, Google; Gabriel Hughes, Head of Attribution, Google; and Jon Vaver, Senior Quantitative Analyst, Google contributed to this report.

¹ This result has a 95% Bayesian confidence interval of [1.17, 1.66].

Posted by Jeremy Tully, Inside AdWords Crew

Local success stories: Qué Tiempo grows by 30% by going mobile

The increase in smartphone sales and mobile traffic makes it more important every day for web publishers to build a mobile strategy for their businesses. Nevertheless, only 1 out of 10 AdSense publishers has a mobile-friendly version of their site. To encourage other publishers to go mobile, Ángel Hernández and Manuel Lebrón, owners of Qué Tiempo, shared their experience with us.

Qué Tiempo is a Spanish site that displays the weather forecast globally. Ángel and Manuel became AdSense publishers in 2007 and over the years, thanks to investing in their content, optimizing their ads and growing their traffic, they’ve been able to build a team of more than 20 employees and invest in new ventures.

Back in 2008, they could already see through Google Analytics that the traffic coming from mobile devices was growing, so they decided to develop quetiempo.es/mobile in-house.

Their mobile traffic has successfully grown by 20% over the last two years. New users are arriving to the mobile-friendly version of their site from mobile devices, while the desktop version is experiencing a 10% year over year growth. This shows that mobile traffic is additional, not substitutional, and mobile usage is complementary to desktop.

Thanks to the increase in their mobile traffic, together with a successful implementation of their ads, Qué Tiempo saw their daily earnings grow by 30%. The CTR of their mobile leaderboard 320x50 now doubles the CTR on their desktop ads. In addition, the CPC of their mobile ads is 100% higher than the CPC of the desktop site.

Most of Qué Tiempo’s efforts are now focused on improving their mobile site with features like geotargeting, which makes it possible to deliver accurate location-specific weather forecasts.  

“We encourage other publishers to build a mobile-friendly site, not only because they’ll quickly see their revenue grow thanks to the available Google AdSense mobile formats, but also because the future of your online business depends on your mobile strategy, a market with infinite possibilities.”

Posted by Alicia Escriba - Inside AdSense team

This information is current as of December 18th, 2012.