5 Principles of User Experience, Part 2

This is the second of a three-part series highlighting five user experience principles to keep in mind when designing your site. Using these principles will help provide a great experience for users on your site. After the next post we’ll host a live Google+ Hangout on October 9th at 10:30am PT with an AdSense publisher. We will be applying these principles to help improve their site! Visit the AdSense Google+ page on the 9th to see it live!

In our last post about user experience, we provided two tips to help you identify some goals for your site and your users.

In this post we’ll share another two tips; you’ll learn how to steer users around your site and how different use cases (desktop or mobile) require different setups.

3. Ensure that users know what action to take on your site

Users should always know what action to take next on your site. When a user lands on your page it should be very clear what they should pay attention to first, second, and so on. There should also be a clear next action for them to take whether it's clicking “buy” to make a purchase or reading a related article.

Tips:
Consider these points when creating meaningful calls to action:

• Emphasis: Give emphasis to the call to action by its size, color, contrast and/or use of white space.
• Simple: Don’t clutter your page with too many different actions. Really think about what you want your users to do and prioritize those actions in your design.
• Incentive: Give an incentive to take action. This can be seen in discounts, gifts, raffle entry or access to more content
• Proximity: Make sure your call to action is in a logical placement on the page. For example, if the page features an article, you may want to put the call to action below the article.
• Consistency: Have your call to action show throughout the site and keep its appearance consistent. 

4. Tailor your experience to your users’ situation

Your site needs to provide a great experience to users whenever and wherever they need it. It’s important to put some thought into how your users use your site differently in different situations. Be sure to consider their time constraints and whether they are on a mobile device or a computer.

Tips:
Use these tips to help you think about the use cases your users might experience:

• Situation: What situation is the user in that caused them to seek out information on your site?
• Limit features: The mobile version of your site should only include the core features of your site that will help your users find the information they’re looking for. Save the other advanced features for your desktop site where your users have a little bit more time.
• Speed: Users only have a couple of seconds so make sure your site loads lightning fast. Google’s Page Speed tool can help you optimize your load time.
• Forgiveness: Users make mistakes, especially on mobile. Let them easily undo and return to where they were, without having to use the back button.

Example:
Suppose you’re a restaurant review site. How does a mobile user’s behavior differ from that of a desktop user? First off, mobile users are probably on the move; they could even be walking down the street as they browse your site. They won’t have time to navigate through several pages of restaurants like they do on the desktop site. They expect your site to use the phone’s GPS to locate them and show them popular restaurants nearby based on their search. Your site can even optimize the review experience for mobile by showing the most popular short reviews since users don’t have time to read long reviews.

Remember, it’s all about thinking about the situation that the user is in when they reach your site and tailoring the user experience to match.

Check in tomorrow and we’ll talk about generating return visits to your site and creating customer loyalty through a great UX.

Posted by David Richards - Google AdSense

Resources:
Google Analytics Events  - http://www.google.com/analytics/
Measure the impact of design changes and monitoring the continued usage of your site will keep you updated on how your users are interacting with your site, and how their usage can shift, change or evolve over time. Google Analytics Events will help you measure these changes by measuring clicks on pre-defined elements of the page.

Site Speed Tool - https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/
Google has provided some great tools to helping improve your site speed.

How to GoMo - http://www.howtogomo.com/
Google has created a quick tool to see how your website looks on a mobile phone. It also provides some great resources to help build your mobile site.

DUDA mobile - http://gomo.dudamobile.com/
Duda Mobile is a partner with Google GoMo and allows you to create your mobile site in minutes. 

Make better decisions in AdWords with your Google Analytics data

If you’re already using Google Analytics, you know how useful it can be to help you make better decisions and improve your online marketing. Now, we’re making it possible to use your Google Analytics data right in AdWords. After setting up AdWords to import your Google Analytics data, you’ll have access to Bounce Rate, Pages Per Visit, and Average Visit Duration columns directly in the AdWords interface. With more performance data available right where you’re managing your campaigns, you can make better informed decisions and improve your AdWords ROI.

Using your Google Analytics data
With Google Analytics you can find insights that matter, including how visitors arrive at your website, how they use it, and how you can keep them coming back. Here are some ways you can take advantage of the new Google Analytics data available in AdWords to improve your results.

• Attract more engaged users. If highly engaged users are an important goal, sort your ad groups to find the ones that deliver visitors who stay on your site the longest (“Average Visit Duration” or “Pages Per Visit”), and bid more for these.
• Discover opportunities to convert more engaged visitors. You might find certain keywords or ads that have relatively low conversion rates, but great engagement metrics. You could lower your bids by a little and move on. Or you could see this as a great opportunity to convert clearly engaged visitors into buyers. By adjusting your offer, adding an incentive (like a coupon or discount code), or making your call to action more obvious and accessible, you might be able to improve your ROI and your conversion volume. To look for these types of opportunities, create a filter based on conversion rate and sort by Average Visit Duration, Pages per visit, or Bounce Rate.
• Identify ads with badly matched landing pages or inaccurate targeting. Pages with both low conversion rates and low engagement metrics (low Average Visit Duration or High Bounce Rate) could indicate a poor landing page for a particular ad or keyword. It might also suggest inaccurate targeting. To identify and troubleshoot these problems, set up a filter for low conversion rate and low engagement rate and regularly monitor it. Since you’re using Google Analytics, you can easily set up A/B testing on the landing page using a Content Experiment.
  

Success in action
Casamundo, the biggest vacation rental listing service in Europe, has been an early tester of this new feature. They've used Google Analytics since 2008 and over the past 5 years they've grown and refined their AdWords campaigns to over 50 million active keywords across 10 languages. Their analysis shows that converting visitors research vacation rentals over an average of 7.4 visits, so understanding whether their ads and keywords can create strong engagement is vital to their business and how they optimize their AdWords campaigns. Seeing high bounce rates and low average time on site for a keyword means that the offer or destination page might not be a good match for that keyword.

Having easier access to Google Analytics data right in AdWords has helped Torge Kahl, Online Marketing Manager, at Casamundo make better decisions and make optimizations more quickly. According to Torge:

“The combination of using both Google AdWords and Google Analytics has proved to be the perfect set of tools for us to achieve our goals, and we're very happy to see this combination get more integrated and powerful. Using Analytics data right within AdWords has let me better optimize our account and significantly improve the return on our AdWords investment."

More details
Please visit the AdWords Help Center for step-by-step directions on how to connect your Google Analytics profile data to your AdWords account and for more details.

To exchange tips and ask questions of others, please visit the AdWords community. You can always contact AdWords support for help if you need it.

Posted by Dan Friedman, AdWords Product Manager

5 Principles of User Experience, Part 1

This is the first of a three-part series highlighting five user experience principles to keep in mind when designing your site. Applying these principles will help provide a great experience for users on your site. After the series we’ll host a live Google+ Hangout On Air on October 9th at 10:30am PT, when we'll put these principles in action by helping an AdSense publisher make UX improvements to their site. Visit the AdSense Google+ page on the 9th to see it live!

User experience can make or break your site’s success. With many other sites offering similar services, it’s important to differentiate your site in the eyes of your users by providing a better experience. Because a user’s attention is limited, you'll only have a few seconds to provide a good experience and quickly guide the user to what they’re looking for.

Today, we've provided our first two important design tips and techniques to help you identify goals for both your site and its users.

1. Focus on your users’ goals

Step back and first ask yourself, “How can I give my users what they want while getting what I want?” The first step in answering this is to figure out what your users’ goals are, what your goals are and how they work together. You’ll need to think about what your site’s core offerings and strengths are. We recommend keeping this to one or two strengths. Though your site may be good at many things, you should focus on what it’s great at.

Tips:
Some questions to ask yourself when starting out are:

• How are your users finding your site?
• What are they looking for?
• Do you give them what they want?
• What do you want from your users?
• How do you get a desired response from them?

Example:
You’re a tech news site and after considering each of the questions above, you determine that:

• Most of your users come from search engines and land on the article page
• Your user is looking for the content of the article they searched for
• You show them a full page article on the landing page
• Your goal is to keep the user engaged, so that they stay longer and see more content
• The answer to here is the real challenge. You need to prove to the user that there’s other valuable content on your site and encourage them to read more. This can be accomplished by including some related or popular articles at the bottom of each article.

2.  Employ a clear structure to guide users

No matter what page a user lands on, you only have a few seconds on that first screen with the space above the fold to get their attention and show them what you’re all about. Employing a simple hierarchy will give your page a clear structure that will guide users and highlight what you want them to see.

Another thing to keep in mind is the information architecture of your site. Users are able to recognize familiar pages from unfamiliar based on the consistent way you organize and display information on your site. If your website’s structure is not logical or what they expect, users will be lost and not sure where to go next. This adds to overall frustration and can lead to users leaving your site.
Tips:
Use these simple design tips to create a structure for your page:

• Contrast: Using color, saturation, or opacity to juxtapose elements on the page.
• Size: Size is one of the easiest design levers to guide your users. Don’t be afraid to use BIG and BOLD elements to draw users’ attention to the most important information on the page.
• Alignment: Elements that share a common axis appear related.
• Whitespace: Drawing attention to specific elements by leaving empty space around them. It also makes your design more appealing to the eye.
• Grid: Using a simple grid to layout elements on your page will create a sense of order and structure.

Example:
Newspaper sites usually do a great job creating structure through hierarchy. The breaking story or most important piece of news dominates the screen. This ensures it’s the first thing you see. Major headlines from other sections are also big and bold so a user that’s browsing can quickly and easily pick them out. The size and contrast of photos and headlines helps to guide users through the page.

Thanks for reading and check back tomorrow for our second installment of Publisher Insights!

Posted by: David Richards - Google AdSense

Resources:   
Google Analytics: Google’s free tool to help you measure your traffic and how users are currently using your site. Additionally, it can help you test how changes to your site affect performance.
Webmaster Guidelines: Creating a clear hierarchy and sitemap will help Google crawlers find and rank content on your site.

PubTalk: Publishers choose Google AdSense because...

Why do publishers choose Google AdSense? In the past, we’ve heard from businesses like Concertboom and AlloExpat.com about how AdSense helped them grow their businesses and expand their audiences.
In a recent Google+ Hangout with publishers, we asked simplyadditions.com’s Voitek Klimczyk, txantiquemall.com’s David and Jan Moncrief, and diyornot.com’s Katie and Gene Hamilton why they started using AdSense and why they’re still with us. Their response? AdSense makes it easier for these publishers to do what they love.

Watch this video to hear more and keep an eye out for more publisher stories on our blog and AdSense +page.

Did you miss our previous PubTalk posts? See what these and other publishers have to say about ad sizes and placements, adding ad units, and testing colors in our optimization tip videos from the same Hangout.

This post is part of the PubTalk series of conversations with Publishers

Posted by Julia Eckstein - Inside AdSense Team

PubTalk: Publishers discuss testing colors for their ads

We’re back with the third video from our Google+ Hangout with AdSense publishers! Have you tried our publisher suggestions of adding a third content ad unit or changing ad sizes and placements?

Another feature publishers Katie and Gene Hamilton of diyornot.com, David and Jan Moncrief of txantiquemall.com, and Voitek Klimczyk of simplyadditions.com tried was changing the text and background colors of their ad units. Experimenting with colors and tracking different ad styles provides insight on clickthrough rates and revenue uplift which will help you decide how to make future changes to your site. 

Watch this video to see how these publishers test colors and follow AdSense on Google+ to see how publishers use AdSense’s different customizable features.



This post is part of the PubTalk series of conversations with publishers.

Posted by Julia Eckstein - Inside AdSense Team

Follow our AdSense +page and catch our upcoming Hangouts On Air

We started our AdSense +page a few months ago to connect with you and regularly share information. Since the launch of the +page, you’ve provided great feedback and made it clear that you’re constantly yearning to learn more. Over the next couple of months, we’ll be hosting a series of Hangouts On Air to provide you with additional information and help you build connections within the publisher community. We’ll be covering a variety of topics, including how to:

• Fix crawler errors
• Establish a Google+ strategy
• Use DoubleClick for Publishers Small Business
• Understand your AdSense payments
• Navigate performance reports
• Implement optimization tips

Be sure to follow the AdSense +page to learn about the specific dates and times of the Hangouts On Air. We’ll also post the recorded videos to our YouTube channel, in case you’re not able to watch a live session.

We hope to Hangout with you soon!

Posted by Jamie Firkus - Inside AdSense Team

PubTalk: AdSense publishers discuss adding content ad units to their pages

Welcome to the second video in our publisher feedback series. Hopefully you’ve been able to test ad sizes and placements since our last post!

During the same Hangout, publishers Al Gross of infosports.com,  Katie and Gene Hamilton of diyornot.com, and Voitek Klimczyk of simplyadditions.com discussed how adding additional content ad units to their pages significantly helped increase their AdSense revenue. In the past, we’ve seen publishers increase their earnings by 400% by adding a maximum of three content units to their pages.

Watch this video to see why these publishers made the change and continue to check our blog for more optimization tips. To hear what other publishers have to say and to get involved in the conversation, follow AdSense on Google+.

Visit our Help Center to learn more about best practices for balancing ad units and page content, and to learn how to measure the effect of multiple ad units.

This post is part of the PubTalk series of conversations with publishers.

Posted by Julia Eckstein - Inside AdSense Team

PubTalk: AdSense publishers talk about testing ad sizes and placements on their site

Many of you have opted in to receive our customized suggestions about your AdSense implementation. Wonder what publishers have to say after they’ve implemented one of these suggestions? Now you can hear from the publishers themselves in our new Google AdSense optimization series.

Five publishers recently participated in a Google+ Hangout with AdSense to share their stories and some of their top optimization tips. In this video, publishers Gene and Katie Hamilton of diyornot.com, David and Jan Moncrief of txantiquemall.com, and Voitek Klimczyk of simplyadditions.com discuss how changing ad unit sizes and placements has increased their AdSense revenue and clickthrough rates.

Visit our Help Center to learn more about recommended ad formats and placements to help you decide which changes you’d like to make next.

Check out this video and keep an eye out for the rest of the series!



This post is part of the PubTalk series of conversations with publishers.

Posted by Julia Eckstein - Inside AdSense Team

Become a DFP expert using our new DFP Academy

As your online advertising business continues to grow, you may have started working with other ad networks or doing deals directly with advertisers. DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) Small Business is a free, Google-hosted solution to help streamline how ads are served on your site when you’re working with AdSense alongside other ad partners. With DFP Small Business, you have a vast array of features that give you more control over when, where, and how your ads serve.

Today we’re announcing the launch of DFP Academy, a step-by-step guide for getting started with DFP Small Business. DFP Academy explains how to organize the ad space available on your site, input the information about your advertisers into DFP Small Business, traffic ads from ad networks and direct advertisers, and leverage AdSense to maximize your overall revenue.

If you already have an active AdSense account, you can quickly sign up for your DFP Small Business account today. Your DFP Small Business account will be linked to your AdSense account, so be sure to use the same login information as you for do for AdSense.

As we continue to improve DFP Academy, we’d love to hear your feedback in the DFP Forum.

	Check out DFP Academy now

Posted by Rishan Mohamed, Yield Management Specialist

Make smarter decisions with the new Auction insights report

A key component of developing a search ads strategy is understanding what other advertisers are doing, and using this intelligence to optimize campaigns for top performance. To empower advertisers to make better informed optimization decisions, we’re launching the Auction insights report.

We currently provide Impression share columns within campaign and ad group reports that show the percentage of impressions received, compared to the estimated number of impressions for which they were eligible. While this report gives valuable insight into missed opportunities in aggregate, it also raises additional questions -- who competes in the same auctions, and can performance data be made available at a more detailed level?

With the Auction insights report, you can compare your performance with other advertisers who compete in the same set of auctions as you do. You can see how often your ads rank higher than other advertisers’ ads on the search results page, and how often your ads appear compared to theirs based on your estimated possible impressions. This information can help you make strategic decisions about bids, budgets, and keyword choices by showing you where you are succeeding and where you may be missing opportunities for improved performance.

The Auction insights report provides data at the keyword-level, and provides five different statistics: impression share, average position, overlap rate, position above rate, and top of page percent:

Note: Mock data only.

Reports can be generated for one keyword at a time, and data is only available for keywords that meet a minimum threshold of activity for the time period specified. If you see this icon () to the left of a keyword in your statistics table on the Keyword tab, you’ll know that the Auction insights report is available for that keyword.



Note: This report provides information on other advertisers that participated in the same auctions as you. This does not indicate that the other advertisers have the same keywords, match types, or other targeting settings as you. The other advertisers’ metrics shown are based only on instances when your ads were also estimated to be eligible to appear. These reports will not reveal the actual keywords, quality, or settings from your campaign, and it will not give you insight into the same information for others.

While this information is already available by performing queries on Google search -- and many already attempt to estimate this data by scanning the ads that appear -- this report will make it easier to access and understand this information. It is available at no additional cost to advertisers whose keywords have a minimum threshold of activity.

This report will be rolling out over the next few days. For more information on the Auction insights report, visit the AdWords Help Center.

Update - Auction insights report icon unavailable

We are removing the Auction insights report icon () from the statistics table on the Keywords tab. The report is still available for keywords which meet the minimum threshold of traffic.

To determine the keywords for which to run the report, we recommend sorting keywords by impressions. If the report is not available for the selected keyword and time frame, no data will be shown on the report page.

We’ll update this blog post as soon as the icon, or an alternative solution, is once again available.

Posted by Bhanu Narasimhan, Group Product Manager, AdWords