India Site Clinic, Part 1

Thank you webmasters for your overwhelming response to the Google India Site Clinic initiative. The sites submitted covered 12 diverse categories, making this an excellent sample set for our analysis. As we analyzed the sites we were able to identify a few trends where we’d like to help Indian webmasters improve. So in this post we will address one of the most pressing concerns for a webmaster at this point in time: should a webmaster invest in a smartphone-optimized presence.

30% of the world’s smartphone users live in India and China (source)

India is one of the leading mobile markets worldwide. The nation has 919.2 million mobile subscribers as of March 2012 (TRAI, May 2012), which is 75% of the population. 65% of mobile subscribers are urban dwellers.

So why would your website benefit from having a mobile presence? Time for some colorful graphs and revealing statistics. The following statistics are derived from http://www.thinkwithgoogle.com. Surveys were conducted over 2 phases (March - July 2011 and January - March 2012) and 1000 sample users (across all age groups and gender) were surveyed for each of the phases.

78% of smartphone users visit a search engine on a daily basis.

Source: http://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/mobileplanet/en/

Now let’s have a look at how the smartphone user spends his time on the Internet.

Source: http://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/mobileplanet/en/ 

The graph indicates that 32% of surveyed users used online/mobile shopping coupons, 56% of them downloaded content, and at least 40% of them collectively spent time searching for restaurants/pubs, jobs, travel/holidays or reading news and magazines. Every site submitted for review to our Site Clinic fits one or more of the activities above so for these sites, a smartphone-friendly website might provide advantages to its users.



Good Mobile User Experience



For example, when a friend recommends a website he liked, your first reaction might be to check it on your smartphone as it may be some time before you get access to a desktop or laptop. If you aren’t able to read the content on the site or if the site doesn’t render properly on your mobile, you may be disappointed and might even forget about checking the site later on. Hence, a good user experience on mobile is very important.

Here is an example of the difference a mobile site can make:

Example site: www.caclubindia.com

These are a few simple things that have changed in the mobile version of the site:

1. Text is legible without zooming or panning


2. Links and buttons can be easily tapped with a thumb


3. Search functionality is accessible through use of a button

Is your site mobile-friendly?
To check how your site renders on a mobile phone you can simply check on your phone and see how your site looks. For a deeper analysis we recommend use of the GoMoMeter.

Now that you’ve had a look, let’s go through the steps to provide a great mobile experience to your users.

Building a smartphone optimized site

Google supports three configurations

1. 
   Sites can use responsive web design, i.e., sites serve all devices on the same set of URLs, with each URL serving the same HTML and using just CSS to change how the page is rendered on the device. This is Google's recommended configuration.
   
   


2. 
   Sites can dynamically serve all devices on the same set of URLs, but each URL serves different HTML (and CSS) depending on whether the user-agent is a desktop or a mobile device.
   
   


3. 
   Sites can have separate mobile and desktop URLs.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   

We recommend using responsive design because using a single URL makes it easier for your users to interact with, share and link to your content. It also helps Google's algorithms to assign indexing properties to the content. Redirection will not be needed for users to get to the device-optimized view, which reduces loading time. For detailed analysis of this and other approaches, please see our developers page for building smartphone-friendly sites.

We hope this post got you thinking about your site in the mobile space. Look forward to the next post in this site clinic series where we’ll address another interesting trend.



Posted by The Google Search Quality Team

Map of the Week: MOCA: Ends of the Earth

Map of the Week: MOCA: Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974

Why we like it: The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) "Ends of the Earth” site a great example of using Google Maps as a conduit for connecting art with the real world. This map gives the viewer real world context for the artwork. We also like seeing a user interface that uses a full screen map and is designed to work as one with the map.



MOCA: Ends of the Earth was created as an at-home interactive experience for museum guests and the newest collection at the MOCA. The goal is to give users meaningful context using Google Map’s repository of global Satellite and Street View imagery. As described by MOCA, “Developed by MOCA for End of the Earth: Land Art to 1974, this interactive feature maps key artworks included in the exhibition, pinpointing their original locations to demonstrate the global nature of land art and its relations to real places and times.”

Aside from being a great way to learn about a piece of art that interests you, the site’s user interface creates a very pleasant experience for the user. You can also download a KML file and view the collection in Google Earth.

Perhaps one of the most nostalgic pieces of artwork in the collection is Charles and Ray Eames’ film Powers of Ten. Using this site you can visit the location where some of the film takes places and in an interactive ode to the film, you can recreate Powers of Ten anywhere you want by zooming in and out of Google Maps directly on the site.



Posted by Carlos Cuesta, Google Maps API Product Marketing Manager

Google and Forrester Present New Research on the Value of Combining Audience with Contextual Targeting

In the past 10 years the number and variety of new technologies in display advertising have more than doubled, effectively creating new - and better - ways to buy display across the web. With this influx of new display targeting technologies available to advertisers (contextual, remarketing, demographics, interest categories to name a few), our clients often wonder which targeting method performs better: audience or contextual advertising? We've said in the past that the combination of audience and contextual buying work better together, and now we have some new insight into how advertisers are thinking about these tools.



We worked with Forrester Consulting and surveyed 150 interactive marketers to evaluate their perceptions on the effectiveness of combining audience & contextual targeting with respect to display buying. The findings from the new whitepaper, Display Media Buyers Value Audience in Context, were presented during a special joint Learn With Google webinar featuring Forrester’s Joanna O’Connell and Google’s Woojin Kim. Register here to view the recording.



Key findings from the research include:

• 50% of respondents use a full range of targeting types including: Remarketing, Demographic, Behavioral and Contextual


• Contextual and behavioral targeting dominate: Used by the vast majority - 82% in the case of contextual, 71% in the case for behavioral


• 94% of marketers combine contextual & audience buying for higher performance and greater accuracy


• Audience targeting has become the norm in display buying: The majority of marketers surveyed are bullish on audience targeting, and few see it as overhyped.


• Most marketers plan on maintaining increasing spend on combined audience & contextual targeting.

Interested in learning more? Download the whitepaper on Think Insights with Google.


Posted by Katie Hamilton, Product Marketing Manager Google Display Network

Budget pacing insights arrive in DoubleClick Search

Our team has been focused on bringing you more tools for better measurement and actionable insights, right in the interface. Until now, marketers have been using labels in DoubleClick Search (DS) to easily organize and report on keyword performance by placing keywords into custom categories, regardless of which campaigns they live in.

Now in our latest release, we’ve added another layer of reporting flexibility with Budget Pacing Reports. These reports allow you to track performance against a budget in the DS UI. By visualizing week-over-week, day-over-day, or month-over-month trends, Budget Pacing Reports allow you to quickly identify campaigns that are under-spending or underperforming.





Tracking spend against a budget goal is a common need for many users. These reports save time for agencies that need to look at such data on a regular basis. Budget Pacing Reports provide:

• A rich language for entering KPI expectations with your budget target. Define your KPI goals, set expectations and constraints, and see if your campaigns are on track to deliver on them. For example:  I want CPA of $40.00 and I tolerate +-10% error.


• Data visualization for quick projections and insights. Given your entered specifications and expectations, easily visualize different date ranges to see trends and projections of intended outcomes to help you make the best decisions.


• A holistic view across campaigns. See how each campaign is contributing toward budget and KPI.

To learn more about Budget Pacing Reports, see our Help Center, or reach out to your Technical Account Manager for tips and best practices. You can also watch our training video below:








Posted by the DoubleClick Search team

Get social, mobile, and 40+ new data points with the Google Analytics API

Google Analytics Core Reporting APIs enable a powerful and flexible way to analyze, report on, and ultimately optimize such things as web and mobile experiences, conversions, and sales.



Today we’re adding over 40 new metrics and dimensions that can be queried through the Core Reporting API. This enables developers to create reports that are similar to what is available in the Google Analytics web interface for important areas such as social and mobile. See a full list of additions on the Core Reporting API changelog.

Here’s a rundown of what’s new and a few helpful questions the data can answer.



Social Data

Now you can get data for both on-site interactions with social buttons as well as off-site social data from social data hub partner networks.

• Which content receives the most comments on social networks?


• What are the conversion rates for visits from social networks?


• For social buttons embedded in my property, which ones get used most often and for which content?

Mobile Devices

For mobile visits to your site, get all the good stuff like like brand, model, and input type.

• What are the top 10 mobile devices used to visit my website?

Geo

We added a new dimension to indicate the Designated Market Area (DMA) where traffic came from.

• What are the Top 10 Campaigns for the San Francisco Bay Area DMA?

Page Path Rollups

Create your own drill down reports with these new dimensions that allow you to roll-up metrics to hierarchical levels of your property.

• What does the performance of my website look like across different sections?

App & Exception Tracking

If you’re using the Google Analytics SDK for iOS/Android v2 beta, you can now retrieve App View and Exception metrics.

• On a daily basis, how many views did my mobile app get?


• On a daily basis, how many exceptions occurred in my mobile app, and how many exceptions were fatal? 

User Timings

New ways to report on all things related to user timing data.

• What were the time measurements for all user defined timings?

Related Resources:

• Dimensions & Metrics Reference for a list of all available metrics & dimensions. 


• Google Analytics Query Explorer to help you build queries and try out the Core Reporting API.


• Core Reporting API changelog for a list of the 40+ new dimensions & metrics.

Posted by Pete Frisella and Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics API team

Announcing Audience Extension: a new way to create more premium inventory in DoubleClick for Publishers

Today at the London ATS Trading summit we announced the launch of Audience Extension, a new feature within DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) designed to generate more premium revenue for publishers by leveraging their audiences across the web.

Audience extension enables you to reach your audience across other publishers, bundle these impressions with your own inventory, and resell those packages to your direct advertisers at a premium. Audience extension inventory comes from the vast pool of brand safe inventory via publishers on DoubleClick Ad Exchange.  Audience Extension can be used without leaving DFP; flight dates, targeting and bid parameters are set directly within your core ad server.  

Audience extension is best suited to publishers with high value content channels within their owned and operated inventory that are consistently sold out, or who have defined audiences onsite that have a value to advertisers that transcends the context of their own site. It’s also used by publishers looking to reach a critical mass of users from a given geo-location.

Key Benefits

• A single place to manage, execute and optimize buying across owned & operated and external inventory


• Bid management capabilities integrated in the core ad server


• Integrated data management


• Cross-inventory performance reporting, analytics & insights


• Complexity hidden from sales team & ad operations

Posted by Sean Harvey, Business Product Manager

Announcing new pricing for Virtual IP based SSL

We are delighted to make Virtual IP (VIP) based SSL more widely available to developers by announcing a reduction in price. From the 25th of September, VIPs will be $39/month - down from the previous price of $99/month. For those applications already using VIP based SSL, the pricing change will be applied to your bill starting on the 25th. 


Google App Engine SSL for Custom Domains goes above and beyond the basics of SSL by offering globally distributed SSL endpoints and built-in load balancing. Like App Engine in general, there is no need for ongoing system administration and maintenance. For more details on how to setup SSL for Custom Domains for your applications, see the App Engine documentation.

- Posted by the Google App Engine Team