Despite its smaller format and scaled-down capabilities, the mobile Internet is gaining a lot of traction, especially among younger — Generation X and Generation Y — users. These kids are always on the go, and they grab what they’re looking for from the Internet while they’re in mid-stride. (Unlike me — I’m a little more “mature” and find it difficult to read the screen on the phone, much less search the Web!)
This younger generation also has a larger disposable income than adults — folks who have mortgages, car payments, and credit card bills to think about, not to mention the cost of providing disposable income to the younger generation!
If that disposable income is available, why wouldn’t you want to tap into it? Most Web site owners do feel that urge, so they’ve created mobile-friendly Web sites that allow cell phone-enabled Internet users to access their content whether those visitors are sitting on the bus or climbing the Rocky Mountains. Of course, with mobile Web sites, Google will find a way to monetize these mobile-friendly sites.
Enter Google AdSense for Mobile, which is a program that allows you to put ads on your Web site that can be displayed on mobile browsers. Visitors surfing your site with a mobile phone can see and click these ads, and you can earn some bucks even in this smaller format.
Trying to harvest a bit of cash from mobile users does require some changes to your Web site, though, and it also requires that you scale down some AdSense strategies. Think small, in other words, but don’t freak. Thinking small doesn’t require too much retooling. This page contains what you need to know to target those mobile surfers and add another stream to your AdSense revenues.
The Differences of Mobility
Nearly half of all mobile Internet users use mobile Web sites only to find tidbits of immediately useful information. Mobile surfers don’t usually surf just for the fun of being on the Internet — they save major surfing for when they can sit at a computer and see pages displayed more than a few words at a time. In part, that’s because mobile Web sites are usually pretty poorly
designed still, despite the fact that the mobile Web has been around for awhile now. It’s hard to get the hang of how a Web site should appear on a cell phone screen. Many Web site owners make the mistake of designing their Web site for the computer screen and then enabling it for mobile phones without changing site design. You can do that, but the results won’t be the most
useful site a mobile surfer comes across.
Enabling your site for mobile users is easy — for the most part. In most cases, it requires a small switch in the encoding of your Web site from HTML (HyperText Markup Language) to XHTML (eXtensible HyperText Markup Language) or another mobile-enabled Web design language.
Some mobile applications, however, require PHP — hypertext processor (I have no clue how the popular acronym gained the first P). PHP is a serverside processing language because scripts (or applications) are run from the server rather than from the computer that the application appears on. This makes it much easier to have rich programming on Web sites, which doesn’t
depend on the computer a visitor may be using.
Because of the way it works, PHP makes creating rich, detailed mobile Web sites a much easier process. The cool part is that if you have a Web site written in HTML or XHTML, changing it to PHP is often as easy as changing the extension of the files that make up the site from .htm to .php. Really. Well, okay, it sounds easy enough. Now for a reality check — I’ve seriously
oversimplified the considerations that go into creating mobile Web sites. The fact remains that if your site is built for display on a computer screen, mobile users won’t have the same experience. For example, Figure J1 shows how a list of links might look on a mobile Web page. Keep in mind that there’s no mouse on a mobile phone, so users have to scroll through every link on the
page until they get to the one they want to follow.
Figure J1
Simply changing the extension on an existing site built for the Internet also doesn’t do justice to the pages that display on mobile phones. Much of the graphics and functionality of the site is lost during the translation to a mobile format, so while the extension change allows you to quickly enable the text and links on your site for mobility, it doesn’t make the site pretty or even
completely useful.
The hardware restraints faced by most mobile users also create serious issues. You have to go into creating a Web site with the thought of making it available to the largest audience possible. That’s just a fact of mobile life, and as more and more mobile adoptions take place, the mobile surfer is more of a consideration. That means making your site friendly for both mobile and nonmobile surfers.
Mobile content is different
When you’re considering a mobile surfer as part of the audience for your site, keep in mind the different uses for the mobile Web. Google has done a lot of research in this area and has defined three types of mobile surfers:
* Repetitive Now: This is the group of mobile surfers who have a set of online activities that they conduct from their phones on a regular basis. Some of the repetitive tasks these surfers perform are checking the weather, reading news stories and blog posts, and checking stock quotes.
* Bored Now: The Bored Now group of Web surfers have a few minutes of downtime and don’t know what else to do in such a short amount of time. Out comes the phone, and the Web browser is opened to occupy their minds for just a few minutes. This type of mobile surfer is probably
the most targeted because this is the only area where true e-commerce dollars can be captured. Bored Now surfers are selecting ringtones, downloading videos, and adding themes to their phones.
* Urgent Now: “We need it right now” is the motto of this group of mobile surfers. These people are booking, changing, or checking airline flights, booking hotel rooms, finding directions, or locating restaurants. They need information now, so they pull out their phones to find it.
As you consider these three types of mobile surfers, think about which group you’re targeting because the group determines whether AdSense ads will even be acknowledged by these users. The Repetitive Now group and the Bored Now group might click your ads. Unless there’s something very compelling about them, the Urgent Now group is likely to pass right by an ad and go straight for the information they seek.
Mobile requirements
Mobile content is definitely different from the content that you find on other Web pages, and because it is, participation in AdSense for Mobile has some different requirements. Obviously, the Web site must be mobile-compliant, but it also must be developed with a server-side scripting language, such as PHP. If you’re not sure what PHP is, check out “The Differences of Mobility” section earlier in this page to find out more about it.
If your mobile site isn’t developed with a server-side scripting language, AdSense for Mobile ad code doesn’t display properly on your pages. The code generated for AdSense for Mobile doesn’t render properly on a normal Web site, either, so don’t generate the code thinking that you can fool Google into believing that you’re supporting mobile Web sites. All you’ll wind up doing is
generating an obvious error that your site visitors can see.
Here are some of the mobile Web page markup languages that can be used to program your Web site and still have mobile ads enabled:
* WML (WAP 1.x): WML, or wireless markup language, is a programming language that’s based on XML (eXtensible Markup Language) and is designed specifically for creating Web sites and applications for mobile devices.
* XHTML (WAP 2.0): eXtensible HyperText Markup Language is an intersection of HTML and XML, meaning that it’s useful for both normal Web sites and mobile Web sites.
* CHTML (imode): Compact HTML is an alternative to WML and XHTML, but it was designed specifically for Japanese cell phones and even more specifically for one manufacturer’s products — the Japanese company DoCoMo — and the imode phone designation just indicates an Internet
enabled device. So this isn’t a markup language that has a wide usage outside Japan.
I know this is all pretty complicated, but it really is necessary to program your mobile Web site using a supported mobile scripting language if you want your site to be both functional and useful. Users aren’t likely to return to a site that’s nothing more than text and links. If you plan to have a mobile site, you should make it as functional and useful as possible. If you want to
find out more about mobile scripting languages, check out Next Generation Wireless Applications: Creating Mobile Applications in a Web 2.0 and Mobile 2.0 World, by Paul Golding (Wiley Publishing), or Wireless Markup Language (WML) Scripting and Programming Using WML, cHTML, and xHTML, by William Routt (Althos Publishing).
In the preceding list, there’s another abbreviation that I haven’t explained yet — WAP. Wireless application protocol is a standard that’s used to simplify how a browser sees a Web site so that mobile browsers can access the Internet. The protocol is automatically built into the programming language that you’re using to create your mobile Web site. So WML sites automatically adhere to the protocol WAP 1.0 and higher. XHTML is designed to work with
the protocol WAP 2.0 and higher.
In addition to the actual software language requirements that AdSense sets forth, ad placement, behavior, and accessibility guidelines are as follows:
* You can display only one ad unit per mobile Web page.
* A double ad unit — an ad unit that displays two different advertisers’ links — can be placed only on the bottom of the page but can be located above the page’s footer (including navigational links and copyright messages).
* Ads displayed on a mobile Web page may not be modified or obscured in any way.
* After an ad has been clicked, the landing page display may not be interrupted or prevented in any way. For instance, you can’t display any other pages — including other advertisements — before taking users to the advertiser’s Web site.
* The Google crawlers must be able to access your mobile Web sites for targeting purposes. If the crawler can’t access your site, ads won’t be displayed on your mobile pages.
If you’re truly interested in creating a mobile Web site and you have content that will support mobile users, monetize the site as much as possible. These guidelines help you to do just that — put the right content in front of mobile surfers so you can take advantage of mobile ad revenues. That process is only slightly different than the one used for setting up AdSense for Content.
Setting Up AdSense for Mobile
Okay, the technical mumbo-jumbo is out of the way. I don’t claim that what you’ve read so far in this webpage is everything there is to know about understanding mobile programming languages and protocols, and creating mobile Web sites. This is an AdSense book and it doesn’t cover everything mobile. If you want to know more about creating mobile Web sites, check out Mobile
Internet For Dummies, by John R. Levine, Michael J. O’Farrell, and Jostein Algroy (Wiley Publishing). If you really want the whole nine yards, go for Nirav Mehta’s Mobile Web Development. It’s technically dense, but you’ll find everything you need to know in it.
Setting up AdSense for Mobile is a lot like setting up AdSense for Content. The differences are all related to the mobile platform and are easy enough to navigate. You have to tell the AdSense folks which programming language — or a markup language (or just markup for short) — you used for your site. You also have to tell AdSense which character encoding you used for the site.
Character encoding happens when you combine one set of characters with some other indicator, such as numbers or integers. Morse code is probably one of the best known sets of character encoding because it combines letters of the Latin alphabet with dots and dashes that are used in telegraphy. The result is that a set of dots and dashes (or depressions) can be sent with a telegraph machine and then decoded to represent the characters they represent.
In other words, with a telegraph, you could send messages from one place to another.
Character encoding for Web sites works basically the same way. Characters are encoded with some numerical system. Then, the Web browser can decode those characters to ensure that they’re displayed properly. In most cases, UTF-8 is the most commonly used character encoding for U.S. Web sites.
I’m jumping just a little ahead of the game here. To begin creating your mobile ads, first log in to your AdSense account. Then use these steps to create the ad:
1. Click the Get Ads link on the AdSense Setup tab. The Get Ads page appears.
2. On the Get Ads page, select the AdSense for Mobile Content link, as shown in Figure J2.
The AdSense for Mobile Content Wizard appears, ready to walk you through the process of setting up mobile ads (see Figure J3).
3. In the Format section of the wizard, use the drop-down menu to select the type of ad you want to display on your Web site. You have two options: Single or Double. Single shows the link to one advertiser whereas Double shows the links to two, but the ads are stacked one on top of the other. Mobile text ads contain 24–36 characters of text depending on the language in which the ad is written, followed by a destination URL if advertisers choose to enter one. Advertisers also have the option to allowcustomers to directly connect to their business phones by placing a Call link next to the destination URL. If the Call link appears, visitors can click the link to initiate a call to the advertiser.
Figure J2
Figure J3
4. In the Markup section of the wizard, use the drop-down menu to select the markup language used to create your mobile Web site. Your choices are WML, XHTML, and CHTML. If you’re not sure what these are, flip to the discussion about them earlier in this webpage in the
“Mobile requirements” section.
5. In the Character Encoding section of the wizard, use the drop-down menu to select the character encoding for your Web site.If you’re not sure what character encoding is used on your site, AdSense gives you the option to Auto-Detect encoding. Make sure that option is selected.
6. In the Colors section of the wizard, use the color palettes to choose colors for the various elements of your ads.As with AdSense for Content, you want your mobile ads to blend with the pages on which they appear. Use the Color Picker (that pretty colored box) next to each element to choose the color you want to use for that element. Alternatively, you can also enter the six-digit hexadecimal number in the text box provided to further customize colors if the one you want to use isn’t available in the Color Picker. However, you should know there are some markup languages — like WML and CHTML — that don’t allow color customization, so your ads are displayed in the default Google palette if you’re using one of these languages.
7. Click Continue. You’re taken to the next page in the wizard, where you have the option
of selecting or creating specific channels to track your mobile ads. Remember, channels are simply tracking tools that help you visualize how ads are performing. You can add a channel to your ad, and then when you look at your AdSense reports, you can immediately see how
one channel of ads performs over another.
8. In the new wizard page, use the drop-down menu to select a channel — or click the Add New Channel link to add a new one — and then click Continue. You’re taken to the Get Code page of the wizard.In this last page of the wizard, you see one major difference from the AdSense for Content routine. Check out Figure J4, where you can see a Server-Side Scripting Language drop-down menu right above the box that contains the code for your ad.
9. In the Server-Side Scripting Language drop-down menu, choose the language that was used during the creation of your Web site. The code changes to reflect the option that you select.
10. Copy and paste the code into your mobile Web site. Paste the ad code into your mobile site in the same way you paste the code into a regular Web site. Find the location on the site where you
want the ad to appear and paste the code there. Remember, however, that it can take up to 48 hours for ads to start appearing on your pages.
Figure J4
Just as you can with content ads, you can filter your mobile ads to prevent your competitors from advertising on your mobile site. To filter a site, go to the AdSense Setup tab and select the Competitive Ad Filter link. After the
Competitive Ad Filter page loads, select the AdSense for Mobile Content tab and enter the URLs that you want filtered. Enter one URL per line. When you’re finished, click the Save Changes button below the text box.
Earning with AdSense for Mobile
The AdSense way of doing things is pretty much the same across all ad formats — visitor clicks ad, you get money. Mobile ads do have one wrinkle that you haven’t seen in other types of ads, though, and that’s the Click to Call link. This link allows visitors to click the link and place a call to the advertiser. It’s a cool feature, but one that might leave you wondering how you’ll get paid for that. Truth is that this link works just like any other link in an ad. You get paid for
mobile ads whenever your site visitors click the ad links. That includes the Click to Call link. Like other types of AdSense ads, the amount of payment is determined by the payments that advertisers make when their ads are displayed. It’s a formula that Google keeps closely guarded, but it works the same as AdSense for Content and other types of AdSense. Advertisers bid for
the right to have their ads shown. Then, each time the ad is shown, Google gets paid whatever that winning bid amount is. In turn, Google then gives a percentage of what it is paid to you, the Web site owner who publishes the ad. But how much is the exact percentage? Google is pretty tight-lipped about it.
You can track your AdSense for Mobile earnings on the Reports page, which is the first page you encounter when you sign in to your AdSense account. Included here is a category for AdSense for Mobile Content that shows page impressions, clicks, click-through-rates, effective cost-per-thousand impressions, and earnings. Like other reports, you can show these numbers by day,
week, month, or all the time. Mobile Web sites, and by extension mobile ads, aren’t for everyone. You may not have a Web site that’s appropriate for (or is even of interest to) mobile surfers. That’s a call you have to make.
If your site does lend itself to the mobile lifestyle, however, consider AdSense for Mobile. It’s one way to monetize your mobile efforts — and although the revenues that you generate for mobile ads might not be enough to pay the mortgage or the payment on that shiny new car you rushed out and bought when you were approved to display AdSense ads, it might add a little to the
revenue streams that you’re building. In my book, every little bit helps.
