Grow your multi-screen audience with Google Play Newsstand

If you have a news, sports, lifestyle, entertainment or other article-based site, target a growing mobile audience with Google Play Newsstand. Google Play Newsstand gives users the opportunity to discover more of the content they love in one place, and enables you to reach users through your own customizable Newsstand edition.

Use Google Play Newsstand Producer to create your edition and deliver your content to more mobile users. This tool allows you to customize the look and feel of your content, add branding, and set up ads and subscription streams for your Newsstand edition. Once your edition is live, share it with your users so they can subscribe and enjoy your content online or offline. Your users can share your content with others and bookmark articles they find relevant and interesting.

It's easy to get started, first sign up for Google Play Newsstand Producer and then create your edition.

We'd love to hear from you, tell us in the comments section below this post about your favorite content distribution strategies.

Posted by Jay Castro - Audience Development Specialist
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Live Google Hangout: Using Google Analytics to build a better gaming app

As smartphone and tablet usage continues to grow, many publishers consider exploring the growing app space. According to Gartner, more than 130 billion apps will be downloaded onto phones and tablets by the end of 2014 and most of them will be free to users*. At the same time, revenue from apps is expected to grow by over 200% in the next 4 years**. We're moving away from a paid apps model to an era of free apps with incremental payments.

In a world where users have lots of choice, understanding user behaviour within your app becomes key to success. Whether you're a budding app developer or you're just beginning to understand the different revenue models used by app developers, our live Hangout on Air can help. Register today for Analytics - It's a Game Changer taking place tomorrow September 17 2014, 10.00 a.m. PDT and learn:

• Why you should be measuring your users behavior; 
• Where to find the data that matters;
• How to measure the differences between highly-engaged and less engaged users; 
• When to use these insights to impact monetization positively.

If you can't join us live, please register anyway and we'll send you the recorded YouTube version by email.

Posted by Ciaran O Herlihy, Industry Manager - Gaming, Google

*Source: Gartner, September 2013
**Source: Gartner, January 2014

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Work with a vendor to improve your mobile user experience

Did you know you can hire a third-party vendor to help you build a multi-screen site? Our certified vendor partners are helping AdSense publishers like you create and optimize mobile sites, giving users a better experience regardless of the device they're using.

If you don't have the time or expertise to build a mobile site, working with one of our certified vendors can be an easy way to ensure that your users have a great mobile experience. These vendors offer a broad range of services for building a mobile site, ranging from simple to highly customizable solutions.

Regardless of the complexity of your site and the resources available to you in-house, there's a vendor to suit your needs. You'll find more information about certified vendors in the Multi-screen guidelines section of our Help Center.

Posted by Wibe van de Vijver - Inside AdSense Team
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Google AdSense answers multi-screen FAQs

We recently opened a new category called Going Multi-Screen in the AdSense Help Forum* where you can post questions and share your experiences about multi-screen optimization. In today�s post, we will summarize the top five FAQs received to date. We hope you find these helpful.

1. Optimizing websites for multiple screens requires resources and commitment. Is it worth my time and investment?
   Yes, going multi-screen is worth your time and investment, although it's not always something you can accomplish in a day. Our research shows benefits to both monetization and user experience. On average, publishers with mobile-optimized sites can have 8% higher RPM and their site traffic grows twice as fast as non-optimized publishers.** Having a mobile-optimized site can also help you to improve time spent on site and bounce rate.
   
   Furthermore, since global advertiser spending on mobile ads is expected to increase by 52% in 2015, you could benefit even more from this trend.***
   
   As Evan Britton, the founder of FamousBirthdays.com, said: The important thing to realize is that growth in the mobile market is all about offering a better experience the potential in the mobile space to grow ad revenue is huge. (find more publisher stories)
2. I'm planning to create a responsive website. How are responsive ad units performing? 
   
   We've found that responsive ad units generally perform better than normal ad units as they work in line with responsive layouts. This helps to improve the experience for your mobile users. We recommend using the smart sizing mode if you're just starting out, but there's also an advanced mode if you're looking to customize ad sizes on a more granular level. You can find code samples for the advanced mode in the Help Center.
3. What are the best practices for mobile site ad placement?
   
   The best ad placement will depend on your own site content and structure, but you can see our recommended placements for mobile sites below. We recommend that publishers use the large mobile banner (320x100) and medium rectangle (300 x250) sizes, which are high performing and fit nicely on your mobile screen.
4. What's the maximum number of ads allowed on mobile pages?
   
   You can place up to three content ad units per page on your mobile sites. This is the same number of ad units allowed on desktop sites. For smaller screens, carefully consider the balance of content and ads so that users can find the information they're looking for. Please avoid showing only ads on your first screen.
5. How can I improve the user experience on my mobile site?
   To check your mobile user experience, try the PageSpeed Insights tool and read the suggestions in the user experience section. For more detailed and technical approaches, we recommend you go through the Web Fundamentals resource on the Google Developers site. You'll learn more about how to deliver your content as quickly as possible, optimize images and videos, and improve the mobile experience for users. If you'd like to see some examples of good mobile site design, check out the white paper, Principles of Mobile Site Design.

Still have questions? Visit the forum and start a conversation with other publishers to learn multi-screen best practices.

* Currently only available in the English, Spanish and Japanese Forums
** Source -  Google internal data, please note that results may vary
*** Source - Global Ad Spending Growth to Double This Year, July 19, 2014 (digital advertising spending includes paid media spending on ads of any format delivered to any internet-connected device, mobile Internet ad spending includes display and search.)

Posted by Maiko Fujita - Multi-Screen Specialist
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Web Fundamentals and Web Starter Kit: Resources for modern web development

In recent years, mobile devices have brought the web to new users and introduced many new device capabilities, screen sizes, input methods, and more. To help publishers and developers navigate this new space, the Google Developers team recently built Web Fundamentals, a useful source for modern best practices aimed at web developers. We�ve also made it even easier to build multi-device experiences with the Beta release of the Web Starter Kit.

Whether you are creating a mobile site yourself or hiring a developer to create one for you, this resource will offer you useful guidelines to get started.

Web Fundamentals' guidelines are intended to be fundamental to the web platform: useful no matter which framework you choose or which browser your users run. The guidelines include a range of useful articles to help you build a site including articles focused on responsive layouts, forms, touch, and performance, just to name a few.

Inside Web Fundamentals you will find a web starter kit - a lightweight kit to help you or a developer get started with creating your mobile-optimized site. This kit is highly useful and includes helpful tools, including a visual style guide, that you can implement on your site.

Keep in mind, this content is pretty technical and is geared more towards web developers.  If you find the content to be too technical, we do offer a list of recommended vendors that can help you build a mobile-optimized site.

Keep an eye on this space moving forward. We will be updating the Web Fundamental guidelines with more content and resources in the future.

Posted by Matt Salisbury,  Multi-Screen Specialist
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This blog post was adapted from content originally posted on the The Chromium blog.

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Responsive web design gives FamousBirthdays.com a mobile advantage

Wondering which web design approach is best for mobile? Evan Britton of FamousBirthdays.com had the same question back in 2012. He looked to Google to help develop a mobile strategy for his website, deciding on responsive web design (RWD) as the best solution for his needs.

Evan chose RWD for a host of reasons, especially as it meant the site would adjust to fit various screen sizes, giving users a positive experience regardless of what device they visited from. Additionally, he liked that RWD is low maintenance once implemented, allowing him and his team to focus on growing the site.

Before implementing RWD, FamousBirthdays.com received around 100,000 mobile visits a month. After implementing a mobile-optimized site, this number grew to over 2 million. Evan believes that �the potential in the mobile space to grow ad revenue is huge�, and attributes this twenty-fold mobile growth to better user experience after implementing RWD. Today, the site employs a team of twelve to manage their fast growth. Evan claims, �without RWD, we would not have been able to grow as quickly.�

Read the full story, and hear from other publishers who have successfully adopted a multi-screen strategy, over in our Help Center.

Elise Thygesen, AdSense Multi-screen Specialist
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