Go Mobile with Google Affiliate Network: Publisher best practices

This is the second post in our ‘Go Mobile with Google Affiliate Network’ series. Today, we’ll focus on best practices to help publishers make the most of mobile in affiliate marketing.

We kicked off our blog series earlier this week with details on the importance of mobile for affiliate marketers. As publisher, you already understand the growing market in mobile e-commerce. Below we’ll share some insights to help you mobilize your website.

Optimize your website for mobile
Visitors to a mobile or tablet site may be at a different point of the purchase funnel than visitors to a desktop site, so it’s important to have an optimized site to match user intent and behavior. What’s more, optimizing for mobile may also help you increase your conversion rate through all of your marketing channels, including affiliate.

Before you get started, find out what percentage of your visitors are coming from mobile devices. Next, consider how your site might look to mobile users.

When building your website to support different devices, consider if you want to utilize responsive web design, or if you should create a separate mobile site. Once you’ve decided on a configuration, be sure to consider some of our additional best practices for mobile users: simplify your landing pages and use strong call-to-action language to attract mobile visitors.

You can simplify navigation by:

• Adding hierarchy and vertical scrolling to aid information access
• Be thumb-friendly by designing your site so even large hands can easily interact with it
• If applicable to your website, make your site local
• Avoid using flash, since not all mobile websites support it
• Minimize load times for the convenience of your mobile viewer
• Learn, listen and iterate by building your site with input from your audience

And, if you’re wondering whether to first create an app or a mobile site, build the site first as it will offer more cross-platform reach than apps. See our Help Center for more information on optimizing your mobile website.

Tell advertisers your website is optimized for mobile
Once you’ve optimized your site for mobile users, it's important to make sure advertisers are aware. You can easily update your Website description in your Publisher profile so advertisers that view your profile can see that your site is optimized for mobile.

Get mobile affiliate ads
We’ve made it easy to quickly access standard mobile ad sizes. You can find mobile affiliate ads by clicking the Links tab and using the Size filter to find standard mobile ad sizes. You can also get mobile ads using Link subscriptions and the Links API. See our Help Center for a list of standard ad sizes for Android, iOS, and other devices with full HTML browsers.

A publisher's experience with going mobile
Pageonce, a popular app to track your money and pay bills, uses affiliate marketing to show targeted offers. Pageonce finds that their "users are much more engaged and focused on their mobile device. They know what they want and they want to be done quickly and efficiently,” says Steve Schultz, the company's Chief Operating Officer. Over the past year, Pageonce has built a healthy mobile ad revenue stream through Google Affiliate Network. Steve shares some tips for mobile success: "Messages need to be tight – there’s no room for extra copy, landing pages need to be optimized for the mobile experiences and offers have to be relevant."

While these tips are a great starting point for optimizing your mobile site you can find more tips & best practices in our GoMo Guide for Publishers at howtogomo.com.

Posted by:
Emily Harris, Product Marketing Manager