Monetizing mobile traffic ain’t no joke. More website traffic than ever is coming from mobile devices, while ad revenues lag behind. One of the solutions to this challenge for publishers is pagination. But only if you do it right.
When it comes to ads, size matters. As a webmaster balancing ad visibility and content, you know this well. So it’s no wonder mobile advertising is so hard. There’s just so little room for ads on that tiny screen. Not to mention the difficulties in targeting on a cookie-less platform. They hurt advertisers as well as publishers.
Mobile monetization is hard. Even large, data driven publishers are having a difficult time monetizing their mobile traffic. And there’s no lack of creative mobile monetization solutions out there. You can create an app that is a paid mobile magazine version of your website without the ads. You can experiment with various mobile-centric ad networks. But still mobile monetization gives many AdOps the creepy crawlies. All that being said, we still recommend you take example from companies like Forbes and Google, and paginate your stuff.
Welcome to the Pagination NationSo what is this pagination I speak of? Well, if you’re not familiar with the term, I’ll save you the Googling. Pagination is a term from the world of book publishing, that set a trend for the way we consume content. When you take a large piece of content and split it into smaller numbered bits, readers have an easier time digesting it. Even if there is no technical limitation forcing you to split the content into multiple pages. On the mobile screen, pagination has other major advantages.
Mobile connections are about as stable as a teenaged pop-star’s emotional state. And they become slow and ineffective in areas with bad signal reception (much like said teenaged pop-stars). If your content is too heavy to load fast, users will just click back and choose to browse elsewhere. This is especially true for graphic heavy content like image galleries. By dividing content into several pages, you can make sure it loads and displays faster. And if the connection dies and the user clicks back? They end up on the previous page of your site. And continue browsing to the next page when connectivity returns.
Responsive is just not enough. One of the most annoying experiences for me, personally, when browsing on my mobile? When I get a phone-call, then try to go back to the article I was reading, and I have no idea where I was. The browser forgets my position in the long page, and I have to scroll and scroll and scroll until I find where I was. Sometimes I just give up and move on. It’s much easier for me to read long texts on my mobile in “chapters” across several pages. If the navigation is comfortable, of course.
Another thing many publishers tend to ignore on mobile is design below the fold. The more you scroll, the less friendly and comfortable the layout looks. By using single page interfaces and minimizing scrolling, you make your website mobile-friendly. Not just responsive.
Google AdSense limit you to a maximum of two ads per page on mobile. Other networks have even stricter limitations. So you don’t need to be a math genius to figure it out. If you have 1,200 words of content you can put 2 ads on it, you can only get so many views or clicks on that tiny mobile screen. If you split those 1,200 words into 4 chunks of 300 words, you just quadrupled your inventory for a single item of content. Simple math. This is especially true with CPM models, where you get paid per view.
Many publishers do this not only on mobile, but on their desktop website too. A good example is Forbes. They tend to split 1,000 word articles into two pieces, basically doubling their number of hits and pageviews.
With galleries this is even more extreme. Instead of 10 images with some text on one page, you can now have 10 pages in a slideshow.
No math or magic here. More clicks inside your property means longer sessions and lower bounce-rate. And we all know how important those are, and why.
I am not the only one in favor of well-executed pagination. Google has been recommending it to webmasters for years. According to the Google Webmaster blog, search-friendly pagination makes indexing easier for the Googlebot. In addition, by splitting a post into parts, you can target different keywords with each page. This is not only great for SEO, but for contextual advertising as well. And contextual advertising is especially important on mobile, where there are less options for remarketing ads.
Enjoy the full article with more advice and tips
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