Consumers’ expectations for faster and better digital experiences are on the rise. The mobile web is no exception. But the thrill of the hunt, whether it’s researching the best hotel deals for spring break or buying a new pair of sneakers, is often hindered by slow mobile sites.Read More

Consumers’ expectations for faster and better digital experiences are on the rise. The mobile web is no exception. But the thrill of the hunt, whether it’s researching the best hotel deals for spring break or buying a new pair of sneakers, is often hindered by slow mobile sites.

We’ve all been there: eagerly anticipating a mobile site to load and then abandoning it out of frustration. It’s a challenge most businesses struggle with. In fact, 53% of visits are abandoned if a mobile site takes more than three seconds to load, according to Google data from 2016.¹

See how you stack up

This morning at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, we introduced the mobile Speed Scorecard: an easy-to-use tool that allows you to compare your mobile speed with other companies’.²

The Speed Scorecard shows the speeds of thousands of sites from 12 countries across the globe. It's powered by Chrome User Experience Report, the largest database of real-user latency data for how Chrome users experience popular destinations on the web.³

Here’s a sample scorecard:

* Fictitious companies used

When it comes to mobile speed, we recommend that a site loads and becomes usable within five seconds on mid-range mobile devices with 3G connections and within three seconds on 4G connections. But there's a lot to gain by taking small steps to improve your site speed - even a one second improvement could increase conversions.

Calculate your opportunity

A slow mobile site doesn’t just frustrate your customers, it can limit your business. In retail, we see that for every one second delay in page load time, conversions can fall by up to 20%.⁴ That’s why we also introduced the Impact Calculator.⁵ With just a few inputs, the tool estimates the revenue impact that could result from improving the speed of your mobile site.⁶ See how much more you stand to gain by reducing load time by two seconds versus one second.

Open up the toolbox

At the end of the day, speed matters; and we want to help. Here are some of the other products and resources we recently introduced to help you speed up your mobile experience:

• Check out the “Landing Pages” page in the new AdWords experience to see which URLs in your account are mobile-friendly, which ones drive the most sales, and which ones may require your attention. 
• Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) are so fast, they appear to load instantly. Today your Search campaigns can already drive clicks to these lightning fast pages. And, now, we’re actively working to expand support for Shopping campaigns to ensure a faster and more seamless shopping experience for customers. 
• Later this year, AdWords will begin processing click measurement requests in the background so your customers won't have to wait quite as long for your landing page to load. To ensure your campaigns are ready for parallel tracking, be sure to reach out to your third-party measurement provider and confirm they're compatible or preparing for the change. 

What should you do now?

When you’re ready to speed up your mobile site, here are a few tips to get started:

1. Meet with your organization’s web development team to diagnose mobile latency issues
2. Review this basic checklist of ways to optimize your mobile site 
3. If you want more advanced recommendations, work with your web development team to implement these user experience guidelines 

You can also learn more about the Speed Scorecard and Impact Calculator, and find other helpful tools and best practices for speeding up, on Think with Google.

Posted by Jon Diorio, Group Product Manager, Google Ads

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1. Google Data, Aggregated, anonymized Google Analytics data from a sample of mWeb sites opted into sharing benchmark data, n=3.7K, Global, March 2016
2, 3, 6. There is more than one way to measure mobile site speed and many factors affect mobile site speed. Improving mobile speed doesn’t guarantee revenue increases. This model is based on data from Google Analytics accounts that have chosen to share anonymous aggregated data with Google for benchmarking purposes. This data is not used in the Speed Scorecard. n=383K, Global, Jan 2017 - December 2017
4. SOASTA, The State of Online Retail Performance, US, April 2017
5. The Impact Calculator was built for all businesses and was inspired by the DoubleClick Publisher Revenue Calculator, a tool to help publishers understand the impact of mobile site speed on ad revenue.

As more consumers come online around the world, there’s more opportunity than ever for marketers to reach potential customers beyond your borders. In fact, research shows that customers aren’t concerned about where a business is based as long as they’re happy with the product or service. For example, 96% of people didn't know that Booking.com is from the Netherlands, and of these, 90% said this wouldn't affect the likelihood of their buying from the company again.Read More

As more consumers come online around the world, there’s more opportunity than ever for marketers to reach potential customers beyond your borders. In fact, research shows that customers aren’t concerned about where a business is based as long as they’re happy with the product or service. For example, 96% of people didn't know that Booking.com is from the Netherlands, and of these, 90% said this wouldn't affect the likelihood of their buying from the company again.¹

To get started, check out our Official Guide to Expanding Internationally with AdWords. This four-step guide outlines best practices and free resources that can help advertisers find more customers in new countries.

There are many tools and resources for businesses looking to expand. For example, Market Finder is a powerful tool built with insights from Google Search to prioritize the best markets for your business based on search volumes in your category, ease of doing business, consumer purchasing power, and more. It’s available in the US, UK, and China, with more countries on the way in 2018. Another resource is Consumer Barometer, which helps advertisers learn about consumer preferences and trends. Did you know that clothing, books, cosmetics, and computer hardware/software are the products most often purchased online from abroad?² Last but not least, tap into the Go Global Community for the latest research on emerging market trends, conversations with international market specialists, and updates on new ads innovations. Companies from around the world have grown their businesses with these tools. For example:

Kabam is a leading provider of mobile games, including Marvel Contest of Champions with over 130M downloads. To expand its game into Japan, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, Kabam used insights from consumer gaming trends and video engagement from each market to localize its Search and YouTube campaigns. As a result, the game reached top 10 in download charts for its category on both iOS and Android in target APAC markets.

French DIY website ManoMano offers two million products from 750 sellers, including electrical, hardware, furniture and tools. The DIY market is highly seasonal and constantly changing -- customers love gardening and outdoor activities in warm seasons and indoor projects during the winter. ManoMano predicted these purchase patterns, understood consumer trends in each market, and engaged customers with timely, localized campaigns. As a result, its sales more than doubled in 2016, and ManoMano now has nearly 2 million customers across Europe, with localized websites in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the UK.

It’s more important than ever for businesses, large and small, to think beyond borders with our Guide to Expanding Internationally. It’s a small world, after all.
Posted by Jay Bowden, Industry Director

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1. UK Google Consumer Surveys, 2014
2. The Consumer Barometer Survey 2014/15

Google is often the first stop for sports fans, music lovers, and theater goers looking for tickets and information about upcoming events, shows and concerts. We strive to connect these folks with relevant and accurate results, and are committed to delivering the best possible user experience.Read More

Google is often the first stop for sports fans, music lovers, and theater goers looking for tickets and information about upcoming events, shows and concerts. We strive to connect these folks with relevant and accurate results, and are committed to delivering the best possible user experience.

Many venues sell tickets directly and some use resellers to help, making it easy to get the seats you want. Unfortunately, some ticket resellers provide limited transparency in their ads about ticket costs and fees, as well as their association with a specific venue or event. Lack of transparency can erode trust in the online ticket ecosystem and makes it harder for legitimate businesses to reach customers.

We only want companies that offer a great user experience on our platform. Effective today, we are tightening our standards and will require all event ticket resellers to be certified and to radically increase their transparency. This will give users more clarity on the vendor reselling the tickets and the total cost of those tickets, including any associated fees.

To be certified by Google, an event ticket reseller must:

• Not imply that they are a primary marketplace
• Prominently disclose themselves as a ticket reseller/secondary marketplace
• Prominently disclose that prices may be above face value
• Provide the total and breakup of the price across fees and taxes before requiring payment information
• Prominently provide the face value of the tickets being sold in the same currency (this will be required starting in March 2018)

This updated policy is a result of our own research as well as the insights and feedback we gathered from users, advertisers, partners and third-party industry groups. To allow advertisers time to prepare for this change, we issued a change to our AdWords policy page in November 2017.

According to Charlotte St. Martin, president of The Broadway League, “Google’s dramatic step in consumer protection is of major significance to The League’s membership. We strongly support requiring brokers who advertise Broadway tickets on its platform to disclose when they are unaffiliated with an official box-office and itemize costs before collecting payment.”

Transparency, trust and safety for our users will always be top priorities for Google. We remain dedicated to ensuring that the ads our users see are helpful, relevant and trustworthy.

Posted by David Graff, Senior Director, Trust & Safety, Global Product Policy