Targeting Users With Your Facebook App

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If your company has a Facebook app, and considering the increasing benefits you should strongly consider having one, it can now help to target your audience.

Brittany Darwell reports for Inside Facebook that the way users interact with your app can be used as a part of ‘Custom Audiences’, called App User IDs, to make a group to target. Users don’t even need to register through Facebook, or with an email or phone number.

Currently, App User IDs are only available for iOS developers, but the expansion to Android is expected soon.

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Video Ads Coming To Facebook

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Facebook reportedly began gauging the interest of advertisers in video ad units about 6-months ago and now, as Ginny Marvin reports for Marketing Land, they appear ready to roll out video ads to newsfeeds by July.

The video ads are expected to be available for all platforms, desktop, tablet and smartphones, and at a lower CPM for broadcast television ads. However, detractors have already started wondering aloud how users will react to more ads in their newsfeed. Especially a concern about how autoplay videos will effect the site’s load times, especially for smartphone users.

Advertisers will certainly be clamoring for the ad space in the early going, but we’ll wait and see if it becomes a proven commodity.

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One-Click App Downloads With AdWords

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Did you know there are more than 700-thousand mobile apps for Android or iPhone? How about that the mobile app industry was valued at an estimated $30-billion in 2012? Those are pretty astounding numbers and they suggest that, if you haven’t already gotten into the app game, you should do so soon.

Now, Google is making it easy to find and download your app too with the introduction of a “click to download” ad template in AdWords. It’s part of the “Enhanced Campaigns” you’ve been hearing so much about. Mobile users can download an app with a single click from search listings. iPhone and Android users only, however, as currently, Blackberry and Microsoft are being left out.

Head over to Business2Community where Larry Kim has the particulars on how to set up your mobile app ad in AdWords.

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Why Responsive Design Is Winning The Mobile SEO Debate

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Source: WikiCommons

Source: WikiCommons

It is no secret how important a mobile SEO strategy is in today’s market, especially with predictions coming out stating mobile internet usage will overtake desktop internet usage in the next year.

Eventually, mobile search could catch up to desktop search, and users aren’t just staying on any website they find. Two-thirds of consumers say they are more likely to purchase from a website that has a mobile-friendly website, and more than a few survey has shown how low-quality sites or long load times repel searchers like a disease.

You probably knew all this. The debate over the importance of a mobile SEO strategy is over. The real question for most web designer’s is how do I achieve a mobile-friendly website? You have two options: a responsive web design, or an entirely separate mobile website.

There are pros and cons to both methods of course, but gradually it appears responsive designs are winning, especially when SEO is a factor. Jay Taylor, writer for Search Engine Watch, breaks down three reasons why responsive design seems to be taking the lead.

The biggest reason stems from a big endorsement from Google. It is an SEO professional’s job to please the almighty Google, since they command more searches than all of the other engines combined, and Google loves responsive design so much they called it the best practice for the industry.

Google’s preference for responsive design is likely because responsive sites have one URL and the same source code, regardless of how it is viewed, which makes the site easier for Google to crawl and contextualize. Separate mobile sites, on the other hand, have separate URLs and HTML, which complicates everything for the search engine.

Further more, content on responsive sites is easier for users to interact with and share than content that is separated between different websites. If that seems weird, imagine what happens when you get a link over Facebook from a friend who was on their phone. If you open that link on your desktop, you might get sent to a stripped-down mobile website if they use the separate website method.

When Google recommends a method for achieving your mobile SEO strategy, it is always best to do as they say, but there are other reasons responsive design is slowly taking over the search market. It allows a more uniform experience across devices, and makes managing your entire strategy easier. Everyone likes their work to be easy right?

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Familiarize Yourself With Enhanced Campaigns

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For the past couple of weeks, you may have been hearing a lot about AdWords newest endeavor, ‘Enhanced Campaigns’. They are reportedly starting as an added option but the idea is to make them a more integral part of AdWords in just a couple short months.

Daniel James wrote an article at Bit that explains a little about the added features of enhanced campaigns and how you might utilize them. Most exciting is the ability to link to different versions of your site based on what device a user is currently on when they click your ad and a function that identifies whether your store is open at the time an ad is clicked.

The new features seem to be geared toward directing customers to what they are searching for, while you spend less per conversion. These all seem like good things for everyone involved.

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AdWords Looks To Increase Mobile Revenue

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Smartphone

AdWords’ cost-per-click has fallen over the last five quarters. Perhaps that’s why there recent efforts have been to enhance their keyword advertising with respects to mobile users.

As Steven Musil reports for CNet, Google’s AdWords Enhanced Campaign seeks to simplify advertiser’s experience when dealing with multiple device platforms. As with most advertising platforms, there is still a mystery surrounding how to get mobile users, on tablets and smart phones, to click ads the way desktop and laptop users will.

The AdWords Enhanced Campaign also includes ad copy, links and extensions for mobile optimized ads. Ideally, this is an update that helps both advertisers and Google without sacrificing user experience, but that may be too idealistic to hope for.

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Mobile Design Misconceptions Debunked

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In just a few years, mobile browsing has gone from laughably tedious to one of the fastest growing ways we access the internet. With that meteoric rise to popularity comes misunderstandings thanks to generalizations, but the reality of mobile browsing is much more complex.

Karolina Szczur wades through the misconceptions about mobile browsing and design, attempting to clarify the truth about mobile design and show how believing these inherently false ideas leads to designs that don’t really work for the current web.

The biggest misconception is that mobile is well-defined or even monolithic. This isn’t helped by most articles which suggest tips for mobile design which lump all devices, browsers, and even tablets all into one category. It is easy to forget when we write about mobile browsing like this, that ‘mobile’ doesn’t actually refer to the handheld devices. It it refers to the user, according to Barbara Ballard, author of Designing the Mobile User Experience.

Focusing on devices when designing for mobile misses the more important factors surrounding users. Context defines more of what mobile users are doing than their devices. The most wide-held view of mobile users focuses on out-and-about shopping, but studies have shown that 70% of Americans use their phones in the bathroom, and just as many use them while sitting on the sofa, away from their desktop.

The usual decision when thinking about mobile users as “on the go” is to streamline everything on a site, but this forgets that mobile users are often trying to perform complicated transactions or reach full length articles from areas where a desktop isn’t feasible.

This monolithic attitude about mobile browsing also leads people to think that mobile browsing is dominated by Apple devices. While those with iOS devices are the most high profile smartphones and tablets, Google owns roughly 53% of the smartphone market in the US.

The difference is, Apple uses one standard device, whereas Google’s smartphones are spread across a vast array of Android devices with wildly different display sizes. Designing just for Apple is actually designing for less than half of the market out there, and ignores the huge variances available. When you then include the number of browsers available on smartphones and tablets, designing strictly thinking about Apple’s Safari browser is focusing on just a small share of users.

These are just two of the wide-held misconceptions about mobile browsing, and they spawn from generalizations meant to make the field of mobile browsing seem digestable, but it ignores every big of fact available. The reason for the huge boom in responsive design over the past year is a reaction to just this problem, and it serves a strong solution. Mobile browsing is anything but singular, and design now has to take into consideration the hugely different ways we all browse.

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Facebook Mobile Ads: A Growing Trend

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Facebook mobile has allowed ads for less than a year, but they’ve put a lot of effort into making it an effective platform. Now they are seeing the benefits of that, as 20% of the ad buys on Facebook are for the mobile format.

The price of the mobile ads are significantly higher than their desktop counterpart, but they are worth it considering their higher visibility due to mobile showing only one ad at a time.

Head over to TechCrunch to check out the full story on the growing platform of Facebook’s mobile ads. If you haven’t already gotten started, you may want to consider allocating some of your ad budget there.

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What Is The Device-Agnostic Approach To Design?

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If you look at the tags for most articles on responsive design, you will notice the way most writers connect responsive design to mobile design. Thinking of responsive design as a mobile design method kind of misses the point however.

When Ethan Marcotte first coined the term ‘responsive design’, he wrote, “responsive design is not about ‘designing for mobile’. But it’s not about ‘designing for the desktop’, either. Rather, it’s about adopting a more flexible, device-agnostic approach to designing for the web.”

So what exactly is device-agnosticism? It is the main selling point of responsive design. The device-agnostic approach to design is designing for every device at the same time, or focusing on no specific device. PC Magazine defines it simply as saying the approach is “not tied to a particular device.”

I won’t say more about the benefits of thinking agnostically about devices, as it is already covered in just about every article I’ve done about responsive design. But, what I will say is I made the same mistake many have by slipping responsive design under the idea of mobile design. Thinking that way still focuses on the needs of devices. Instead, as Sarita Harbour from Web Designer Depot, explains, you should stop thinking about the needs of devices, and start thinking about the needs of the consumer. Isn’t that what is most important anyways?

 

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Left Nav Flyouts Don’t Work, Please Stop Using Them

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Mobile navigation can be difficult because you are forced to condense everything your site or app offers into a simple list or set of buttons. For the iPhone, three naviagational patterns rose up that are fairly good solutions to the problems of mobile navigation. You have the tab bar, the table view (like Messages or Mail), and the card stack, like what you find in Weather.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t designers trying other navigational solutions. Some of the more experimental ways to move around apps and sites work great, but there are some that just don’t work. Facebook’s mobile left nav flyout pattern is a perfect example of a mobile navigation system that should be gotten rid of.

Brent Jackson agrees that Facebook’s navigation system needs to be replaced, and argues why on his Tumblr page. More than anything, the issue I have with the system is it hides a lot of the functionality the app offers under small, hard to tap buttons.

As Jackson points out, the left nav flyout is also innefficient. While normally you have a small set of buttons always available to help you get where you want to be, Facebook makes you continuously wait for new lists or areas of the app to load. It becomes very tedious to do anything except look at the News Feed.

If you can think of times when a lefy nav flyout works, I’m all ears. There are none that work for me, or wouldn’t benefit from another site navigation system.

 

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