A better mobile experience

Sridhar Ramaswamy, Google’s SVP for Ads and Commerce, spoke today at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting in Palm Desert, CA. Building on the theme of “The Next $50B,” Sridhar reinforced Google’s commitment to better mobile experiences in order to move the digital advertising industry forward.

A faster mobile experience

Half of all users tell us waiting for slow pages to load is their top frustration with mobile. Let’s face it, your mobile strategy is irrelevant if people don’t stick around waiting for your page to load. That’s the premise behind Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), an open-source technology we announced last October that any publisher can use to make their pages load instantly - and also integrate with any advertising partner. 

Sridhar provided an update on the work we’ve been doing with our partners since then to test a range of monetization solutions, from programmatic ad serving to native ads to paywalls. In this time, we’ve also built an ecosystem of third party providers who will support AMP.  

Better mobile ads

With AMP we're excited to bring new, compelling mobile experiences to users. But we are also focusing on preventing bad experiences - and Sridhar shared the latest on those efforts. For example, have you ever been swiping through a slideshow of photos on your mobile device and all of a sudden an ad you didn’t mean to tap takes you to another site? We developed technology to detect and prevent these accidental taps - and we block a significant number of them everyday.

We also have policies in place for sites and apps that show Google ads. In 2015, we stopped showing ads on 25,000 apps that didn't meet our guidelines. Two-thirds of them were for bad practices, like ads that covered up your content. This means users have a better ad experience and it also helps publishers and all of those who depend on a healthy digital ads ecosystem. (Learn how we fought bad ads in 2015.)

Measurement across devices

As we work to create better mobile experiences, we can take advantage of one big upside of mobile: measurement. With mobile, we’re able to tap into more signals, and get more relevant data, from device to location to time of day.

Advertisers and publishers can use this data to make mobile ads better and improve business outcomes. For example, Sridhar shared how Cadreon used cross-device measurement in DoubleClick for an auto client to measure the impact of mobile on each conversion, ultimately realizing a 15% lift in total conversions and developing new insights to feed back into their media planning. Watch Sridhar's full keynote here: