Google Publishes AdSense Guide to Audience Engagement

[engine]

Google has just published a 23-page PDF guide titled, "The AdSense guide to Audience Engagement [services.google.com]"

The guide has section on helping an audience to become familiar with your brand, and a section about making the site design good for users, it calls it, "Design user journeys, not just web pages." There's another section about developing content that resonates with the publisher's audience, and making the content easy for users to view.
It goes on to talk about linking out, which is an interesting angle for many.

The seasoned pros around here will probably know all of this already, however, there are still many newbies, and for some it doesn't harm to have a reminder of things we've all forgotten.

To get the PDF guide, click this link [services.google.com].


To read the announcement go here:
[adsense.blogspot.com...]

[edited by: martinibuster at 2:22 pm (utc) on May 11, 2016]
[edit reason] Added the download link. [/edit]

[trebuchet]

Yes, I noticed this. I haven't downloaded it. Personally I'm hanging out for their PDF guide on "How to live on half the earnings, despite having 25% more traffic". Closely followed by "Why your clicks are vanishing".

[robzilla]

Direct download: [services.google.com...]

[ken_b]

Oh great, grey(?) text on white background. Who thought that was a good idea? No need to worry about readability.

Thanks for the garbage Google.

[martinibuster]

Gee Ken, you're right, the text is light gray on white. That's a fail.

But the content is not garbage. It's very useful for people of all professional levels. There are some profound insights in that document. Give it a read [services.google.com].

[ken_b]

Content that can't be easily read is garbage.

And they as much as say so

61% of users would quickly move on to another site if they didn’t find
what they were looking for right away.

[engine]

I agree, it's a bad choice of color, but i've seen this mistake on many documents these days, so Google is not alone.

[teaandbiscuits]

So they have a pdf on how to make your pages user friendly, but then make that pdf non user friendly.

[IanCP]

Thanks for the laughs folks. Black text on white background is GOOD, anything else is rubbish.

I still come across sites with a completely black background, and small typeface grey text. Why? I dunno. Some people think Bling [whatever name] is good.

[ADDED] I just remembered I have downloaded several recently created pdf files from big name technical corporations, and my government as well, many with the same defect. Mr. Adobe changing the defaults?

[tangor]

99.9% (not 100%) of the time any PDF I get from g is converted to WP/DOC (mechanized) and THEN I read it. Learned this a long time ago dealing with "do as I say not as I do no evil" company.

There is some info in there. Not much, just enough fluff to make it seem they care.

[MrSavage]

I haven't read this yet, but coming from the Google? Make my pages better or be more purposeful, but at the same time they want to increase their usage of the answer box. Tell me this isn't nuts.

[trebuchet]

I looked at it. It's powder puff stuff, a little of it useful, most of it useless. No doubt someone at Google will have something positive to write in their self appraisal, e.g. "I oversaw the development and publication of a PDF guide to improving audience engagement. This was well received by the publishing community", etc.