Today’s article is written by Holger Sindbæk, Designer and Developer, at Online Solitaire.

---

I’m the creator of Online Solitaire, a website where more than 1 million people play more than 4 million games of Klondike Solitaire, Spider Solitaire, and FreeCell each month. All the games are free to play, but ads are shown on the right side of the playing board, with an option to upgrade to an ad-free version of the game for a nominal fee.

Which raises the question: how many pay the nominal fee, and how many stick with the ads?

Expectations

When I first started to think about implementing Stripe as a paid alternative to ads, I thought it would be an excellent supplement to the site’s ad revenue. Most of the users on the site are recurring users, many of whom come back every day to play a game of solitaire and the average session for a user is 20 minutes, so for some of those heavy users, a paid option seemed like a no-brainer.

So I went about implementing Stripe. The way I did it was through a text-based button above the ads saying “Hide ads”. When clicking that, a popover would show where people could pay $4.99/month or complete a 5 min survey to hide ads.

The functionality itself worked great, and a good bunch of people clicked “Hide ads” because who doesn’t want to hide ads if it’s an option? Below you can see a screenshot of how many people click “Hide ads” each day. You can see that the number is around 100 people per day who see the purchase popover.

That leaves the question of how many people actually purchase a subscription or complete a survey.

Reality

Let’s get down to brass tacks. Was the implementation of subscriptions a failure, a success, or somewhere in-between? In short, it was a failure. Few people are willing to pay a fee to get rid of ads. They aren’t willing to complete a survey to hide the ads for a time, either.

Below is a screenshot from Stripe, where you’ll see that only 3 people have paid for the game in the last 30 days. Considering how many people play the game, how much some of those people play it, and how much some seem to complain about ads, it’s astonishing that so few people are willing to pay for it.

For perspective, Online Solitaire earns more than $10.000/month in ad revenue, and the 12 month average for subscription revenue is $8.3/month, which makes subscription-based revenue absolutely minuscule.

So what can we conclude from all that?

Reflections

First of all, the above scenario might not be the same for your website. Solitaire is one of those games that people expect to be free, and therefore they might be much less willing to pay for it. I also run a multiplayer card game website called World of Card Games, where people play games such as Hearts and Spades with each other, and on that site, many users have reached out asking me to implement a subscription system.

That being said, if you have a genre where people expect your website to be free to use and you’re considering spending time to implement subscriptions or any type of payment, your time is probably better spent doing something else.

Another thing we can conclude is how tolerant people are towards ads when the alternative is paying up. Everyone talks about how annoyed they are by ads and how they wish they weren’t there, but people seem to prefer them over the alternative when it comes down to it.

I hope that this post will make it clearer for you whether to implement subscriptions or not. If you’re still unsure, why not play a game of Freestar-themed solitaire below to clear your head.

The post Ad Revenue vs. Paying Customers: Which Makes More? first appeared on Freestar.

• 52.2% of web traffic is generated from mobile devices
• 61% of consumers report they’re more likely to buy from mobile-friendly sites
• 52% of pay-per-click actions come from mobile devices
• 66% of emails are read on a smartphone or tablet

Innovative businesses understand that these days, just having a website isn’t enough. Mobile connectivity and optimization are crucial. 

That said, there are right ways and wrong ways to go about this. Here are the most common wrong ways. 

8 Signs You Need to Optimize Your Website for Mobile

1. Poor Reality Checking

To see how truly mobile-friendly your site is, access it via various mobile devices. Use as many different devices as you can, whether that means keeping a company-owned library of phones and tablets on-site or asking your friends to do a quick spot-check.

You can also use this Google mobile-friendly testing tool.

If any of these turn up poor results, you have a problem. 

What to Do About It

In these situations, it’s best to act like Santa Claus. Make a list of the problems, and check it as many times as necessary. Identify the causes, solve the issues, and see how it does during your next reality check. 

2. Bad Mobile Form Responses

Mobile forms can be a problem for many mobile interfaces because they take up room and formatting is tricky. Coding for interaction with a device keyboard is more complex than it should be. 

Worse, regular traffic reports don’t always show this problem exists. They’ll show navigation to the page, including the form, but nothing about how frustrating it was to interact with it. 

Your best sign there’s a problem is in the forms themselves. You can expect a few to be abandoned mid-process or to have nonsensical responses, but if this happens often, that could mean your forms are too hard to use on some devices. 

What to Do About It

If you’re getting weird responses to your forms from mobile, field-test them on various devices. You’ll get your best results from people who haven’t interacted with the form or even the whole site since they have no context.

3. High Cart Abandonment Rates

Customers might abandon a purchase for many reasons, but one of those could be you’ve made the process frustrating on mobile devices.

You can find this statistic quickly enough in your analytics. Hopefully, you have some recovery automation in place for it already. Use your analytics to determine if cart abandonment happens more often on mobile than regular browsing. If so, there’s an issue with your mobile shopping cart. 

What to Do About It

Start with a mobile audit of your online shopping cart. Watch especially for slow loads, confusing navigation, too-large images for small screens, and popups that make it hard to buy what you’re selling. 

If any of those appear, they are the most likely culprits for this problem. If not, you may have to dig deeper into the code for your mobile shopping experience.

4. An Empty To-Do List

An empty to-do can be a good sign since it shows your team is completing all of their tasks. But it can also indicate that you’re not doing enough. 

If your tasks are getting completed but you’re unhappy with your mobile statistics, it could be a sign you’re not maintaining the site and checking it regularly enough. 

What to Do About It

Check your business systems. For large companies, this could be a policies and procedures manual. For small businesses, it could just be a set of automated reminders or handwritten notes.

Either way, make sure they include time and processes for things like:

• Annual assessment and redesign for the site overall
• Running mobile audits and tests
• Viewing the site on various devices
• Speed-testing site loading times
• Checking touch aspects
• Auditing plug-ins for updates and usage

These tasks and more should be part of your regular mobile experience maintenance. If they’re not, theor absence could be costing you. 

5. High Bounce Rates

Your bounce rate is the percentage of people visiting your site and leaving after viewing the initial page. Your analytics should show this rate, and you should be able to find out if your bounce rate is different between mobile and regular interactions. 

Your web people should know what number constitutes a good or bad bounce rate in your industry. If your mobile bounce rate is considered higher than average, this is a strong indication your mobile browsing experience needs work. 

What to Do About It

Compare your bounce rates for mobile site visits, regular site visits, and the industry norms. You’ll find four different possibilities, each with its own solution:

• Regular and Mobile Are Better Than Industry Norms: Your site is solid, including mobile. Nothing here shows you need better optimization. 
• Regular and Mobile Are Worse Than Industry Norms: You need to work on your site in general. It may need mobile optimization later, but you have more urgent tasks right now. 
• Mobile Is Worse Than Regular: Your site needs mobile optimization.
• Regular Is Worse Than Mobile: You are mobile-optimized and may want to see how you could improve your regular website. 

6. Dropping Conversion Rates

Dropping conversion rates are a problem for any business. They mean lost sales, which means lost revenue and reduced profits. They’re easy to spot but sometimes harder to diagnose since many things could be causing them.

It’s easy to spot the issue if your site isn’t mobile-friendly because conversion rates will drop from mobile connections, but not from other purchase methods.

What to Do About It

Start by walking through the buyer’s journey on your website, using as many different mobile devices as you can. Look for issues like tricky navigation, poor form formatting, trouble seeing or interacting with product details, and annoying popups.

When you find them, fix them one at a time and see how that impacts conversions. 

If the dropping rates happened suddenly, it also pays to look at what you changed for your mobile presence immediately before the drop. This can be the first set of clues for fixing the problem. 

7. Walls of Text

Does your web copy include large blocks of uninterrupted text? That’s already a problem, even for regular browsing. 

People don’t want to read a wall of text, even on the large screens of their workstation or laptop. So think about how much information they want to read on the screens of their phones and tablets. 

If your site has paragraphs more than three lines long on a regular monitor, you’re in danger of losing people on mobile. 

What to Do About It

Audit your site’s individual pages, looking for paragraphs longer than three lines. Cut those into smaller sections. Convert some into bullet lists or other elements with plenty of white space. All of these will improve a mobile user’s experience.

Also, consider converting some text into video. It’s more engaging than text and capitalizes on the strengths of mobile browsing. 

8. Horizontal Navigation

Traditional computers have a landscape-oriented screen — one that’s wider than it is tall. But although most sites are designed to scroll downwards rather than sideways, that’s not always how they appear on the user’s screen.

This problem is exacerbated on mobile, where vertical scrolling has been the norm since the beginning. A horizontally-navigated screen is enough trouble for mobile users to give up and abandon the site altogether. 

What to Do About It

This is another solution centered around testing and fixing. Check your sites on a desktop monitor, a laptop, and various mobile devices. If any of them requires horizontal navigation to interact with a page, then it’s likely many mobile users need to do the same.

If that’s the case, it’s time to dig into your code and find out why.

Final Thought

One last sign your site isn’t mobile-optimized is customers or leads telling you so. Keep an eye on your ​​social media feeds and online reviews for anything that suggests your site was hard to navigate. If you can, contact those reviewers with a free offer in exchange for more details. Then follow up on those details and fix the problem.

Do similarly with your existing customers. Remain alert, especially for side comments that mention something minor in passing. This isn’t just an opportunity to fix something subtle that’s broken. It’s a chance to wow them with your responsiveness and active listening. 

Michelle Reed is a freelance business journalist based in Miami, Fla.

The post 8 Signs Your Website Isn’t as Mobile-Friendly as you Think first appeared on Freestar.

Concern over consumer privacy has continued to be a sensitive subject, as consumers have demanded more control and choice over how personal data is collected and transacted which has led to new governmental regulations being enacted. Back in 2018 the European Union GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) was launched with the focus and purpose to provide a high level of data protection for Internet users while enabling digital advertising to continue playing its important role in the Internet ecosystem. Here in the United States the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) went into effect on January 1, 2020, and is the most comprehensive law on consumer privacy regulations to date in the U.S.

The IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) which is an organization responsible for creating and governing advertising industry standards proposed its own solution to help support the continuous roll out of GDPR, and last year on August 15th 2020 the 2nd evolution of the IAB’s Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF 2.0) was launched. TCF v2.0 continues to support the overall drive of the TCF to increase consumer transparency and choice, management by digital properties of consent and compliance, and industry collaboration that centers on standardization. The TCF’s simple objective is to help all parties in the digital advertising chain ensure that they comply with the EU’s GDPR and ePrivacy Directive when processing personal data or accessing and/or storing information on a user’s device, such as cookies, advertising identifiers, device identifiers and other tracking technologies.

Publishers employing TCF v2.0 gain greater control and flexibility with respect to how they integrate and collaborate with their technology partners. New publisher functionality allows them to restrict the purposes for which personal data is processed by vendors on a publisher’s website on a per-vendor basis. Perhaps one of the biggest developments with TCF 2.0 is the participation of Google who committed to the new framework.

So what exactly is a CMP and how does it help publishers

A consent management platform (CMP) is a tool that enables a website or app to be compliant depending on the regulating body whether it is CCPA or GDPR. It does this by prompting users for consent, collecting and managing that information, and passing the data to downstream ad partners. The CMP can read and update the legal basis of a company that participates in the delivery of digital advertising (commonly referred to as a vendor) within a publisher’s website, app, or other digital content. Vendors declare their legal basis and purpose for accessing a user’s device or browser, or processing their personal data in the Global Vendor List (GVL).

The CMP specifically performs the following:

·   Provides users with transparency into the vendors that a publisher works with;

·   Provides transparency into the purposes and legal basis that a vendor wishes to leverage – the names and descriptions of purposes and features can be found here 

·   Store a user’s consent signals, for example a third-party cookie, in the user’s browser and makes consent information available to vendors in the TCF v2.0 TC String;

·   Ensures that consent for a purpose applies only to the vendors that have declared, via the GVL, that they use data for that purpose;

All CMPs who register with the TCF are required to take and pass the Validator test before they can be issued with a CMP ID that allows them to set a TCF v2.0 TC String. The Validator has been published to the Chrome Web Store in private mode and is only available to CMPs who register with the TCF, or publishers running an IAB TCF registered CMP.

Ultimately it is the responsibility of the publisher to read and follow CCPA or GDPR Policy and ensure that there is a consistent presentation of the purpose and legal basis for which the vendors they work with process personal data based on a user’s visit to the publisher website or app.

The post Publisher CMPs and Consumer Privacy first appeared on Freestar.

2020 brought about an incredible amount of uncertainty and will go down as one of the wildest years in our lifetime. A global pandemic will have that effect. In the adtech world, there are other reasons 2020 has brought about uncertainty. Apple’s release of iOS 14 and the changes to IDFA are responsible for that. The IDFA (Identifier for Advertisers) has been the cornerstone of so many businesses in the app ecosystem — navigating without it will take time, testing, and adjustments. The jury will be out on the level to which businesses can overcome this fundamental change handed down by Apple in the months and years ahead. While the death of the IDFA was introduced by Apple in the name of user privacy, I believe Apple’s motivations may not be as selfless as advertised.  But, that is a conversation for another time.

Apple’s deadline enforcing the App Tracking Transparency framework is set to come to fruition early this year. Ironically, Apple has been less than transparent with the exact date, and has left the industry on pins and needles. Some of the challenges publishers face with the changes include learning to scale user acquisition campaigns with access to far less data, getting users to opt-in to IDFA tracking, monetizing users effectively through ads when users do not opt-in, managing data collection done by 3rd party SDKs, and more. 

Specific to in-app ad monetization, vendors are making changes to target users by leveraging signals available on devices rather than relying on profiles built around a consumer’s IDFA. The outcome will be less relevant ads for those consumers, and less conversions for those paying for the ad space. We’ve seen Facebook Audience Network disclose the extent to which this change will impact their performance on iOS devices as Facebook’s entire targeting framework had been built around IDFA. What is the potential impact? As quoted in Forbes, Facebook could have as much as $8 billion at risk, and Google $17 billion at risk as an outcome of this change. 

If you are saying, ‘Ok, so the change is big, what can I do about this?’. We’d like to help publishers prepare the best they can when Apple enforces the new rules. 

The basic recommendations: 

With iOS 14, the IDFA will be zeroed out until an app calls the App Tracking Transparency framework to present the app-tracking authorization request to the end-user. If a user opts-in to tracking within your app, the IDFA can be leveraged but if they opt-out, the IDFA will be zeroed out for that device. In addition, the ATT prompt can only be called once per device.

Steps to ensure you are ready – 

1. Ensure your ad monetization SDKs are on iOS 14 supported versions. 
   1. Ad networks have made changes to their SDKs to account for the changes coming with iOS 14. To ensure compatibility, you need to verify you are on the latest supported versions of your SDK networks. 
2. SKAdNetwork support
   1. Apple built a system by which ad networks can still attribute installs, if IDFA is unavailable.
   2. To ensure your networks can function, update the SKAdNetworkItems key with an additional entry in your info.plist dictionary.
3. The string for these SKNetwork IDs need to be lowercase as represented below and indicated in Apple’s documentation:

<dict>

<key>SKAdNetworkIdentifier</key>

<string>22mmun2rn5.skadnetwork</string>

</dict>

4. Define a strategy for the Apple Tracking Transparency pop up.
   1. Your goal is to get as many users to opt-in to tracking as possible – but the reality is, you won’t get 100% of users. In fact, many developers are expecting that less than 20% of their users will opt-in. Either way, you can test different ways to try to increase your opt-in rate as much as possible. 

Hopefully these steps will help you prepare for the changes coming with Apple’s enforcement of App Tracking Transparency. If you have any specific questions, please feel free to email us at Freestar to provide guidance. 

The post Navigating App Monetization with iOS 14 first appeared on Freestar.

If 2020 taught us anything it’s that there is no certainty in what’s next. While COVID-19, civil unrest, and politics took center stage, the advertising industry continued to innovate and looked to the future. A recent eMarketer report revised its forecast to show 10% growth in digital ad spend in 2021. As the cookie crumbles, privacy concerns continue to make headlines, and consumers spend even more time on their mobile devices, here are five trends to watch in 2021.

5. The Machines Keep Learning

Artificial intelligence (AI) plays a role in all parts of advertising from creative to audience targeting and even ad buying. The Drum reports that related trends such as “the use of voice search, the introduction of blockchain, and 5G networks are likely to experience a boom in 2021.” Look for AI to have an even greater function in analyzing audiences and tailoring messages this year to make A/B testing obsolete.

4. Brands Must Take Action

Consumers are looking for companies that align with their values and make their positions known around social and environmental issues. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is more than just a buzzword, especially with younger generations. Digital Media Solutions shares that “75% of Millennials have admitted to changing their shopping habits in order to align with the environment” and “63% of Gen Z shared that they are more likely to buy from a company that contributes to a social cause.” These messages need to be authentic and align with what a brand truly stands for or the backlash could be greater than having no position at all. Inclusivity is another area with increased focus this year. SocialMediaToday reports that “41% of shoppers will shift away from retailers which don’t reflect their views on identity and diversity and 29% are willing to switch brands completely if they don’t show enough diversity.”

3. Less is More

While it’s been around for a few years, six-second pre-roll may replace many of the thirty-second and fifteen-second spots. Consumers’ attention spans continue to shrink as they juggle working from home and time with families. GumGum and Adweek conducted a survey and “81% of respondents [found these shorter ads to be] effective.” Many users continue to reject advertising and will skip video ads whenever possible, but this succinct format seems to be more palatable. Short and sweet, the right creative can still deliver on brand awareness, brand engagement, and purchase intent. Statista reports that digital video ad spend will reach $12.66 billion by 2024 and a large part of this budget will go to shorter-form ads.

2. Ditching the Desktop?

This year, eMarketer predicts “U.S. mobile ad spending [will] increase 22% to over $117 billion.” According to BusinessofApps, “mobile ad placements grew 70% during H1 2020” due to lockdowns during the pandemic and this has not slowed down. People are working, keeping connected, and entertaining themselves with their phones. Statista’s Digital Market Outlook found that “mobile will account for 50% of ad spending [in] 2021 and finally surpass desktop in 2022.”

1. Context is King

With recent privacy laws (GDPR and CCPA) as well as changes being made on Apple’s mobile devices and Google’s Chrome, marketers will look for other ways to reach their targets. IAS reported that 44% of U.S. survey respondents said that “increased data privacy legislation would be the top digital media challenge” and “82% selected contextual targeting as their preferred method.”  First-party data will definitely play a huge role, but brand-safe, contextually relevant sites that attract quality audiences will be on the top of many advertisers’ digital strategies. eMarketer found that as cookies go away that 34% of marketers plan to increase spending and emphasis on contextual advertising.

While we don’t have a crystal ball, a lot of these trends have been in the works for several years and may now be ready for primetime. Here’s to a year of innovation and prosperity.

The post 5 Advertising Trends to Watch in 2021 first appeared on Freestar.