Global Spotlight: Catering to mobile first users in India

This week we are shining our AdSense Global Spotlight on India, a nation with a population of over 1 billion people and 22 official languages (not including English). For current AdSense publishers, this presents an opportunity to grow your audience globally.

The Global Spotlight is series of blog posts that can help educate, inspire, and provide you with insights into how you can grow your business and share your content in emerging markets. 

Our last spotlight shared insights on how to capture the opportunity in India by sharing tips on how to research your potential audience in India. Research is an important first step because when you know what users are talking about, you can participate in the conversation.

Today we want to talk about why you should cater to mobile first users.

It’s no longer breaking news, our world has shifted to mobile. This shift has been quick, and users expectations for great mobile experiences has increased even more quickly. A website that simply loads on a mobile device is no longer enough. To keep users engaged, mobile sites must be fast and relevant. You’ve learned in our previous post that India is projected to have 570M users online by 20201, and more than half of those users will be accessing the internet via a smartphone. Since hundreds of millions of users in India will only access the internet via a mobile device, it’s important to think like a user, and think mobile first.

First, understand how users interact and use their mobile devices. The study “How People Use Their Devices” dives into three different categories of use cases:

1. What does device usage look like in an average day
2. What we do on our devices
3. How we search across devices

Second, increase your mobile page speed. For users in India, it’s important to reduce the size of your pages. To reduce the size of your pages, target 50 or fewer requests and 1,000 or fewer bytes to optimize load time. You can also compress and select efficient images, and prioritize download of visible content. Lastly, consider AMPlifying your site for lightning speed. These are all key in winning mobile micro-moments. 

Check out the Mobile Web Speed Toolkit released by DoubleClick to help you optimize the speed of your mobile site.

Third, leverage the many resources available to go mobile.

• Test my site
• Principles of mobile site design
• Building websites for multi-screen consumers
• AdSense multi-screen guidelines
• Find a multi-screen vendor
• Optimize your content for mobile users

What are you waiting for? Get out there and grow your site in India. While you’re at it, be sure to turn your #PassionIntoProfit today by signing up for Google AdSense.

Tomorrow we’ll be sharing more tips so stay tuned or check out the other posts from our Global Spotlight series! Don’t forget to mark your calendar and register for our next live Hangout on Air session on November 17th. We’ll be talking through best practices and ways to grow your business.  

Posted By: Jay Castro, from the AdSense team

Footnotes

1. eMarketer, Worldwide Internet and Mobile Users: eMarketer’s Updated Estimates and Forecast for 2015–2020, October 11, 2016

from Inside AdSense http://bit.ly/2fcyEnm