What you will learn
- Why most sites are not well optimized to make money from mobile users
- How to make ads work on mobile
- How to screen affiliate offers for mobile users
- Using different types of opt ins for mobile
- Optimizing mobile for speed, design and layout
Most site owners have under optimized mobile revenue streams. With the majority of traffic now coming from mobile, it’s important to understand how to monetize this kind of traffic. In today’s episode, we show you how to do just that
Resources Mentioned In This Episode
- HealthAmbition (our site)
- Mobiletest.me
- AdInserter
- Ezoic
- Clickmeter
- Sumo Me
- OptinMonster
- WPsmushit
- Kraken.io
Full Transcript
Welcome to the Authority Hacker podcast, the place to learn field tested, no BS tactics to grow hack your online business, and finally, live life on your own terms. Now, your hosts, Gael and Mark.
Gael: Hey guys, welcome to the Authority Hacker podcast. Today we are going to talk about optimizing the monetization of your mobile traffic. And today we are going to talk about this with Mark. How is it going Mark?
Mark: It’s going pretty good.
Gael: Cool, let me ask you a question, what level are you on Pokemon Go?
Mark: [laugh] I knew this was going to come up. I haven’t actually been playing it for the last five days, so I am still level 7 or 8. I’m waiting for the pbp to come.
Gael: Okay, fair enough. I am just playing a little bit when I go left and right, I am kind of level 18 now, but whatever. Anyway, that is the best introduction I found to talk about mobile traffic, because we are always on our phones, when we go around and stuff, and actually, when I looked at the statistics on Health Ambition which is our own authority site, if you want to check it out, if you want to get an example of the kind of sites we build, I saw that 60% of people that visit the site are actually on phones, and 10% are on tablet. That means that almost 3 out of 4 people visiting the site are on mobile platforms. And, we don’t think a lot about them when I am sitting in front of 27 inch iMac designing the website, right?
Mark: Yeah, you don’t think of people with 24 inch screens when you are sitting in front of your 27 iMac to be honest sometimes. It’s quite easy to forget, it’s quite hard to sort of contemplate sometimes the vast majority of our visitors are on mobile devices. And they behave very fundamentally differently to desktop users.
Gael: Yeah, I was checking the time on site as well, it’s not a huge difference, it’s like they stay like 10% less time on site usually, so they are still consuming content, on mobile they consume like 1.6 pages and they consume 1.8 per visit on desktop so it’s not a huge difference, but the experience is massively different and for a long time we’ve been building sites never looking at them on our phones, right?
Mark: Yeah, it was probably only like a couple of years ago that we’ve really started taking it seriously, I mean, despite knowing that the 60% of people back then at least were on mobile devices.
Gael: It was a probably bit less like it’s growing rapidly and it’s going to grow, I believe we are going to be over 80% in a year or so.
Mark: Yeah. It’s still just a little bit difficult to sort of put your head in your customer’s or reader’s perspective if you know what I mean. Like, you are not your customer, you are not the user, I know I say that to a lot of Authority Hacker Pro members all the time, who kind of get a bit of stuck in their own internet marketing heads, but it really is with this mobile versus desktop sort of thing something which I say even still, we don’t really take it seriously enough, do you think that’s fair?
Gael: Yeah, I agree. But actually, when you say like people staying in their online marketing heads, like I can see that being a problem, because if you look at the Authority Hacker it’s the opposite, 80% of people are on desktop, and only 20% of the traffic is mobile, which is extremely low in this day and age, like internet marketers especially the people that we are targeting like the people that do SEO, like they are not too much into social media usually, they have 20 followers on Twitter, and no profile picture kind of people, but they are classic SEO people, they don’t even use their mobiles very much, it’s like even when I talk from like poll from Thrive Themes etc, it literally doesn’t know how to use his phone, and it’s really amazing that the B2C population let’s call it that way is doing everything on mobile these days and the professionals literally still do everything on their desktop/ laptop.
Mark: Yeah, and without sort of being in that person’s body so to speak is very difficult to kind of really understand that this is happening and people are using their phone as their main source of internet. We are spending 8 hours a day in front of our big wide screen monitors.
Gael: If you just need to do Facebook and calling on Skype and reading stuff online, I actually believe like an iPad is a better solution than the laptop at this point. So yeah, it totally makes sense, but the problem with site owners is that monetizing mobile traffic is challenging because it’s newer obviously, like we’ve been monetizing desktop traffic for decades now, and mobile traffic really, phones have changed so much, like they are in the form in which they are right now like the standard is 10 atp screen so big enough resolution, big enough screen, fast enough to process a proper website, it’s only been that way for like 3 years maybe, 3,5 years?
Mark: Yeah, and then throw the data allowances and data speed, 3G, 4G internet and it’s probably for the last 2, 3 years even in some countries.
Gael: Yeah, so as a result, there is a lot less ways to monetize mobile traffic and a lot less people figured it out, and as a result for example when you run advertising, if you run in that sense for example, the clicks are going to be quite a bit cheaper on mobile than they will be on desktop because people don’t understand it so they are not willing to be there as much as they would be on desktop, or their checkout is slow, and as a result you make less money generally from mobile traffic but there is no going away from people going to mobile instead of desktop now. So it’s kind of like web professionals taking a long time to adapt and it’s not just us, right, it’s like even Amazon is still, or Google is still like heavily investing in figuring out how to monetize mobile and make as much as desktop visits. And yeah, like having a responsive WordPress theme is usually not good enough, right, it’s we have responsive WordPress theme but for example, like we had to tweak the css so the borders on the left hand were smaller so that you could put more than 3 or 4 words per line when you were reading, otherwise it was like you had to scroll all the time to keep reading and that wasn’t perfect.
Mark: Am I right in thinking that when someone says there is themes responsive, that doesn’t mean for a second that it displays perfectly on any resolution, it just means-
Gael: It means it re-adapts.
Mark: Yeah, it re-adapts at certain stages, but those stages you might sort of get caught in between.
Gael: They are arbitrary, right. And, like all these phones have different resolutions, and so on, and you might be caught in between where it’s like slightly too large to be comfortable but like not large enough to show that the sidebar yet and it feels weird, or sometimes, the point where you just have like a big screen, some phones now have like 6.5 inch screens, right? These might actually show the sidebar on some phones, making the text really small and unreadable, so you have to double tap to zoom in and then it’s like you can scroll in all directions and it’s very weird. So that happens when like it is definitely one of the difficulties and because there are no, you also add a lot of things to your site, the thing is site speed is actually a lot more important on mobile because a lot of people are still on 3G and sometimes even on that crappy connection when you don’t have the network properly and loading the site takes forever, and if your images are slightly bigger on most broadband connections it’s not a big deal anymore, but on mobile, it actually plays quite a bit, and that actually makes more people bounce out and not click around, and you get less out of your visitor as well. Another thing that is massive is the checkout process, right. So, have you ever tried checking out on your mobile phone?
Mark: Maybe I think I booked a flight on it once.
Gael: How was it?
Mark: I can’t remember, I think it was like Air Asia flight or something, it was alright. But, I’ve never bought anything off Amazon, so I didn’t even know what the mobile checkout looks like. I don’t know, I have this like marketers professional like maybe I’ll find something cool on my mobile and then I’ll go home and buy it on my desktop. It’s weird.
Gael: I do a lot of checkout on my iPad actually. But, yeah, it’s like, you have to fill these forms and like typing on a mobile screen is just not very comfortable when you have to type a delivery address and delivery instructions, and stuff, you end up writing a little bit and it takes forever, and when the checkout is like one step checkout then it’s taking up to like 10 minutes to actually fill out the checkout. It would take you the third of that on a real keyboard, but when you are typing on your screen, it takes a long time. Maybe I am not fast enough, I don’t know.
Mark: I have this inherent distrust of mobile checkouts as well for some reason, I don’t know what it is.
Gael: It’s just like more experimental than the desktop one.
Mark: Yeah, I don’t know, I can’t really explain why but for some reason I feel safer putting my credit card into a desktop.
Gael: Alright grandpa. [laugh] It’s exactly the same process.
Mark: Yeah, it’s just little things like, I guess on mobile I’ve just never done it but I know what it looks like for the http and I can spot scam a lot easier than the desktop.
Gael: Now you know how your parents feel when you are touching all these buttons on the remote control and they don’t know what it is. But, another thing that people don’t think about as well is, people visiting your site on mobile they are easily distracted as opposed to a desktop visitor, right; when you are visiting on the desktop, desktop I mean like desktop computer and laptops obviously, you are usually sitting in front of it and that is your main point of focus. Whereas, when you are visiting a site on a mobile phone, you are maybe in the metro or you maybe waiting in the queue or like to checkout at the grocery store, or you are walking and there is real life that is interacting, that is not your main purpose, you are kind of filling time with browsing around, and so if you are trying to get someone to checkout or if you are trying to get someone to take an action, even though your funnel is designed amazingly well, people will drop off a lot more on mobile and that is what explains I think a lot of the lower time on sites, and high bounce rate and that kind of stuff, it’s not necessarily you are doing a bad job, you are secondary. Whereas when people visit your site on a desktop, you are primary.
Mark: Yeah. They have arrived to their destination with their Uber and they have to get out and speak to people or they go through a tunnel and their data goes out and stuff like that.
Gael: Yeah, so it’s one of these things that makes it also harder to make money. Another thing as well is a lot of the things these days work with things like retargeting, and subscribing etc, right, so like I am thinking about the push notifications that kind of stuff that we are playing with, and we will write a post about that at some point, but, people are using multiple devices now as well, in terms of analytics and attribution, it’s also extremely complicated, because as you said, you find something on your phone, and you go back on your desktop and you check out how does the analytics guy in Amazon figure out that.
Mark: Yeah, that’s almost impossible.
Gael: Same with reatrgeting ads etc, it’s possible somehow, like if you are logged in in Google account I think you can have AdWords follow you with ads etc, so there is some ways to connect and universal analytics is supposed to help with that a little bit. But, it means that there is less opportunities to show ads, there is less opportunities to check conversions essentially like make more money out of this traffic, so it means it’s harder to make money once again. And finally, I would say the last things that makes monetizing with mobile challenging is that a lot of conversion tools are just not made for mobile, like I am thinking like you just wrote this massive review for Thrive Leads and like the opt in pop ups, you can choose to not show them on mobile but you can not choose to show one just on mobile for example, right. And it’s like a lot of these things just feel very week on mobile, I mean if you check even Health Ambition to pop ups-
Mark: Although, I want to add actually, what’s the Thrive Leads [13:00 inaudible] it’s totally gone from my mind right now?
Gael: Opt in Monster?
Mark: Opt In Monster, yeah. They have actually just implemented that, so you can now toggle on and off desktop, mobile and tablet.
Gael: Thrive Leads needs to do that eventually, like, this is another site I believe but that’s because Paul doesn’t know how to use his phone.
Mark: [laugh] True.
Gael: You can tell, you know. He is going to love me when he hears this podcast. These are all the things that make monetizing on mobile difficult. Now, we are not going to give you a magic bullet to do like to magically make as much money as your desktop traffic, you probably won’t, but we are going to give you a few tips and tricks that we have found over time to kind of decrease that gap between the value of your desktop visit and a value of a mobile visit. And, the first one is actually a trick you found, which is make sure your site is readable on every mobile phone, so how do you do that?
Mark: Well, there is actually, I discovered this tool it’s called mobiletest.me it’s a free tool and it allows you to preview or view any site through the eyes of a specific phone, and to be honest, there is only like 5 or 6 devices there, like a couple of tablets, an iPhone, Galaxy phone, and I can’t remember the others.
Gael: I am sure there is like paid versions where they are like-
Mark: I am sure there are many other tools that do this, it’s just this one struck me because it has quite a wide range of devices with different resolutions, and for example, when we were doing the, when we were redesigning the Health Ambition checkout cart in January of this year, the designer, the developers told us okay, it’s mobile responsive now, because it worked on their iPhone 5 or 6 or whatever. And, we had HTC 1 at the time, and it worked fine on those, because those were the ones they had made responsive for, those two devices. So I went to mobiletest.me in order to check other devices like the iPhone 4, and Galaxy and the iPad Mini I think it was, and it just didn’t work at all on any of those. So, yeah, test this as much as possible on different devices, because just because someone says it’s responsive and it works on your phone it doesn’t mean it’s going to work on other people’s phones as well.
Gael: What do you do when you find the bug though, like, what should be done?
Mark: A bug? What do you mean?
Gael: When you just find it not displaying properly.
Mark: You fix it?
Gael: Yeah, basically there is no magic tool that you can one click fix it, right, you basically need to hire someone to fix it.
Mark: Yeah, as I understand it’s quite complicated thing to make things fully responsive, like I see a lot of WordPress themes out there which are supposedly responsive but not really, so yeah, it’s worth testing this out a lot.
Gael: Yeah, before you buy a WordPress theme, and you know you are entering a niche where mobile is important, than you should consider taking their demo site, because they always have a demo site, and actually putting it in this tool and checking it out because especially when it comes from like small production houses, I am not hating on them but they have limited testing ability and very often, they are going to sell products that are just not that great on most devices and that’s going to cost you quite a lot, I mean, when you actually have a site that doesn’t display well, people stay less on your site, they trust it less, they share it less, they buy less, you are losing out on every front.
Mark: I think it’s also sort of good indicator for the overall quality of the code that someone builds, if they are skimping on this then there is likely other areas that it’s going to fall down in.
Gael: Yeah, probably. The second one is actually, let’s talk about that, it’s advertising. So advertising is an interesting bit because you want to optimize the revenue you make etc, and we give some layouts on Authority Hacker on the blog and in the Authority Hacker pro area, and the thing is, well first of all, when you do advertising and if you do advertising especially in your sidebar, which you know, we do a bit, we do have an add on top of the sidebar, I think I remember and one at the bottom that scrolls with you; well, when your site is responsive the sidebar is like at the bottom of the screen and nobody ever gets to that point, right? So, what’s the point of having ads there if you are getting paid per click, if you are getting paid per impression, per thousand impressions, it’s actually worth having them, so like networks like Buy Sell Ads for example that we use, we still run them on mobile but when we, for like the AdSense stuff, and the Media.net that we normally have there as well, but that is cost per click so if people don’t click we don’t make any money; these actually we move them on mobile, we move them inside the content, we move them like between paragraphs, and if you read a lot of big sites, like the Ecnomist and stuff like that, you will see that the desktop version barely has any ad in content, they usually use their sidebar, they try to keep it clean, and keep it nice, but as soon as you open the site on mobile, you’ll see ads in content between every eight paragraphs or something. And that is how everyone that does content and ads is monetizing mobile traffic and actually the revenue is pretty good that way and if you want to know how to implement that, we recommend a plugin called Ad Inserter on WordPress, and it’s actually free and it does that, you can see like just all the mobile platforms show ads here but then desktop show ads here, but then desktop show ads here etc. So that’s pretty cool.
Another thing as well is like the size of the ads, right, because sometimes you have this 728 by 90 and these literally get completely off the screen, these long horizontal banners, and so if you do that, that’s going to break your theme, that’s going to have people no click on it, and that is going to reduce the quality of your site, it’s going to look terrible. And for a long time we were running these on Health Ambition actually on mobile. And, the solution to that is well, either use different ads on mobile and desktop, which you can do with Ad Inserter as well, or you can use on AdSense, they have these responsive ad units, right, so they actually adapt to the size of the screen so that’s pretty cool, because then if you were talking about the fact that mobile devices have different resolutions, it’s all over the place, right, it’s from like 480 p all the way to like 4k I think now actually. And actually, based on the resolution of the device AdSense is going to put the right size of that to take the most space. So, that’s pretty cool, you can just check it out, it’s just the format, when you choose the size you can pick responsive and that works pretty well. Otherwise, when we use Ezoik, which we have been using quite a bit lately, it actually does that for you, it’s like you can just choose which formats for which platforms or like tablet, mobile, or desktop. So that is basically how you can optimize your ads and that is quite important, when we switched to Ezoik we multiplied by 5 our ad revenue from mobile, just because we didn’t have these ads going off the screen etc.
Mark: Yeah, I mean that’s not just Ezoik, it’s just responsiveness improvement.
Gael: Yeah, you can do it with AdSense. That is super massive if you are doing ads. If you are doing affiliate marketing, well, having your site responsive is great, but making sure the site you link to, the offer you link to is responsive and not just the sales page, the checkout page, because a lot of people have like they build theirselves pages on Worpress or something, then they run some obscure checkout process. And then you send people and there will be a good sales page and they will click buy and they are going to have a horrible checkout experience on mobile and you will not convert anything in terms of mobile traffic, so it’s actually worth checking that and what you can do actually with a service like click meter for example is you can actually direct people to different offers depending on whether they are on mobile or they are on desktop, so like, maybe you want to even send people to Amazon on mobile if there is no offer that is mobile responsive, but you want to send people from desktop to like a higher paying offer or that kind of stuff.
Mark: It’s not just responsiveness, you’ve got to consider format as well, like in health there is a lot of video sales letter type sales pages, and these are the kinds of things you need to watch through a 25 minute video presentation in order for the buy button to appear. And, people just are nit going to do that in mobile, or very rarely, because data and just mobile, just because.
Gael: Yeah, it have the plan already, and you know, they can get easily distracted as we say.
Mark: Yeah. So, that is the kind of situation where it’s also worth thinking about where you are directing people. Fortunately, most good products will have equivalent text pages as well, if you go and dig up their affiliate program details, they usually have a sort of page where they outline all of their offer pages. So bear that in mind.
Gael: Actually all this stuff is also valid for your own products, right, so if you sell your own products like long sales pages, pages that are already very long on desktop become like excruciatingly long on mobile, it’s really, it’s too long, so you should also consider making a mobile version that is slightly shorter or something, maybe cut a bit on the pre sale, or that kind of stuff. Because otherwise, literally people are scrolling for ages and it doesn’t work. Also make sure your images align properly, actually that’s for us, because we use Thrive Content Builder, and Thrive Content Builder is kind of, sometimes it looks good on desktop, and then you open it on mobile and the images just align all over the place. So that happens quite a bit so make sure like you actually check these pages, make them a bit shorter, and you can use something like click meter to actually send people to different pages depending on whether they are on desktop or they are on mobile, and actually it’s free for the first thousand clicks a month, so like, you can d it for free actually. So that is something I would consider.
Another thing I would consider when you affiliate marketing as well is actually swapping offers, and the checking mobile app installs. Mobile app installs pay between 2 and 5 dollars usually per app install and it’s lie free installs, and these things will tend to do better on mobile then maybe a ClickBank product or something. So yeah, if you want to add, like you can swipe your ad unite for that, or you can swipe affiliate links, using click meter essentially.
Now let’s talk about opt ins, if you are collecting emails. And we talked a little bit about this earlier, you can’t pick pop ups just for mobile, on Thrive Leads apparently Opt in Monster does it so so if that is something you need maybe you should check out Opt in Monster. But they are just not that great these pop ups usually. Also, there is not exe internet on mobile right, because exe internet being the mouse going out of the browser and that’s when the pop up shows up to get your email. That’s what happens on a lot of sites, on your desktop, but hey, how do you do that on mobile when there is no mouse, right, the mouse is your finger? So, actually, from what I know, Thrive is the only one that has a solution for that?
Mark: Yeah, so they have smart exits, it’s called, actually smart exit and smart exit plus, now you put me on the spot here trying to remember which one is which, but, one of them, if you go and read my Thrive leads review, I go into this in a lot of detail, but one of them is basically functions regularly on desktop, so like the exit intent will work as normal on the desktop, but if you are viewing it on a mobile device, then you can set it so after xz number of seconds or specific amount of time, then the pop up will appear, so you are not losing any value that way. And I can’t remember what the other one is.
Gael: I think it was the same.
Mark: What is one time and one percentage, I think it’s different, I am going to check that actually.
Gael: I can’t remember. Anyway, otherwise, if you are running an internet pop up, it’s just not going to show up on mobile, so you are losing on your opt ins which probably make you quite a bit of money so it’s quite important that you probably test different types of opt ins, and like, you know, things like hello bars, you know, these bars are at the top or at the bottom of the screen, these are not bad and these are things that we are testing quite a bit lately, like not showing pop ups at all on mobile, and only showing them on desktop, and then, using these hello bars to put call to actions to like opt in pages.
Another thing that we are testing a lot, and I am not going to talk too much about it because we are going to make a big post about it but that;s push notifications. So, push notifications, if your site in https and you may have noticed that all our sites are now in https it’s because you can use these browser native notifications. Essentially, you get these pop up that comes from your browser says hey this site wants to send you notifications, allow or block. And, actually we found that when you have an https site or an ssl site, the opt in rate is very high, it’s 15% for both sites right now, so it’s doing really well, and then push notifications are perfect for mobile actually, it’s just it’s made for it, people click and they can launch a link and what you can do if you want to collect emails is you can send opt in pages as push notifications. So you can even build this autoresponder of two push notifications that sends people to your lead magnet, people click and then they get on the page with just a form and like a list of things so it’s not like they are trying to read an article and you are getting in their face and it’s hard to close and they open the tab thing instead of closing the pop up because they have big fingers or because their screen is not very responsive. And, it’s just a better experience and it allows it to also generate a lot more traffic, because we are finding that push notification click rate is like 3 to 4 times higher than email click through rate, so that’s pretty cool.
And last thing I am going to say about this, is the only downside I found to this is that so far, on Safari, this is actually not supported yet but every other major browser has done it, so it’s supposed to come in one or two updates on Apple site, I can’t wait. So that is basically it for the opt ins. Now, let’s talk about the share buttons as well. Do you want to do it or should I do it?
Mark: As I understand it, the share buttons, for example, those floating one you often see at the side, they just don’t really work so well on mobile.
Gael: Yeah, usually, you don’t see them. Which is, which makes you miss out a lot of shares, right? But, more than that, a lot of these buttons, imagine you click on the Facebook share button, right, what happens is when you are on your desktop, it’s opening like a small pop up window for you to share on your Facebook when you are already logged in on your browser, correct?
Mark: Yes.
Gael: Are you logged in on Facebook on your browser on your mobile?
Mark: It’s a good point, actually.
Gael: You are not, you are using the app, right?
Mark: Yes.
Gael: So, what happens for a lot of shares buttons is that it’s actually doing that, it’s opening the pop up, it’s like oh, you need to log into Facebook, so to share this article, it’s not a one click thing, it’s like you actually have log in to be able to share that thing, whereas, some other share buttons will actually open it in the app, to share, you know.
Mark: Yeah, and then what happens is you get distracted when you go into it and then, because tabbing isn’t really so easy on the phone. I am not going back to the article and that’s it, you know.
Gael: Yeah. You just lost visitors. So, SumoMe is actually doing pretty well, it’s like for some reason, it seems to be behaving differently on iOS and Android, but like, SumoMe is doing an okay job at sending people like I am actually checking my phone right now, it’s sending e to login page. But, you should try this, you should try this share buttons for some reason it works on iOS it doesn’t work on Android, it seems where it actually shares in app it works for Twitter as well, it works for Pinterest, there are technical ways to do that you just need to check which plugin you are using, and if the share buttons on your theme does that, and you should actually check on iOS and Android because these things behave differently. Not that fun, but if you are like one of these viral stories type site, this is going to change everything, because people cannot share your content on mobile otherwise, which is super annoying. And once again, the scrolling buttons, they are great they get more share, but on mobile they either take half the screen or they don’t show up at all.
Mark: I find they are also not very smooth, with the scrolling, it’s a bit jittery, you know. Maybe that’s my phone, I don’t know.
Gael: Yeah maybe that’s your phone.
Mark: We have the same phones, so I don’t know.
Gael: Yeah. So anyway, so I actually like SumoMe for that as well, and we’ll put a link in the show notes but sumome.com because they allow you to just have these little corner thing that shows the numbers of shares, and because when you are running advertising on mobile as well, you are actually using the bottom part of the screen to have these crowling ads, and if you are running buttons there, essentially you are covering your ads up and you are losing money. So SumoMe actually allows you to just take the bottom corner, the bottom left or the bottom right corner, and then when you click it just has a layover with all the share buttons. And I found this to be probably the best compromise, it’s just that for some reason, on Android, the Facebook button doesn’t seem to work but the Twitter and Pinterest work with the app, so you really want to check which networks are the most important to you, for us, it’s Pinterest by far, and you want to make sure that these buttons work with the app, not do these browser thing. So that’s quite important.
And finally, I am going to talk about one last tip. As we said, sites speed is super important, people are like on 3G and they are like on old phones, like these phones still have like 500MB of RAM, and it’s like it’s slow, it takes forever. So, one thing to like speed up your site without going super crazy, is to optimize the size of your image. And it’s like, it’s something that you should be doing anyway, but especially for mobile, so the two things I recommend for you to do is it’s going to be free stuff as well, there is a plugin called Imsanity that autoresizes the images you upload in WordPress, so if like us you are using things like stock images, right, we are using a lot of stock images on our site, not always the best idea, but hey, you need to illustrate your site and it’s an easy way to do that, usually when you download these images they are like 5000 by 5000 super high definition stuff etc, which is not ideal, because that makes your page super heavy. Instead of having to resize in Photoshop, and taking ages to do that, you have this plugin, Imsanity and it just as soon as you upload, you put a max size for images, and it just resizes automatically to that size when you upload. So for us, it’s like it can’t be more than 2000 by 2000 which is already really big, but we got also adapt to these very high resolution screens, so at least they are not too big.
And another plugin that I recommend you put in there that is going to make mobile much faster is WPsmushit, which is essentially a compression algorithm for images that makes them smaller. Now, this is not the best one, there is a bunch of them out there, but it’s free, so if you want the free version WPsmushit is a coll plugin you can check, otherwise, Kraken.io or Thrive Themes actually has it built in, is probably the best one but it’s paid, it’s pretty cheap so it depends how important that is, and how much money you are making, but if you really want to optimize, Kraken is where you should go. And that is it for our 7 tips to optimize your mobile experience and revenue. Do you have any final words of wisdom Mark?
Mark: No. Not really. Just as I said ta the start, when you are working in online marketing and using your desktop computer all day, it can be a bit hard to sort of put yourself in the shoes of one of your users. So, I know I always find when I go visit my family back home, they are, I don’t think my mum ever really uses desktop computer, except for some reason to Skype me, but she is always on her iPad, so it’s quite good to like observe other people and how they behave to get some kind of insight into how real people actually use your site.
Gael: It kind of pisses me off actually, I see my mum going on Google and type google.com you know, and so like, why, [laugh] not using the search bar and stuff, so it’s useful. Anyway, all these tips will not make you make more money from mobile than you make from desktop, you will still not make as much and this is still the infancy of monetizing mobile traffic, I mean, not long ago people were still using the wap system, right, these kind of like alternate internet that where people would have to build an entire new site etc, so it’s still the beginning and there is still going to be more and more mobile traffic, but it’s something that you kind of, what you kind of need to ride the wave and over time it’s going to be improving, and as mobile traffic grows, it’s kind of going to even now with desktop traffic, it’s like I think rather than seeing mobile traffic as low income traffic it’s just people will start seeing desktop traffic as a high income traffic. Because it’s going to be the most rare type of traffic. So, if there is new ways we will actually probably make a new podcast, otherwise, good luck with monetizing our mobile traffic, it’s not easy, we are still playing with it, we still have a lot to improve on, I am sure we’ll hear about that in the comments, but thanks for listening guys, and we’ll see you guys in the next episode.
Mark: Bye.
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