Okay, the technical mumbo-jumbo is out of the way. I don’t claim that what you’ve read so far in this chapter is everything there is to know about understanding mobile programming languages and protocols, and creating mobile Web sites. This is an AdSense book and it doesn’t cover everything mobile. If you want to know more about creating mobile Web sites, check out Mobile Internet For Dummies, by John R. Levine, Michael J. O’Farrell, and Jostein Algroy (Wiley Publishing). If you really want the whole nine yards, go for Nirav Mehta’s Mobile Web Development. It’s technically dense, but you’ll find everything you need to know in it.
Setting up AdSense for Mobile is a lot like setting up AdSense for Content. The differences are all related to the mobile platform and are easy enough to navigate. You have to tell the AdSense folks which programming language — or a markup language (or just markup for short) — you used for your site. You also have to tell AdSense which character encoding you used for the site.
Character encoding happens when you combine one set of characters with some other indicator, such as numbers or integers. Morse code is probably one of the best known sets of character encoding because it combines letters of the Latin alphabet with dots and dashes that are used in telegraphy. The result is that a set of dots and dashes (or depressions) can be sent with a telegraph machine and then decoded to represent the characters they represent. In other words, with a telegraph, you could send messages from one place to another.
Character encoding for Web sites works basically the same way. Characters are encoded with some numerical system. Then, the Web browser can decode those characters to ensure that they’re displayed properly. In most cases, UTF-8 is the most commonly used character encoding for U.S. Web sites
I’m jumping just a little ahead of the game here. To begin creating your mobile ads, first log in to your AdSense account. Then use these steps to create the ad:
1. Click the Get Ads link on the AdSense Setup tab.
The Get Ads page appears.
2. On the Get Ads page, select the AdSense for Mobile Content link, as shown in Figure
The AdSense for Mobile Content Wizard appears, ready to walk you through the process of setting up mobile ads
3. In the Format section of the wizard, use the drop-down menu to select the type of ad you want to display on your Web site.
You have two options: Single or Double. Single shows the link to one advertiser whereas Double shows the links to two, but the ads are stacked one on top of the other.
Mobile text ads contain 24–36 characters of text depending on the language in which the ad is written, followed by a destination URL if advertisers choose to enter one. Advertisers also have the option to allow customers to directly connect to their business phones by placing a Call link next to the destination URL. If the Call link appears, visitors can click the link to initiate a call to the advertiser.
4. In the Markup section of the wizard, use the drop-down menu to select the markup language used to create your mobile Web site.
Your choices are WML, XHTML, and CHTML. If you’re not sure what these are
5. In the Character Encoding section of the wizard, use the drop-down menu to select the character encoding for your Web site.
If you’re not sure what character encoding is used on your site, AdSense gives you the option to Auto-Detect encoding. Make sure that option is selected.
6. In the Colors section of the wizard, use the color palettes to choose colors for the various elements of your ads.
As with AdSense for Content, you want your mobile ads to blend with the pages on which they appear. Use the Color Picker (that pretty colored box) next to each element to choose the color you want to use for that element. Alternatively, you can also enter the six-digit hexadecimal number in the text box provided to further customize colors if the one you want to use isn’t available in the Color Picker. However, you should know there are some markup languages — like WML and CHTML — that don’t allow color customization, so your ads are displayed in the default Google palette if you’re using one of these languages.
7. Click Continue.
You’re taken to the next page in the wizard, where you have the option of selecting or creating specific channels to track your mobile ads. Remember, channels are simply tracking tools that help you visualize
how ads are performing. You can add a channel to your ad, and then when you look at your AdSense reports, you can immediately see how one channel of ads performs over another.
