Mobile Targeting Basics in Google AdWords - Capitalising on the Growth of the Smartphone

According to global shipment estimates published last month, 2011 saw total shipments of smartphones increase by a staggering 62.7%, overtaking P.C. shipments for the first time. Fortunately for those of us working to generate sales and leads through this relatively new medium, our potential customers aren’t just using their mobiles to connect with Twitter and Facebook; comScore reports that 38% of U.S. smartphone owners have completed at least one purchase using their device.

Assess your existing mobile-generated traffic

Get started by segmenting your data by the device; AdWords campaigns are opted in to target “mobile devices with full browsers” by default, enabling your ads to appear to users who search via a smartphone. You can gauge how many of your AdWords visitors accessed your site via a smartphone by segmenting by the device in the AdWords interface. This will allow you to compare metrics relating to desktop, smartphone and tablet users.

If your existing campaigns attract a considerable chunk of mobile traffic, or you would like to optimise your account to attract more mobile traffic, it is highly advisable to create dedicated campaigns that solely target mobile devices. Segmenting campaigns by device targeting will allow you to:

• Adapt your bids; there are fewer ads displayed on the initial page of Google’s mobile search results than there are on a desktop, meaning that you may need to bid slightly higher to achieve a place on page one.
• Use a suitable landing page; in an ideal world, you will have an optimised-for-mobile landing page that you can use as your destination URL. Otherwise, ensure that your site is easy to navigate on a smartphone and that conversions can be carried out without difficulty.
• Enable appropriate ad-extensions; make it easy for the searcher to get in touch by creating a location extension (if you have a physical location) and adding a click-to-call number.

Think about your keywords

Many of the resources discussing mobile targeting in Adwords suggest that search queries made from a mobile device tend to be shorter than desktop searches. While this appears to be the case for traditional mobile phone users on the Google m platform, research conducted in 2009 showed no difference in the average number of words in an iPhone-based query and a desktop-based query. Assuming this to be true for most modern smartphones, the data implies that we don’t necessarily need to disregard all of our long-tail keywords when we set up mobile-targeted campaigns.

On the other hand, keyword content might differ if users searching via a mobile make more use of Google’s suggested searches. Begin to type some of your high-volume keywords into a smartphone and have a look at the search queries that Google suggests; include them as keywords if you think that they are relevant or add appropriate negative keywords if they are not.

Consider mobiles without full web browsers

 Though this may come as a surprise, the majority of internet-capable mobile phones in use today carry WAP browsers as opposed to the full internet browsers offered by most smartphones. While WAP users might not use their mobiles to browse the web in the same way as a smartphone owner (or as frequently), there is still an opportunity to harness this traffic through AdWords.

Targeting searches from WAP browsers requires the creation of a WAP mobile ad, which will be subject to slightly different policies and will require your destination site to be written in a supported markup language. If you don’t have a suitable landing page, don’t worry; consider connecting clicks to your business telephone number using a “click-to-call” WAP mobile ad.

Thank you for reading! Please feel free to get in touch if you have any questions.