There has been a lot of talk about how mobile searchers will make up 22% of search revenue in 2012. There’s been less talk about how PPC account managers can take advantage of this relatively new marketing channel. Here are my top 3 tips of mobile PPC marketing.
1. Segment Your Mobile and Desktop Traffic
Best practice is to have your Adwords campaigns set to target Mobile, Tablet or Desktop targeted devices exclusively. Therefore you should not have any campaigns that target all devices. This is the most basic tenant of mobile PPC marketing. If you aren’t doing it yet, don’t read on until you’ve read this PPC Hero post on segmenting by device.
2. Understand the Intent of Mobile Searchers
When a person pulls out their smartphone and searches “Wireless Router” they may have a different intent than someone who performs the same search on a desktop device. The mobile searcher may be looking for the nearest place to buy a router, or perhaps even wants to quickly compare online prices to the price of the router they are holding in their hand. The desktop searcher of the same term may be just beginning their search and looking for more general information on what wireless routers are, how much they cost, and where they can buy one.
A study by Google and Ipsos OTX MediaCT claims that mobile searchers are further down the funnel than your average desktop searcher. So take the time to think carefully when selecting which keywords to add to a mobile marketing campaign, and what landing page you are going to send the traffic to. It’s going to take longer to set up the campaign, and you may have to invest in some new landing pages, but the ROI should be worth the work.
If you’re new to narrowing down intent by search terms, start with a simple spreadsheet. Enter your keywords in one column, then add “Desktop,” and “Mobile” columns to the left. Go through each keyword (yes, that can take a long time, so if you have too many keywords to do this by individual keyword, do it by ad group.) and enter whether you believe the searcher’s intent is awareness, research, compare, or purchase.
Once you know what the intent is, make sure the destination URL for the keywords/ad groups goes to the page on your site that will help them best fulfill that intent.
3. Optimizing Mobile Landing Pages
Just having a landing page that is compatible with mobile devices isn’t enough. You need to make sure it is optimized for the task that mobile searchers will likely want to perform. This includes making sure the buttons on the page are easily clickable with a finger or thumb. The phone number should also be easily clickable without having to zoom or unintentionally clicking a different option. Google has created a great website for testing your mobile landing page for these, and other functionalities.
Once you have these best practices in place, you will want to incrementally optimize the page using Google Analytics and the conversion data that can be found in your Adwords interface.
Fully implementing these three tips will help your business capitalize on the drastic increase in revenue generated by mobile marketing in 2012!
