I was invited to Google’s “Love Mobile” event, to speak on the Mobile Search panel.  Related to this presentation was a panel on Mobile Advertising which prompted me to consider the ways in which these mobile search and mobile advertising impact each other.

Although vendors have been trying to market mobile as a viable advertising platform for years, their success was hampered by a lack of appropriate technology. The success of the iPhone 3G prompted a fundamental shift for promoters of mobile internet, through the alleviation of the practical problems surrounding mobile search – the clunkiness, the speed, and the unavailability of mobile-focused sites.

Mobile internet users are responding to these changes. In the last two years, restaurant-related search queries have increased 400%. And – to add some context to this, in my experience, restaurant-related search queries are more immediate in their nature – you’re hungry and you want to find somewhere to eat.

The event planning timeline is shrinking. That’s great news for people who leave researching a venue to the last minute, or people who love to get together spontaneously (flash mobs, anyone?) … and this is also great news for mobile advertisers. With the planning of events taking place on-the-go rather than beforehand, mobile advertisers can expose these “late researchers” to influential advertising. Their lack of time means they’re likely to latch onto an offer if it crosses their device’s screen.

Clearly, we’re talking about a lot of screens. Google’s analysis of the top 1,000 commercial queries, as in, those related to shopping, reveals a 2500% growth over the last three years – and that’s just mobile. What this means to advertisers is pretty simple: if your site doesn’t have a mobile version, you are missing out on potential shoppers and revenue.

To understand this growth from the mobile advertising side — AdMob display network is Google’s mobile ad network. You can use it for display advertising on mobile devices. It’s constantly growing and a good place to supplement your existing search advertising.

AdMob is currently serving the following:

• Total Sites & Apps: 39,100+
• Total Apps: 27,300+ (13,600+ Apple, 13,700+ Android)
• UK ad requests = 93 million per day

Increasing functionality

You should be running separate campaigns for mobile and desktop. Why? To be able to add on additional search formats, to take advantage of features that are mobile-specific, like the click-to-call phone extension.

Click-to-call

Click-to-call enables mobile users to simply tap on a phone number to dial it. Details for how to set this up are via https://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=173346 I have seen a 5-30% increase in CTR by adding a click-to-call number to ads, which hasn’t affected clickthroughs to the mobile site. You’re getting extra traffic by being an easily-discovered, easily-dialled resource, and, it turns out, people are looking for more information than just a phone number, so they’ll also make use of the main site.

More information on click-to-call’s related feature, click-to-download is here.

 

Dealing with size and location

You also should separate campaigns to compensate for mobile’s condensed format. For example, sitelinks.

Sitelinks

The functionality of sitelinks is the same for mobile as it is for the desktop version, except only two sitelinks will show within the ad unit instead of four. (The ad unit being the sponsored link box that appears before the non-sponsored links.) Because of this reduction, it’s important to split your mobile and desktop campaigns so users are pointed to the right version for whatever technology they’re using. Technical details are here: http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=188236

Hyperlocal

If your work involves promoting stores or anywhere with a physical presence, you should use hyperlocal mobile advertising. This is enabled once you set up location extensions on your ads. Technical details are here: http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=144545