The mobile market is booming.  In fact, one would be hard pressed to find someone without a cell phone. However, a big question is what strategies businesses should use to reach people on their mobile devices? Businesses have to learn how people interact with their mobile devices, in order to craft a proper strategy to reach them.

It’s no surprise that mobile users are constantly on the move and looking to get information quickly when searching for it.  Therefore, businesses have to make information quickly and easily accessible to them.  For example, let’s say a business has a landing page with a lead generation form. In order to get more details, a person has to fill out the form. This is fine for computer users, but probably not the best way to reach mobile users. It would be better to have a landing page with a phone number that says to call for more information.  For a mobile user, calling a business is easier than trying to fill out an online form.

Another way to reach mobile users is through geo-targeting; specifically physical location targeting. Basically, physical location targets device-based location signals and only shows your ads to people who are physically in your target area.  A local business can truly benefit from using this targeting strategy.  Let’s say a couple from North Carolina is visiting family in New York. They are driving around looking for a good restaurant. They check their mobile device and receive an advertisement from a restaurant that is only 2 miles away and decide to try it out. This restaurant benefitted by using physical location targeting. If they had just targeted the New York area, they might have missed out on the couple from North Carolina. However, by doing physical location targeting they were able to reach the North Carolina couple because the couple’s actual location was only a few miles from their restaurant.

They are many different strategies which can be employed to reach mobile users, and businesses should sit down and decide on the best ways for their business to proceed. Once the strategy is created, implement it and make adjustments as you go.

It’s possible that some searchers have had to do a double-take with some of the ads they’ve seen on Google recently. It’s not a glitch. Google is testing out the display url in the headline of paid placement ads. For many searchers and companies alike, this is a welcomed breathe of fresh air.

In an article in Search Engine Land, Google wants to “clarify to users where their click-through will take them.”  A lot of searchers glance at ad copy, but don’t take the time to check out the display url right beneath the paid placement ad copy.  Due to this oversight, many searchers have made the mistake of clicking on the wrong paid placement ad.  They think they are going to one particular site and end up on the wrong website.  Some searchers have the patience to go back and figure out where they went wrong, while others may abandon their search or start a new search altogether. By showing the display url in the headline, Google is shedding a lot more light on where the final destination of an ad will lead a searcher. Some predict that this will result in better clickthrough rates for many businesses, especially since this gives searchers a better clue of where they will be landing.

For many companies this is a plus, because other businesses won’t be able to disguise themselves as another site. This is especially important for companies’ branded terms. For years businesses have been putting “official site” and the trademark symbol “®” in their ads to shine a beacon of light to searchers and help them steer clear of imitations.  As Google continues to roll out ads for advertisers that show the display url in the headline, the murky waters of paid placement ad confusion should become more pristine and sparking. It’s a lot harder for imitators to pretend they are the official site when the display url in their headline glaringly, states that they aren’t the true site.  Take a look at the example below. The url of “morevisibility.com” in the headline labels the ad as belonging to

Morevisibility.  Even if a competitor tried to be crafty and say, “We will give your ads “more visibility” in the search world.” A searcher would be able to tell from the display url in the headline that Morevisibility wasn’t running the ad.

Display url’s in the headline give legitimate businesses an edge over crafty competitors and sneaky imitators. As Google continues to roll out this new change, it should prove itself to be a win-win situation for searchers and for companies who are the original provider of products and/or services.

One of the biggest hurdles business owners and marketers face in creating marketing campaigns is bias.  It is human nature, I suppose, that we believe our ideas and viewpoints are held by the majority of the public.  However, it is important to remove your bias from the discussion when developing an ad campaign.  Not all web surfers think alike or use the internet the same way to find information.  More importantly to consider and understand…not all people think like you when it comes to finding information online.

For small and medium size business owners, this seems like one of the hardest marketing lessons to accept.  It is understandable to expect a business owner, who built his or her business from the ground up, to have their pulse on what makes the business grow.  When it comes to internet marketing and paid search campaigns, many business owners simply apply the same logic that helped build their business to the web.  This is often a failing strategy, because of the bias inherent in the business owner’s thought process on what drives people to their website.  It is this bias and inexperience from most business owners that lead to poorly created and managed paid search campaigns.  Many of the fixes needed to restructure these campaigns are technical in design.  For example, the business owner wasn’t aware of the proper way to build out and structure the campaign, which is to be expected.  They have enough on their plates running their business, and probably never took the time to earn their Google AdWords Certification.  Getting a business owner to agree to technical and structural change is relatively easy when providing paid search consultation, it is exactly the type of help they need and want to hear.

Where it gets challenging for the marketing consultant, is educating the business owner on how to drive higher quality traffic, when the recommendations are in stark contrast to the preconceptions of the business owner.  I do not think many business owners like to hear their ideas on traffic generation are flawed.  As a marketing consultant, educating the business owner on how to look past their own bias by showing real-time statistics to support your recommendations is imperative.  Using Google Analytics (GA) is the most effective way to demonstrate the concept that not all searchers think alike and not all keywords are equal.  Website visitors and their engagement with the site determine success for any campaign.  As a business owner, learn to leverage that data to educate yourself and break down the walls of bias when creating and optimizing an online marketing campaign.  Don’t assume you can just build out keywords based on how you search the internet.  This will only limit your campaign’s effectiveness, because not all searchers think like you.