The mobile advertising market is growing at an enormous rate.  According to BIA/Kelsey’s US Mobile Advertising Report, search alone went from $59 million in 2009 to $163 million in 2010; and forecast to practically double in 2011! 

Advertisers who leveraged mobile-targeted campaigns in 2009 benefited by seeing higher click through rates on their ads at a lower cost per click (CPC) than campaigns targeting desktop / laptop users using the same keywords.  While this is still possible to achieve in today’s mobile advertising market, it is more challenging.  The influx of advertisers entering the space and high adoption rates of new mobile devices (i.e. Netbooks and ipads) can be leveraged to fine tune your campaign targeting and help generate more revenue.

Here are 3 tips for maximizing your mobile-targeted AdWords campaigns.

1. Be aggressive.

You will be competing to have your ad serve on 5 ad spots versus 10 ad spots with traditional search results on a laptop or desktop. As a guideline, try starting out with 2x your search bids for similar keywords. 
 
2. Use short keyword phrases versus long tail keyword phrases.

Use general keywords to help increase impression volume.  Mobile searchers tend to use shorter queries, so your longer tail keywords will not generate the same amount of impressions in mobile search.

3. Add negatives. 

Think about how the intent of a mobile searcher may be different than a searcher using a desktop / laptop computer.  For example, help weed out users who are looking for driving directions by adding negatives like “map”, “directions”, “locator”, etc.  Don’t forget to use the same negative keywords you have in place for other campaigns you are running.

Mobile-only search campaigns can drive stronger performance and generally see higher click through rates than traditional laptop and desktop campaigns.  Having mobile-only campaigns also allows you to have greater control over budgets, bids, keywords, and ad creative.

Setting up a “mobile only” campaign is easy; here are 3 simple steps.

1. Duplicate / copy an existing search targeted campaign.
2. Within the Campaign settings for Networks and devices, select only “iPhones and other mobile devices with full internet browsers”.
3. Update this setting on your other search campaign to “Desktop and laptop computers”

You can even choose to target specific mobile devices (i.e. iPad only or Android only) as well as specific mobile carriers.  These preferences are found by expanding the ‘Advanced device and carrier options’.

Why keep mobile campaigns separate from desktop / laptop campaigns?  Many options are set at the Campaign level in Google AdWords (i.e. daily budget, day parting, geo-location targeting).  By breaking out your current search campaigns into mobile targeted and desktop / laptop targeted campaigns you will also make it easier to analyze performance as well as enjoy more granular reporting options.

Ever since Google established itself as the Big Dog in online search with 35% of the market share in 2001, whenever there has been a new search engine or search technology brewing there has been an expectation (by someone somewhere) that it will be a “Google Killer”. 

Here are a few of the more buzzworthy Google-killers from the last few years:

• March 2006:  Microsoft Live Search
• January 2007:  Wikia Search (Wikipedia’s Google-Killer)
• October 2007:  Yahoo Search Assist (Yahoo’s Flickr Integration )
• July 2008:  Cuil
• March 2009:  Twitter search
• May 2009:  Wolfram Alpha
• June 2009:  Bing
   

In 2010, expect to see even more “killers” in the online world.  Its no longer about who is going to try to overtake Google in search market share…there have been tons of attempts, but nothing has taken hold up to this point. 

Now we are seeing more “killers” in the social media space.  But history has taught us not to attack Google where they dominate – search.  Social Channels play nice with Google when it comes to search.  While many social platforms have developed their own search engine – they still rely on the big  3; make that 2 engines to power the results.  However, there is opportunity to attack Google in other places that can be damaging, like email / Gmail.  Have you heard about Facebook’s webmail that is in development? 

But Google is always ready to pull something from their arsenal - and it is not Microsoft, Facebook, or even Twitter that seems to be on the radar – despite the rollout of Google Buzz, called a Twitter-killer by some.  Rather, we are seeing Google penetrate and gain momentum in other areas like mobile with the Nexus phone (iPhone killer) and Chrome OS Tablet (iPad killer).  This crossover into retail mobile should help Google continue to dominate in the online world. 

Even more interesting to watch will be Google’s foray into broadband with their 1-gigabit-per-second broadband networks.