You have stepped up to the plate and made the (smart) decision to create a mobile friendly version of your website. That is great news, especially because the number of mobile users continues to rise and you ought to ensure that your website can accommodate this growing market segment. So, now all you have left to do is design the mobile site and you’re done, right? WRONG!  Just when you think you have all of your bases are covered, you don’t. There are a few important factors to consider before building out your mobile site.

For starters, there are many different smartphones available for people to choose from. You might be asking yourself, what exactly is a smartphone? According to Wikipedia, “a smartphone is a mobile phone that offers more advanced computing ability and connectivity than a contemporary basic feature phone. Smartphones may be thought of as handheld computers integrated within a mobile phone.” Examples of the most commonly used smartphones are:  iPhone, Blackberry, Android, etc. Now you might be asking yourself, does it really matter which device a visitor uses to access my website? Won’t having a mobile version make for a positive user experience for every smartphone user? The answer is probably not, reason being, not all smartphones will render the same. This is why it’s hugely important to identify which devices your visitors are using to view your website. Having this knowledge will afford you the ability to tailor to the vast majority of your mobile audience. For example, when creating mobile websites for clients, our Design and Development teams utilize simulator testing, which will actually “simulate” how the site will render on each device. In addition, they will create custom versions to support the most popular devices accessing your site, as well as install JavaScript, which will detect which device is being used, then display the appropriate version.

Now, you might be asking yourself, how do I figure out which devices my visitors are using? This information can be easily found in your analytics program. If you utilize Google Analytics, click on Visitors (on the left navigation) then click on Mobile and finally, Mobile Devices. The results may astound you! Remember: having a mobile site is only half the battle; it should be optimized properly for your mobile audience, whatever that audience might be.

So you think you need a mobile campaign?  Well you probably do.  Web browsing and searching is exploding on so called smartphones that contain fully functioning browsers.  This includes, of course, the iPhone but also phones which run on Google’s Android operating system.  The iPhone was first, but according to Macworld, Android based phones will duke it out with Apple for smartphone dominance.  This is not only a rosy outlook for Google’s Android operating system, but also for mobile marketers. 

So should you market to mobile users, here are five quick steps to take to help you answer this question:

1. Do you have a mobile website? I know what’s coming next.  With the exception of the iPhone and Adobe Flash, today’s smartphones have full browser support and can render websites, so why do you need a mobile site?    The answer is obvious if you look at your 1024×768 website on a 4 inch screen – it looks terrible. If you don’t want to develop your entire site for mobile devices, at least offer a bridge to mobile users:  A few key pages: home, contact us form, about us, locations and click to call functionality, so that users of mobile devices can easily learn more about your company and services.   Code this mobile site with Google Analytics so your referring data doesn’t fall into a black hole.  The last thing you need are referrals from /mobile or mobile.yoursite.com in your GA data.
2. Log into your Google AdWords account; segment your campaign keywords and ads by “device”. Voila! If you haven’t previously excluded mobile devices from your campaigns; your AdWords data is now broken out by computer and mobile device.  I’ll bet there are more impressions and clicks than you expected!
3. If you aren’t using AdWords, or even if you are; log into Google Analytics and select “Mobile Traffic” from the advanced segment dropdown.  Booyah!  Here you’ll see only the mobile traffic and how mobile browsers are accessing and converting on your site.
4. If you have any mobile data after completing steps 2 and 3, and don’t have a mobile site, then build one ASAP. If you have a mobile site and no mobile campaigns, then build a mobile campaign.  That’s right, change your campaign settings in you current campaigns to target only “computers” and then build a new campaign that only targets mobile devices.   When you get started on your mobile campaign, there are many options that include device and mobile service provider.  Skip these for now and target all mobile networks and devices.  Once you’ve collected some data on performance, you can optimize with real data and not hunches that Verizon users will buy more than Sprint users.  (The exception is if you are selling, for example, an iPhone app; then please select iPhone and AT&T here please.) 
5. Measure and Optimize.   Building a search marketing campaign properly is only the beginning.  Collect data, analyze and optimize. 

So if you’re still not convinced, remember that mobile search can happen in ways that desktop search cant.  It happens away from the office, at times of inspiration or worry.  It happens prior to imminent purchases as buyers ensure they are buying the best widget at the best price.  And it happens, for the most part at a lower cost.  That’s right; I saved the best for last.  Depending on your campaigns and keywords, there is generally less competition on mobile and in my experience; a properly optimized and targeted campaign can get you the same click for less.

Our friends at Google have recently launched a new sorting algorithm within Google Analytics. Now, when you sort a computed metric – like goal conversion rate, bounce rate or percentage of new visits – you can weight that sort by the number of data points.  This ranks the most interesting and actionable items higher in your sort.

Previously, if you wanted to see which keyword had the highest bounce rate, it would rank keywords with 100% bounce rates the highest, even if the keyword only had one visit. This did not lend much to analyze.

Now, however, with Weighted Sort you can see which keywords with substantial visits are giving you high bounce rates.

Weighted Sort clears up the clutter of large amounts of data and helps you make more effective decisions when dissecting campaigns. It can help you focus on what keywords or pages need to be improved to increase your campaign performance.