Tis the Season to Go Mobile

Anne Garcia - December 12, 2011

During this holiday shopping season, consumers are consulting mobile devices for holiday shopping more than ever before, according to eMarketer. Smartphones are quickly becoming on-the-go shopping assistants, a la iPhone’s Siri.

Shoppers are using mobile devices for product research, online shopping and help in making purchase decisions while in brick-and-mortar stores. In addition, certain product categories like books, CDs and DVDs, video games, clothing and electronics drive more smartphone usage than others.

This time of year, it is important to be in the consumers’ eyes, especially if you have an e-commerce web site. One easy way to become visible to the mobile customer and get quick results is to segment your pay per click (PPC) traffic to specifically target mobile devices. One important item to note is that you do not have to have a mobile website in order use mobile targeting.

You can simply target mobile devices in the Settings tab of each PPC campaign that you create. Also note that you should exclude mobile devices from your desktop campaigns in order to avoid your campaigns from competing against one another.

According to Google, the average mobile cost-per-click (CPC) is approximately $0.05 to $0.10 cheaper than its counterpart desktop CPC, so not only will your ad be visible to mobile visitors, but you will also be paying less for these visitors.