Articles in The 'Mobile-campaigns' Tag

Tis the Season to Go Mobile

by Anne Garcia

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.

AdWords API Workshop

by MoreVisibility

I have been responsible for the development of MoreVisibility’s software that relies on the search engine’s APIs to manage and report on paid placement campaigns.  I have been working with the Google AdWords API since version one, back in 2006.  The latest and greatest release was announced Oct 7, 2011 and is about the fifteenth version.  Back in 2009, they stopped using the sequential release number nomenclature at V13 in favor of a year time stamp.  The newest release, V201109, has been eagerly awaited by the development community.

Back in the spring of 2010, in conjunction with major version releases, Google began inviting developers to attend an API workshop hosted in one of their seven offices in major metropolitan cities, such as London, Singapore, Tokyo, San Francisco, New York.  This year I attended the NYC workshop and was able to meet the hard working Google developer advocates and fellow developers that I have been corresponding with via their forum.  It was great getting to put a face to these helpful developers and to thank them for their tireless efforts to keep the developer community productive, via guiding us through their various versions of the APIs based on the AdWords platform.  It was also a chance to get a better grasp on the new versions’ complexities, and take away best practices for security and efficiencies.

One of the most important functions exposed in the API is their reporting module.  For agencies to effectively manage multiple clients’ budgeting, we need to get complete data efficiently at our finger tips.  I believe that, in an effort to keep AdWords competitive Google will quickly deploy new advertising channels, without addressing the ease of measuring/reporting on these campaigns.  As an example, many developers were unhappy with the V2009 series of releases, due to the fact that the new Remarketing channels’ data was very difficult to report on, due to it being buried in an Ad Performance Report and not in their Keyword Performance Report.  Many in the development community reported the problem to the AdWords API forum and began requesting a super report that would properly provide metrics across all types of campaigns, such as traditional search, display, remarketing, mobile, location and whatever else Google deems worthy for effective internet advertising.  As developers, we did not like to impose mandates to our team for the naming convention for certain types of AdWords campaigns, which would then allow our application programs to locate and manage the metrics.

The Google AdWords API developers processed our feedback and deemed it a high enough priority to address in their next release.  The new “uber” report, Criteria Performance Report, which allows the downloading of all criteria types in one report was part of their latest release.  To differentiate between the criteria, a new criteria type field has been exposed in the reporting, which allows for filtering upon pulling data and categorizing when pulling all data.

Also found in the latest release, is a new authentication option; the popular three legged OAuth, which is a commonly deployed open standard.  While this may not be needed by all agencies, many at the conference had a need to obtain this method for account access to client’s not able to migrate to their My Client Center for one reason or another.  Security is an important component for Google across all product platforms and a top concern of advertisers when entrusted with the management of their client’s hard earned advertising budget.  So it is not surprising that Google expanded their options for authentication.

The workshop included a Mobile Best Practices track presented by, Sumit Chandel.  Sumit had a wealth of statistics on the smart phone’s explosive growth and projections for the mobile internet users and their searching.  It is expected that mobile users will surpass desktop users by 2013.  This will require advertisers to have a fully functioning mobile presence.  If you are still grasping with how to accomplish and could use some assistance in setting up your mobile site, please reach out and ask about our newest CMS for mobile product.

AdWords allows you to actively drive traffic via mobile targeted campaigns and ad extensions.  AdWords does not leave out any bells and whistles for creating highly targeted mobile campaigns.  One can select the carrier, language, platform, operating system, location, product and proximity that you would like for your ad to appear.  AdWords will even allow one to leverage an extension for a click-to-call functionality.  This will present an extra line of content in your ad for a clickable phone number.  Being that this is a Google platform, they have tightly integrated with their Google Voice product to capture the call metrics, like number of calls and completed calls so you are able to measure your success.

One of the best takeaways from the conference is getting to know what Google is working on for future AdWords API releases.  We can expect to see location targeting to the zip code level and shared objects for the efficient use across campaigns.  As the mobile explosion continues to grow, they will continue to expand mobile device targeting options.

Five Steps to Successful Mobile Campaigns in Google AdWords

by Theo Bennett

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.