The following is a guest post from Andrew Hudson, PPC Analyst at Epiphany Solutions.
As I’m sure we are all aware, the market for high end mobile devices is huge and is an important growth sector with an enormous potential and target audience for Mobile Ads. We all, as search marketers, need to be right on top of this sector and need to ensure we are maximising the potential of this channel.
By 2015, it’s been estimated that shopping via mobile devices will account for in excess of $163 billion in sales worldwide, 12% of global ecommerce turnover (ABI Research, 2010), with 59% of consumers using their smart phones to perform mobile shopping activities from home (Experian Study, 2011).
With this in mind we need to ensure we are embracing all the latest technologies available at our fingertips. I would like to outline a couple of useful snippets that should help us all improve our mobile campaigns.
The first of which being the “Click to Call” facility. This feature has been around for a while now, since January 2010 in fact, and is a much underestimated tool. It enables the user to click on a phone link and call directly the desired business. Recently, statistics unveiled by a Senior Product Manager at Google revealed that campaigns with the “click to call” function typically experienced a 6-10% rise in click through rate, which could have a dramatic impact on sales.
Another useful nugget is adding the location extension to your ads. When a user searches for one of your mobile ads they will be able to see how close to your business they are, where your business is on a map and again a “click to call” link.
Surojit Chatterjee, a senior product manager of mobile ads for Google, surmises that mobile users are much more focused on fulfilling immediate actions and are looking for things they can act on immediately.
Both of these functions are very appealing to the mobile user and in my experience they really work well, they can make the difference between success and failure.
If you are not trailing them, why not?
