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September 17, 2014

Google AdWords is Mobilizing

 google-adwords-mobile

Mobile is no longer the future. Actually, mobile is now. I just attended a conference at Google this past month that included two of twelve lectures devoted entirely to mobile marketing. Globally, mobile traffic makes up about 35 percent of all internet activity.  In March, Google’s own Matt Cutts said “he wouldn’t be surprised” if mobile search exceeded desktop queries this year, and many industry leaders predict that that will be the case by the end of 2015. It’s happening, and Google has taken note. In the past month alone, Google has announced a couple of major mobile-related changes to its AdWords platform in an attempt to help advertisers better capitalize on the trend, and it may impact best practices for mobile marketers moving forward.

Change #1: Google has recognized that ad extensions lead to higher click-through rates, and they have decided to change the format of ad copy within mobile ads to allow for more ad extensions to be displayed. Starting October 15, ads may only show the first line of ad text accompanied by an ad extension. Depending on how well it’s expected to perform, the second line of ad text may or may not show with the new mobile ads. The purpose of this change is both to give advertisers another point of engagement with their customers, and to make it easier for customers to find information about an advertiser’s business, such as location and product offerings.

Impact: Many mobile best practices will remain the same, but to take full advantage of the change, you’ll want to have all relevant ad extensions enabled and optimized. Because the first line of text is all that’s guaranteed to show up now, make sure that the most important information in your ad is included in that first line so it doesn’t get cut off. Also, it would be a good idea to write a separate sentence for each line, or at least a separate thought, because you want that first line to be able to stand alone if necessary.

Change #2: Click-to-Call Ads and their resulting metrics are a great way to gain insight into the quality and quantity of phone calls that a mobile search ad produces. The biggest issue in tracking the effectiveness of mobile ads has always been that we did not have a way to account for the visitors who clicked through a search ad, and then called the phone number they saw on the website after doing some additional research. The Google forwarding number is limited to your ad, not the number on your website itself. Until now, that is: Google recently launched Website Call Conversions as a new way to identify and measure all calls from your website that occur after an ad click, not just the calls directly from Click-to-Call Ads. We now have the ability to dynamically insert a Google forwarding number on a website when it is reached via search ad and track call metrics back to the keyword and ad that produced the call.

Impact: With Website Call Conversions, we are able to see which ad groups/keywords/ads are driving not just the most, but also the most valuable phone calls throughout a particular campaign, thus allowing us to optimize these campaigns accordingly.  This is a great tool that can be utilized for pretty much all clients.  In particular, for non-eCommerce websites, or for websites that receive relatively few ‘online conversions’, this gives marketers another way to measurably demonstrate the value of search ads for our clients. More than that, though, these changes also significantly increase the value of our search marketing efforts.

Good job, Google!

Reference:

http://searchengineland.com/matt-cutts-mobile-queries-may-surpass-pc-year-186816

http://gs.statcounter.com/#desktop+mobile+tablet-comparison-na-monthly-201308-201408

http://searchengineland.com/smartphones-drive-50-percent-google-paid-search-clicks-end-2015-study-187013

http://adwords.blogspot.com/2014/08/introducing-website-call-conversions.html

http://adwords.blogspot.com/2014/09/making-every-character-count.html