Making the Most of Mobile – Mobile Search

In Ian Everdell’s recent webinar, he talked about mobile internet and how we often think about how people access our sites through mobile devices. Basically, there are four different experiences in which people can have on a mobile device. One of it is through mobile search.

Over the last few years we have seen the rise of the smart phone, the tablet, and the smart phones that are practically the size of tablets and 2014 will only see an increase in mobile traffic – Stuart Wainstock

For the past few years, mobile search has grown very quickly. Three in five searches are now performed from a mobile device. That’s a 400% increase compared to last year. Around 30% of restaurant searches are made through a mobile. And over 60% of consumer searches are done through mobile. A lot of these searches are happening when people are at the store, on the way to the store, or even at home just thinking about products. People also search through mobile when they are looking for local type trends.

Mobile Inquiry

Over half of mobile searches have local context. People are usually looking for something nearby or for an address. The challenge in mobile search is that people have different intent. Those different intents lead to different queries. Smart phone queries are 25% longer than they are on tablets, and 50% longer than they are on the desktop. So, these mobile users are not taking the time necessarily to start a general search and refine. They want to get the answer right away. What happens then is that different queries and different intent leads to different behavior.

This is where the content comes into play. When people try to access your site, they tend to type different things, they click different things, and ultimately, they are trying to do different things. Understanding those things and how we can capitalize on them to interact with our PPC ads is very important. In this case, we are looking primarily at pay per click (PPC) and search engine marketing. Compared to desktop click through rates, people are much more likely to click on an ad on a mobile device; and it’s a little bit higher when on a smart phone. So there are different behaviors going on and we can take advantage of that.

Optimizing Mobile Search Campaigns

Optimizing mobile Search campaigns helps with websites that are often visited by people who use mobile devices. Listed here are just a few ways to optimize mobile search campaigns:

1. Use device specific bids
2. Use device specific landing pages
3. Track daily mobile usage
4. Add a “Name Search”
5. CTAs (Call to Actions)

Using device specific language

If you can detect when a mobile user is on their iPhone, and they see an ad that references their iPhone, they are more likely to click that ad. You can help improve your mobile search marketing by using words like that helps to improve the click through rate of your ad

Using device specific landing page

This is actually a mobile landing page that serves up similarly to the device specific language in the ads. It may say, “I see on iPhone,”. Serving device specific content is very crucial in getting people to engage with your advertising. It also makes them comfortable using your website because it is friendly with their devices.

Day Parting

People use different devices in different times of day. You might want to target your mobile campaign in different times of day, rather than what you would do on your desktop campaign. This is because people might be interacting with your site differently at those time of day.

Misspelling

There are lots of misspelled words on mobile phones. A way to discover how people are possibly misspelling your name is to open up your browser, turn off auto-correction, and type your company name or key product or one of your high volume search terms. Type it in 10 times as fast as you can and see what you get and start potentially bidding on those terms. Those are possible terms that consumers are doing where you might not come up, or where you can lower cost per click, or bids with higher CPR.

Mobile Extensions

Call to actions like “click to call these” are all additional targets for people to click. They give them extra options. The other extra thing about these extensions is that, in mobile devices, because the screen is so small, you take a lot more real estate when you use it. By taking advantage of the extension available to you in PPC, you can actually take more of the screen and get more of the visual attention devoted to each other’s result. If you want to learn more about mobile search or more about this webinar, click here. You can also learn more about mobile search and marketing through Ian Everdell’s company: Mediative.

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