Consider these two statistics from Google’s 2013 Mobile Path to Purchase report:
93% of people that use mobile to research go on to complete a purchase of a product or service, and over half of consumers want to make a purchase within an hour of conducting research on their smartphone.
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You don’t need much more of a reason to make sure that you have mobile ads targeting smartphone users.
So if you’re running a Google Adwords campaign, how can you ensure you’re capturing that traffic on mobile devices?
Here are a couple quick and easy changes you can make to ensure you are reaching your potential customers on mobile devices.
- Create Mobile Optimized Ads
If you’ve already created an ad for desktop, then creating a new ad for mobile devices is relatively easy. All you have to do is copy the same ad and save it as mobile optimized ad right within Adwords.Split Testing:
Also, don’t forget to split test your ads to improve the performance. In the second version of your mobile or desktop ad change up the ad text, change the headline, the call to action, or the display URL. Don’t change too much as you want to understand which change in the ad affected the performance. Once you have enough data, pause the ad that is not performing as well (i.e. lower click through rate, fewer conversions), and create another ad to split test and change up another variable.Don’t forget also to optimize your ad extensions too – not just the ads. Ad extensions allow you to add additional information into your ads such as extra links to other pages on your site (site link extensions), your business address, your phone number, and a relatively new feature called callouts – all these ad extensions need to also have mobile optimized versions. There are other ad extensions that you can explore, but the previous one’s are more commonly used. - Adjust Mobile Bids
Average Position:
On a mobile phone if your ad has an average position below 2 it has almost no chance of getting any clicks. On a smartphone the top of the screen above the fold is dominated by 2 paid ads, and the visible screen space leaves very little room for any organic results above the fold. This is very different from desktop results where you can easily see 3 Google ads at the top along with organic results all above the fold – this is why ad position on mobile is even more important than desktop.
Increased Impressions, Clicks:
Sometimes bidding more aggressively will buy you more impressions and clicks. Google provides a bid simulator, which provides data on how many more impressions and clicks you could be getting if you increased your bid by a certain percentage. Sometimes the increase in the bid may not get you enough of an increase in clicks or impressions to make it worthwhile, but that is something you will have to test and decide on.
