Mobile Paid Search Marketing – The Wait is Over

We’ve heard it several years before – this is the year of the mobile. Whether or not 2010 is it, the fact of the matter is that with the iPhone and Android platform, mobile search is quickly becoming a most-do tactic.

At a recent IAB UK seminar focusing on Mobile search, between Google and Yahoo, there were some really interesting nuggets of data shared. Three stats that caught my attention in particular were:

• Smartphones account for circa 22.8% of UK mobile users (comScore MMetrics, Jan 2009)
• The average search query length on a smart phone is about 3 keywords, same as for a desktop computer. The exact decimal points varied slightly between Google (2.9) and Bing (2.7).
• Approximately 1/3 of mobile searches have a location intent (Michael Schipper, Google)

So where do you start with mobile search?

A first step is to analyse what mobile traffic your sites are currently receiving. If your using Google Analytics, it’s as easy as looking under the “visitors” tab and select “mobile devices”. This will give you some top line information, including the percentage of overall site visitors that arrive using mobile devices.

Looking across a couple of my own sites, they receive anything from 2-9% of their traffic from mobile devices. And most of this traffic is generated via search engines.

For paid search, while it’s easy enough in Google to just tick the mobile boxes, it’s still advisable to create separate mobile campaigns to improve the optimisation process. And if you’re running on yahoo it’s worth pointing out that it doesn’t apply any quality scoring for mobile adverts, but just a plain auction.

A common threshold for going mobile, is the lack of a mobile website. However, I’d argue that if the traffic is predominantly coming from smartphones such as the iPhone or any flavour of Android, it should be fairly straightforward to adapt at least a campaign site.

Are you actively using mobile search, and what are your results?

Related posts:

1. Google Mobile iPhone App Review – 6 Months Later
2. Brand Building through Paid Search Marketing
3. The Death of Yahoo Paid Search Inclusion gives Birth to a Fairer SERP
4. Paid Search Affiliate Marketing Guide – Affiliate Brand Bidding or Not?
5. Google Product Ads Lowers the Barriers of Entry to Paid Search

Tagged as: google, mobile, ppc, Yahoo