It's not a choice or something to be left on the future to do list. Your website has to function on a mobile devise. Not only will your visibility and sales be affected but you can expect Google to impart penalties. The growth of mobile activity has trended up steadily and over the last year we have seen certain industries cross the line where mobile visits exceed traditional computer traffic numbers.
Shifting of PPC to Mobile
Growth of mobile traffic to websites naturally impacts advertising. Gartner analysts expected 2014 mobile advertising spending globally to be $18 billion and increase to $41.9 billion by 2017. If you are a retailer or B2C you are already missing opportunity if your site is not adapting to a mobile format. Are you watching your traffic numbers and tracking the platform they are viewing. Somebody in your organization needs to be responsible for it and understand enough so that you aren't wasting precious marketing budget. Are you prepared for the impact of mobile visitors and are your competitors beating you at mobile?
Predictions for 2015
Location Based Marketing: Smartphones have become an integral part of many peoples lives. Upgrading limits your choices - it's harder to get just a phone without data. Smartphones have a setting that provides your location, requires location when using maps and weather APs. The ability of location based advertising makes it attractive to reach target audiences in your geo-vicinity with timely information. Geo-targeting lets you push your message out through AP. Smartphones provide new opportunities to reach your target market.
Video Use In Advertising Will Continue To Grow: Video is being used by marketers in their advertising. Not just on YouTube, other sites with high consumer traffic are allowing video promotion ads from auto markets, cereal companies and more. Video has a power to engage that is not possible from a static ad. Movement and sound spike the impact miles above a print ad. Context remains king, place and content has to be relevant to the audience on the site that the video ads show. More advertisers with the budget will use video over text ads in 2015.
Measuring Results Needs To Deliver Richer Data: Cost-per-acquisition (CPA) tells you whether your campaign is working, the message is right for the target, you are reaching your target, comparing where the best returns are for the budget. Hey it's just like direct response, you need to have a way to measure results and with an interactive medium of the internet there should be greater ability to capture data right from your customer. Web and aps allow you to have a 2 way conversation if you are prepared and have formatted your tools to create that opportunity. Information-rich-data is essential for geo-targeting campaigns.
Optimize, Optimize, Optimize!: PPC marketing allows you to create multiple ads with text and images, identify demographics including location. Monitoring the activity and optimizing the ads keeping the best performing ads is easy with Google ad word data. If you hire an agency to do your pay per click marketing optimizing the ads is part of the cost. If they want to keep you as a customer it is in their best interest to optimized results - lowest cost-per-click.When I say optimizing it is more than which ad gets the highest click-through because you want to track that those clicks are delivering quality prospects. That can be hard if your the landing page doesn't have a call-to-action and way to get their contact information.
Competition is crazy these days even for keywords that have low search requests. I worked to optimize a campaign for recruiting foster parents. Analysis of the CPC averaged $15 for the popular keywords and phrases that were rarely searched. The data provided didn't specify whether the clicks are from publishers, people researching for school or a potential parent. To get the best results you also need to know the existing, quality traffic sources and the campaign they should be matched with.
Personalize Ads: Customers expect their experience to be tailored to there interest and needs. A brochure site doesn't deliver the experience they want. Just like you optimize a website, you need to drill down and create ads micro-focused on the unique pain points and motivators of your audience. You may need 20 ads to speak to all of the motivators that push your customer to buy. You landing pages must also be focused on what the ad promised to speak about. Customers will jump if they don't see relevance in a couple seconds. Think of it as speed dating. Think about how you search, react to websites. A business website isn't about your company it has to be about your customers.
I hope these tips help you build a better return on you mobile and online marketing. If you want to read more here are so other blogs you may find helpful.
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