Category: #MobileAdvertising

Mobile advertising refers to the display of digital advertisements on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets.

Mobile advertising includes various formats, such as banner ads, interstitial ads, video ads, and native ads, and can be delivered through mobile apps or mobile-optimized websites.

Mobile advertising is an increasingly popular marketing tactic, as more people are using mobile devices to access the internet than ever before. Advertisers can use various targeting options to reach specific audiences, including demographics, interests, behaviors, and geolocation.

Mobile advertising offers businesses a range of benefits, including increased brand awareness, website traffic, and sales, as well as the ability to reach customers on the go.

Mobile Ads: Facebook: 2 million advertisers milestone and new mobile ad manager

Summary of the Article

Hot on the heels of news of a significant milestone for Facebook in terms of advertiser numbers comes the launch of a new mobile ads manager app.

Article

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Facebook has announced that, for the first time in the company’s history, it has more than 2 million advertisers, a doubling of numbers in 18 months.

According to eMarketer, Facebook accounted for 7.75% of all global digital ad revenues in 2014, and 18.4% of the global mobile ad market, up from 16.6% in 2013.

Culled From

first published: 2015-02-25 00:45:00

Mobile Ads: Google’s new smartphone ad format allows customers to call directly by tapping a button

Summary of the Article

Google is rolling out a mobile ad format that will allow smartphone users to call an advertiser directly from their ad, rather than clicking through to their …

Article

Google is rolling out a mobile ad format that will allow smartphone users to call an advertiser directly from their ad, rather than clicking through to their website.

The ad format, called call-only campaigns, features the advertiser’s name, along with a short description of their business and a call button.

Call-only campaigns will have the same cost-per-click (CPC) cost as a standard ad that links to a website, even though Google claims the call button typically increases click-through rates by 6-8%.

Culled From

first published: 2015-02-22 00:56:15

Mobile Search Events on Smart Devices

Local Search ResultsLocal consumers use their mobile devices to look for all different types of local businesses.

The most popular types of business to search for on a mobile are:

  • Pub/Bar/Club — 32%
  • Restaurant/Cafe — 31%
  • General Shop — 31%
  • Clothes Shop — 26%

 

All these above business types are similar in:

  • Brick and mortar with Physical Address
  • Consumers make quick decisions about these products and services.
  • Consumers visit these businesses within a short time frame of finding them on their mobile. 

So, if you are a local business and have not yet worked out a plan to get yourself found on the net; well, your competition is laughing all the way to the bank !

[roboshot url=”https://yourlocalsem.com/?p=894″ width=”150″]

Tablets Beat PCs in Online Searches

The latest reporting and surveys finds:

  • The findings showed that the conversion rates on tablet search clicks went up a little more than 30 percent last year and by the end of this year, will bypass PC searches.
  • The findings also showed that advertisers spent more than 5 percent more on paid search advertising for tablets last year.
  • Meanwhile, click through rates for those search ads were 37 percent above the PC searches.
  • Another interesting finding is that the cost for tablet search ads increased by 25 percent last year.

 

https://www.zdnet.com/tablets-on-track-for-higher-conversion-click-through-rates-than-pcs-report-7000011150/

Responsive Web Design :-: Responding To Your Visitors

As of February, the smartphone share in the United States has reached nearly 50%. 2012 is FINALLY “the year of mobile” and this means that you need to invest in a mobile user experience. Check your analytics — that mobile traffic share keeps growing!

With all of the hype that responsive web design is getting, what are the biggest implications for marketers and SEOs regarding its fit as the long-term mobile strategy?

First Of All, What is Responsive Web Design?

In a nutshell, responsive web design (RWD) is a technique which uses fluid layouts (which “stretch” to as much screen real estate as possible) in addition to the CSS “@media queries,” which apply different style sheets (CSS) based on the current screen size of the device. With responsive design, your website will fit virtually any device with a full browser: smartphones, iPad + other tablets (both landscape and portrait modes), and even TVs. It doesn’t matter that the Galaxy Tab’s resolution is different from a Nexus S phone — your site will render beautifully, as long as responsive design was correctly implemented.

Exampe of Responsive Web Design (RWD): UC San Diego

One of the most famous examples of responsive web design is Boston Globe.com: simply go to the site and re-size your browser window: the website will automatically adjust to the current width of your browser. Boston Globe is probably the biggest, most complex site which has implemented this technique, but there are hundreds of other examples available at mediaqueri.es, including UC San Diego, Smashing Magazine, and more.

What are the Alternatives to Responsive Design?

Responsive design became a hot topic since the growth of mobile. Some people view it as the best solution to improve the mobile (and tablet) user experience, however it is not always the case. The purpose of this post is to go over the RWD in detail, but in order to see the full picture, “going mobile” via RWD does have two alternatives.

Separate mobile site.

Usually hosted on the “m.” sub-domain, mobile sites are usually developed from scratch. Visitors will redirect to the mobile site after server detects that their User-Agent is a smartphone.

For example, the user-agent of an iPhone looks like this:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8H7 Safari/6533.18.5

Mobile App.

While mobile apps (Apple iOS, Android, Blackberry, or Windows Phone) are the best in controlling the user experience and taking advantage of the smartphones’ hardware capabilities, they are expensive to develop and they are not part of the “open web,” making apps impossible for search engines to crawl.

How Does Google Crawl/Index Responsive Sites?

Crawling.

About 6 months ago, Google introduced a new smartphone Crawler, which mimics the iPhone’s user-agent.
Since RWD simply adjusts to the screen size and does not change the content based on the mobile user-agent, Googlebot-Mobile has access to all of the content of the full site (HTML, CSS, images, etc). The only difference is: in the case that Google can read through CSS and understand “@media” queries used by RWD, Google can figure out which elements are hidden on your mobile site (it doesn’t seem so, but still is an open question). To be on the safe side, I wouldn’t hide any elements containing important content at widths higher than 600px.

Image Previews in SERPs.

Google mobile SERPs show the listings’ previews on the latest smartphones. For responsive designs, the preview is shown at the width of about 640px wide (iPhone’s resolution in a portrait mode). See example screenshot below.

Indexing and Caching [with an Experiment!].

I ran an experiment to figure out if Google actually indexes mobile-specific pages. I took the following steps:

  • On the bottom of each page of my site, I added a text which targets mobile user-agents and is only visible if the visitor’s device is a smartphone.
  • The exact text (which is “mobphone teststring”) didn’t match any pages in Google nor Bing
  • I did “Fetch as Googlebot” (Mobile: Smartphone) in Webmaster Tools. The result showed that my text is visible to Google Bot. [April 27/9pm EST]
  • I waited until my pages got crawled again (checked my server logs after running “Fetch as Googlebot”). Googlebot-Mobile crawled by homepage on April 29th at 9pm EST.
  • I searched for “mobphone teststring” in Google & Bing… No results found (still, after 10 days).
  • When searching for my own site on Google using a smartphone, the “Cached” pages belong to the desktop site and “mobphone teststring” is not there.

VERDICT: When crawling mobile versions of the pages located at the same URLs as the desktop pages (either RWD or done via user-agent targeting):

  • Google will NOT cache the mobile version of your pages.
  • Currently, Google seems to ignore any content which shows up only for the mobile visitors.

Google Mobile Search = Cached full, desktop site

If your visitor goals are different on the mobile site than on a desktop site (e.g. car insurance companies: quotes on desktop vs. road-side assistance on mobile), then I tend to agree with Bryson Meunier: currently, the hybrid approach to mobile URLs (having an “.m” sub-domain) would ensure that the mobile site’s content gets cached and treated equally to the desktop sites. (Although at the end of this post, I describe how I’d like this to be taken care of by Search Engines long-term.)

Bing & Mobile.

While Bing doesn’t have a separate mobile crawler which mimics a smartphone, Bing seems to use BingBot for crawling the desktop and mobile sites. Also, a fairly recent post by Duane Forrester talks about how the “one-URL” policy for all devices is preferred by Bing. I couldn’t find any other information online, in the server logs, or by experimenting (Bing doesn’t give an ability to see cached pages on mobile).

Responsive Web Design: Ultimate List of Advantages and Disadvantages.

Responsive design is not a one-size-fits-all solution to mobile. According to the author of the Responsive Web Design book, Ethan Marcotte:

“But most importantly, responsive web design isn’t intended to serve as a replacement for mobile web sites. […] And as a development strategy, it’s meant to be evaluated to see if it meets the needs of the project you’re working on.”

Keeping this in mind and considering implications listed below, does RWD meet the needs of the project?

ADVANTAGES of Responsive Web Design.

  • User Experience (UX): Website adjusts to any screen size, making it a good long-term solution to UX with the current plethora of devices (including mobile/tablet hybrids). Hiding elements which aren’t crucial for mobile visitors helps to achieve their goals faster.
  • Analytics: One complete view for all the traffic. To get insights on the mobile visitors, create a “mobile-only” segment (note that by default, Google Analytics puts all the tablets under “Mobile” segment).
  • Sharing/Linking: One URL to accumulate all of the shares, likes, tweets, and inbound links. Contributes to a better user experience as well: have you ever clicked on a link in a tweet just to see a mobile version of a page in your full browser? #badUX
  • SEO: Going with the advantage above, one URL accumulates all links, PageRank, Page Authority, etc. However, as Search Engines get smarter at determining the relationships between mobile-optimized pages and desktop pages, this advantage won’t matter.
  • Development: RWD involves no redirects to take care of, no user-agent targeting.
  • Maintenance: Once your website is responsive, there’s very little maintenance involved, as opposed to up-keeping a separate mobile site. It is not required to up-keep a user-agent list with all of the up-to-date mobile devices.
  • Information Architecture (IA): With a 1-to-1 relationship to the desktop site, mobile mimics the full site’s IA, reducing the learning curve to get accustomed to using the mobile version.

DISADVANTAGES of Responsive Web Design.

  • User Experience/Load Time: Users need to download unnecessary HTML/CSS code (not a huge deal) and most of the time, images are simply scaled down, NOT resized — negatively impacting the load-time (bigger issue).
  • SEO: With RWD, you cannot easily adjust Titles, Descriptions, and Content for the mobile users. Mobile users use different keywords, more likely to use voice search and for some verticals, there can be significant variation (use Google’s Keyword Tool, which separates mobile searches from the desktop).
  • SEO: As determined by my experiment, Google doesn’t rank sites based on the mobile-only content located at the same URLs. If your responsive site targets user-agents to serve certain mobile-only content, it will not be indexed nor used to rank your website.
  • Development: The initial development of responsive web design takes more time. It is usually much easier to create RWD from scratch than to convert an existing site.
  • Design: Since layouts of RWD are “fluid” (other than two extremes: mobile and a full desktop site), there’s less control over how the “in-between” layouts will look and it is time-consuming for designers to show all the possible mockups beforehand. Instead, designers usually show wireframes & mockups of the desktop + mobile layouts. When both are approved, RWD is implemented and designers can then show operational layouts of the site in all screen sizes.

I tried to keep the list above as straight-forward as possible. I will offer some generalizations in the section below, but by all means, it is ultimately up to you to decide if RWD is the best solution for your mobile strategy.

When Using Responsive Web Design Makes Sense (And Doesn’t).

As mentioned earlier, RWD is not a cookie-cutter solution; therefore, it works for some sites better than others. Below are some generalizations, but make sure to go through the full list of pros/cons above if you haven’t done so already.

  • If your website contains fewer than 50 pages, does not include advanced functionality, and user intent is not significantly different on the mobile devices, chances are, RWD would be a great solution to improve the mobile users’ experience.
  • If your website is fairly simple, without too many different page “types” (e.g. article pages, category pages, browse by pages, etc.), and the user intent is not significantly different on the mobile devices, RWD can be a good solution to improve mobile UX.
  • If you have a complex site with a lot of page types, user intent is not significantly different on the mobile and you’re planning a redesign, you should at least consider RWD.
  • If people have significantly different goals when using your site from mobile devices, chances are, RWD is not for you.

Undoubtedly, mobile visits keep growing fast, but despite the latest reports that only 9% of the top 1 million websites are “mobile-ready” (by Mongoose Metrics), the absolute majority of websites actually ARE smartphone-ready — since 2007, when Apple introduced the ability to browse any website on the iPhone. In fact, Apple believes that it delivered such a great product (full browser which made phones “smart”) that there’s no need for mobile sites: Apple.com on a smartphone is their full website.

Like any other project, set goals and realistic expectations for the mobile site (“increase conversion rate of mobile segment by X%” or “increase satisfaction rate of customers accessing mobile site by X%”) and determine if this is enough to justify the investment with your current mobile user base, accounting for the growth.

Where I’d Like to See Mobile Search.

As far as search engines go, IMHO, it is in their interest to determine the intent of the users depending on the device they use. Cindy Krum of MobileMoxie has blogged about SERPs differences depending on a device, and I think we will see more of these improvements going forward. We really cannot expect Bob, a restaurant owner, to do keyword research to determine that mobile searchers want to view menu and directions more than the “about the restaurant” section on the homepage. Search engines need to develop further and offer mobile visitors pages which are more likely to be clicked on (nothing new), but adapt this functionality for mobile.

Update:

Just yesterday, Google took an official stand on building smartphone-optimized websites and says that responsive web design is Google’s recommended configuration. With that said, advantages/disadvantages of RWD listed in this post are still the same.

 

 

https://www.seomoz.org/ugc/responsive-web-design-the-ultimate-guide-for-online-marketers

Mobile Campaign – Google Best Practices

Just because you can see your desktop website on a mobile phone doesn’t mean that it’s mobile-friendly. People who use high-end mobile devices, like iPhones or Android phones, can see standard AdWords ads and standard websites. But other possible customers use WAP mobile phones, which can only view specially designed mobile websites.

To reach the most mobile customers, it helps to create a mobile website that’s tailored to the small screen and makes it easy for people to make a purchase or take other action on your site.

When designing your site, keep in mind mobile best practices, like simple navigation and highlighting local options of your business. If you’d like to reach customers with WAP phones, you’ll also need to use mobile-friendly code to create your site.

Reaching mobile customers using a normal (HTML) website

Regardless of whether you have a mobile website, AdWords will let you show text ads to customers using Google Search on a high-end mobile device, like an iPhone or Android phone. These “smart phones” have a full Internet browser (like a desktop computer), so a customer who clicks your standard-sized text ad from the search results page can visit your standard website written with HTML.

By default, AdWords opts your new campaigns into “all available devices,” which includes these “mobile devices with full browsers.” You can opt in or out of showing ads on “Mobile devices with full browsers” from each campaign’s Settings tab.

Keep in mind…

If you opt in, make sure that your landing page doesn’t contain Flash content. Flash is currently not supported on iPhones or iPads, and has only limited support on Android and other high-end mobile devices. If our system detects that your landing page has lots of Flash content, we’ll automatically limit your ads from running on high-end mobile devices.

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Target a device

Nowadays, many mobile devices have standard browsers, but some feature phones lack a full browser and can only view mobile-specific webpages. To reach customers on these devices, you’ll need to create a WAP [mobile ad] and a WAP-friendly mobile website, which we’ll talk about more below.

Best practices for designing a mobile site

When creating a mobile website, you’ll want to keep in mind a few strategies that best take advantage of the small size of mobile screens and the behavior of mobile users. These strategies can help make sure your mobile site is a great experience for customers and direct them to take the desired actions on your site.

Keep it quick

  1. Reduce large blocks of text and use bullet points.
  2. Compress images to keep them small for faster site loading.

Make it easy to buy something or contact you.

  1. Reduce the number of steps needed to complete a transaction.
  2. Keep forms short, with the fewest number of fields possible.
  3. Use check boxes, lists, and scroll menus to make data entry easier.
  4. Use click-to-call functionality for all phone numbers.

Simplify navigation

  1. Minimize scrolling and keep it vertical only.
  2. Use a clear hierarchy in menus and avoid rollovers.
  3. Help customers navigate between levels with clear back and home buttons.
  4. Use seven links or fewer per page of navigation.

Help people find and get to your local sites

  1. Have your address or store locator on the landing page.
  2. Include maps and directions. Use GPS to personalize when possible.
  3. Allow customers to check stock at nearby stores.

https://support.google.com/adwords/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2549057

The Curious Case of Website or Webapps or Both?

The question facing all web content developers is simple, Website or Webapp?

And the answer, who knows?

So far the jury is out on which way is the right way, but one thing is clear, there is no single silver bullet in this game.  Websites and Webapps both need to be part of the integrated game plan.  You simply cannot afford to be without one or the other.

And it will ultimately depend on the kind of market place you are in.  There will be instances where website optimized for smartphones, tablets and desktops makes most sense.  Webapps simply will not be cost effective.

Consider this:

  • Today, most people read news and features on publishers’ websites using mobile devices.
  • Most news websites detect and adapt themselves to smaller screens or offer via Webapps.
  • Amazon Kindle, Google Reader, Flipboard dominate the market.
  • Nielsen study reported that while 33 percent of tablet and smart-phone users had downloaded news apps in the previous 30 days, only 19 percent of users had actually paid.
  • Financial Times dropped their iPad and iPhone app from iTunes.  They have now launched a new website, developed under the new HTML5 standards, allowing any device to access the content with single development model.

On the other hand, if you have a need for repeat orders from the same customer, again and again, it will make sense to develop Webapp which can be customized for each customer’s needs and has profile information stored locally in the device.

Net benefit, you get the order for widgets and your customer is not filling his or her name again and again!

So, weigh your options!  There is no cookie cutter formula here.

 

Mobile Devices Search Grow Google Bing Yahoo

Mobile devices are changing the way the Internet searches are being done on Google, Bing and Yahoo.  Now, there are more searches taking place on smart phones and mobile devices than ever before.

Most of these searches are considered local search for products and services with local business establishments.

2021 Trends

Google My Business and Bing Places for Business are growing in popularity.

Mobile search engine marketing can do wonders for driving brand value and demand for your products or services by leveraging mobile devices to connect with more consumers in real time at any point in the customer life cycle.

Statistics are staggering

  • Today, there are more mobile devices in the world (8.7 billion) than people (7.1 billion), due largely in part to our voracious appetite for new technology.
  • Overall, 82 percent of U.S…… shoppers who used their smartphone to help them shop had used “near me” searches on their mobile device. The most popular categories of local search lookups via mobile were food and entertainment.
  • For the few past years, mobile device usage has grown at an astronomical pace, with over 2.5 billion smartphone users worldwide in 2018 and a forecasted growth to a whopping 2.8 billion in 2020.
  • Based on the latest data reported by Laptop Discovery (“Mobile vs desktop,” 2020), social media accounts for 25% of all digital media consumption and is primarily accessed via mobile devices.
  • Over 52% of website traffic is coming from mobile devices, compared to just under 44% from desktop computers.
  • Nearly 63% of all the searches on Google were from mobile devices in the United States in Q2 2019.
  • Fashion retailers also convert a higher percentage of mobile traffic into sales (89.3%).
  • 70% of the time spent on YouTube is through users’ mobile devices.
  • More than half of the internet traffic worldwide is driven through mobile devices, with current trends indicating mobile share to further increase to as high as 80%.
  • 46% of adults prefer to use their mobile devices to search for items before purchasing them over their desktop or laptops.

Mobile Revolution

Smartphones and mobile devices are revolutionizing the way people communicate with one another and the way businesses connect with their target markets.

Against this backdrop, mobile search rises as a promising field, with users’ ability to quickly obtain relevant results SERP based on their location as one of its most attractive features.

A small business looking for growth can take advantage of this massive number of potential clients by creating digital marketing platforms that are mobile friendly and suit the needs of these users.

Even in the business-to-business world, about 50 percent of inquiries come from mobile devices, and the source seems to indicate that the percentage is rising.

More people are owning more mobile devices as well, with an example being one or two-family computers but everyone owning a smartphone.

The interaction of these variables means that search engine crawling, indexing, and ranking processes differ between devices.

Optimizing for mobile devices requires many of the same best practices of desktop SEO.

People spend more and more time on their mobile devices, interacting with the web in a variety of ways.

Before you can optimize your website for mobile devices, it’s necessary to understand what mobile local search engine optimization is.

However, even though mobile device use is growing quickly, these devices are not pushing computers out of the picture.

After all, whether you’re talking about desktops or mobile devices, content is one of Google’s top three search ranking factors.

In a nutshell, mobile search engine optimization is a process that ensures people who visit your website are delighted by an experience that’s designed for the mobile device they’re using.

Historical Benchmarks

  • Through 2016 and early 2017, the retail conversion rate for desktops was around 3.7 to 4% while the conversion rate for smartphones was around 1.25 to 1.34%.
  • Global internet usage through mobile devices (not including tablets) was nearly 8.5% in January 2012, StatCounter reported, using stats aggregated from 3 million sites.
  • Almost half (49.7%) of U.S…… mobile subscribers now own smartphones, as of February 2012, according to Nielsen.
  • Furthermore, Android leads the U.S…… smartphone market with 48%, while iPhone follows with 32%, and Blackberry is third with slightly under 12%.
  • Mobile devices are estimated to account for 25% of all paid search ad clicks in Google’s network by December 2012.
  • Click-through-rates on mobile phones are as much as 72% higher than on desktops.
  • In many developing nations, the majority of web users are mobile-only: highest are Egypt at 70% and India at 59%.
  • Even in developed nations, including the U.S…… and UK at 25%, a large minority of web users are mobile-only.