If you were marketing a business a few years ago, you were probably inundated with predictions about the dawn of the mobile era. Well, the mobile era is upon us. Mobile searches significantly outnumber desktop searches. You can read about that here, direct from Google. Amazingly, that’s not including tablets, just smartphones. Throw tablets into the mix and you’re looking at evenmore mobile searches.
If you aren’t catering to mobile traffic with your AdWords campaigns, you are hugely missing out. In fact, you’re basically shooting yourself in the foot. It is absolutely vital to market to mobile traffic these days, or you miss out on the vast majority of the market share. Here are some tips to make sure your AdWords campaigns are on target!
Get your ads optimized for mobile
While this is a given, a surprisingly large number of people never actually do it. They just assume their ads will display well on mobile devices. Visit the Google Ad Preview Tool and select Devices: Mobile. This will give you an idea what your ads look like when they display on mobile devices. With this tool, you can diagnose problems and fully optimize your ads. When you are satisfied with their appearance, you’ll be good to go, and you’ll know your ads look great on mobile!
Add a call button to your ads
Google AdWords now allows you to add call buttons directly to your ads. The results have been amazing. Every month, tens of millions of calls are directed to businesses through the advertisements. Considering mobile users are already on their phones, this makes complete sense. A lot of businesses still don’t know about this feature, so this is the first time to leap in there and make good use of it before all your competitors. Adding a call button is easy, and you can check to make sure it integrated properly using the preview tool discussed above.
A call button adds trust and convenience for potential customers. It tells them that you are available and standing by to answer their questions and help them out. It makes it effortless for them to talk to you directly about what you have to offer. Starting a dialogue is one of the best methods for creating conversions, so take full advantage!
Create mobile-responsive sites and landing pages, not mobile sites
Part of optimizing your ads for mobile is optimizing where they lead. A great ad won’t convert well if the landing page doesn’t get the job done. Do you still have a desktop site and an alternate mobile site for your business? These days, it is much more effective to have one responsive design which displays equally well on desktop and mobile devices (that advice comes straight from Google).
Why? Ironically enough, a lot of mobile devices are now so great at displaying responsive pages that they no longer display mobile designs well. They are busy trying to adapt your mobile pages as if they were standard responsive pages, so they come out looking bizarre. Switch to responsive design and you will enjoy better results all around.
Make use of ad extensions
If you aren’t using all the ad extensions that are relevant to your business (i.e. offer extensions, the call extension previously discussed, location extensions, app extensions, and so on), then you are missing out. These extensions add information and usability to your ads.
Google recognizes that, which is why this fact also reflects in a higher-quality score for ads that make use of the extensions. So if you are foregoing the ad extensions, you are hurting yourself in two ways: 1-Your ads aren’t as functional or informative, which reduces your CTR; and 2-Google is punishing you with a lower-quality score.
Optimize your spending with negative keywords
So many people don’t make use of negative keywords. Negative keywords are great, because they spare you from getting all sorts of irrelevant traffic which isn’t going to convert. Why would you want to pay for traffic which isn’t going to pay you? For example, say you run a dentist office, but you don’t offer whitening. Adding in “whitening” as a negative keyword will spare you from all that traffic which can’t convert. This will save money, which you can funnel into ads that drive traffic that can convert.
Optimizing your mobile ads is no small task, and you can expect to spend a great deal of time on it. The work never really ends either, because you cannot “set and forget” with any marketing campaign. You need to follow along with the analytics, figure out what is converting and what isn’t, and then continue to streamline your operations toward the best results. If you need help running your AdWords campaign, if you are running an adwords account and would like us to find the wasted ad spend or any missed opportunities in your account or if you haven’t run AdWords yet and want us to do a market analysis to see what your business will receive from AdWords give us a call. This is a great way to free up your time and get back to focusing on other aspects of running your business! Contact us today or give us a call at (619) 357-4120.
