Adam Marquardt
A pay-per-click advertising campaign generally involves paying each time that a visitor clicks, or views an ad. This is a common method of directing traffic to your website, but to get the biggest bang for your buck, you will need to optimize these campaigns for potential purchasers on mobile devices.
The dramatic increase in mobile users means that PPC campaigns can achieve higher conversion rates by including mobile devices. You can use a range of factors to improve your success with mobile users such as:
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Engagement levels
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Offers
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Time of day
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Call reporting
Engagement Levels
The engagement level of your visitors depends on parameters such as conversions, pages seen and time on site, which you can use to optimize your campaign for mobile users. Search Engine Watch describes a snapshot of an untargeted PPC search engine marketing campaign over a period of a few months that suggests methods of designing a fully mobile campaign. This snapshot showed that mobile users accounted for 7 to 40 percent of the impressions, with business-to-business users in the lower end of this range. Mobile users had a click-through rate that was up to three times that of desktop users, although the CTR for mobile users was highly variable.
The general objective of optimizing a search engine marketing campaign for mobile users is to increase the CTR and reduce the cost per click for these users. A new campaign with a low engagement is often a good candidate for optimization if it's already integrated with the website and has a decent conversion rate. The paid search settings can often indicate the best areas to focus on such as bids, conversion path, copy and landing pages.
Offers
It's often necessary to change the offer on an inbound marketing campaign for mobile users, especially with respect to local businesses. A business that is near a mobile user generally needs to make an offer with greater urgency to lure the user from a national or regional business. A click-to-call ad is often highly effective for mobile users since a call is only one click away with this type of offer. This is primarily because the great majority of mobile users want information on local business since they typically plan to take action on that day.
Local targeting allows you to eliminate spending money on clicks that won't result in leads. Common methods of targeting a content marketing campaign towards a particular location include the use of local keywords in the ad. Geo-targeting ensures that the ad only appears to users within the area of interest, and you can also optimize a landing page for a particular area. Additional items that are important in a localized campaign include providing directions to your business and allowing users to sign up for text alerts.
Time of Day
The time of day is also a critical factor for mobile users. Mobile users tend to be in active search mode during the day, meaning that they're looking for a specific item and need it quickly. These users are more likely to engage in leisurely browsing at night when they aren't planning on making an immediate purchase.
The analysis of PPC campaign data often shows that you need to adjust your bids throughout the day, especially when the PPC campaign has a lower chance of making a sale. This includes not running the campaign when your store is closed and other times that depend on the promotion. Assume for this example that a restaurant chain with outlets on both the east and west coast is promoting a breakfast sandwich and a soup for lunch. These ad campaigns don't need to run when the items they're promoting aren't available for sale. The timing of the ads therefore needs to account for the difference in time zones as well as the fact that the breakfast sandwich is only sold in the morning and the soup is only sold during lunch.
Call Reporting
Enhanced call reporting is an update to Google's AdWords system that will allow PPC advertisers to target mobile users more effectively. This feature was initially implemented in March 2013 for new campaigns and all AdWord campaigns were upgraded to enhanced call reporting in June 2013. These features include the ability to track the length of the call, when it occurred, and the number that was called.
PPC campaigns can cost you a fortune without meaningful returns if you fail to create it around a well-planned strategy. While PPC campaigns done right can work wonders, it's not a sustainable form of marketing for the long-haul. If you rely on PPC alone, your marketing prowess will always be limited, not to mention you may even end up broke. Growing your reach organically is the best option. While it surely takes more time and effort, the results are long lasting and well worth the investment.
Image Credit: SBIz